Creation

Philosopher Étienne Gilson on the essential goodness of Creation

Drawing on Josef Pieper’s ideas, Ken Myers explains why the spirit of festivity is the spirit of worship, and that “entertainment” is ultimately an artificial, contrived, and empty effort to achieve festivity. (25 minutes)

Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)

J. Matthew Bonzo and Michael R. Stevens on Wendell Berry’s understanding of how Creation is a gift with certain givenness

Shawn and Beth Dougherty make a theological case for biomimicry, or fulfilling our original vocation of tending the earth by working according to the nature of Nature. (68 minutes)

FROM VOL. 113 Theologian Norman Wirzba examines the relationship between food and faith. (24 minutes)

FROM VOL. 137 Popular innovator and speaker on farming practices Joel Salatin talks about the challenges of caring for Creation within an agricultural and food system that pays little attention to the purposes and inclinations of Creation. (25 minutes)

Colin Gunton on the trinitarian conception of the divine economy in St. Irenaeus

Canon-theologian Simon Oliver explains how and why the doctrine of Creation is cardinal and must frame all theology. (62 minutes)

Chris Armstrong explains how C. S. Lewis’s work is grounded deeply in the Christian humanist tradition. (45 minutes)

FROM VOL. 67 David Bentley Hart describes how the Christian understanding of Creation as beauty and gift, as the outward expression of the delight the Trinity has in itself, reveals a vision of reality different from the pagan or fatalist vision of reality. (12 minutes)

In a lecture from 2018, Ken Myers contrasts the Enlightenment’s understanding of reason with the Christocentric conception of reason. (57 minutes)

In a lecture from 2019, Simon Oliver presents a summary of the cultural consequences of the comprehensiveness of the work of Christ. (28 minutes)

The book of Leviticus may be assumed to be irrelevant for charting a way through the challenges of modernity. Theologian Peter J. Leithart disagrees. (22 minutes)

In a 2010 lecture, George Marsden examines a few ways in which the distorting effects of Enlightenment rationalism were resisted in the work of Jonathan Edwards. (64 minutes)

FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison

FROM VOL. 150Theologian and priest Andrew Davison believes that retrieving the historic doctrine of participation is vital to help Christians escape from the default philosophy of the age. (32 minutes)

FROM VOL. 108Hans Boersma — author of Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry — explains why Christians should reject the modern separation of Heaven and Earth and recover a “sacramental ontology.” (26 minutes)

Fred Bahnson on the wisdom of attending to patterns of Creation

Fred Bahnson challenges us to consider how we might honor our created and redeemed relationship with the earth as God's stewards. (48 minutes)