A 1997 anthology edited by Alvin Kernan — What’s Happened to the Humanities? (Princeton University Press) — included an essay by historian Gertrude Himmelfarb. Best known for her studies of Victorian England (e.g., Victorian Minds, Marriage and Morals among the Victorians, Poverty and Compassion: The Moral Imagination of the Late Victorians), Himmelfarb also directed attention to the ways in which her academic discipline had been radically transformed in the late twentieth century.

Her essay in Kernan’s volume is titled “‘Beyond Method,’” a phrase taken from Richard Rorty’s claim in Consequences of Pragmatism (1982). Himmelfarb precedes her text with an epigraph from Rorty:

“Dewey and Foucault make exactly the same criticism of the tradition. They agree, right down the line, about the need to abandon traditional notions of rationality, objectivity, method, and truth. They are both, so to speak, ‘beyond method.’”

Himmelfarb sees in this postmodern “beyond” a doorway to chaos and confusion in her discipline, and for higher education more generally: “For the journalist, the medium is the message. For the scholar, the method is the message. On this one proposition, traditional and nontraditional scholars may agree. Methodology does not dictate the conclusions that any particular study may come to, but it does dictate the parameters of the study: the way the research is conducted, how the findings are presented, even what are suitable subjects for study. A revolution in methodology is, therefore, of more than ‘academic’ interest, as the invidious phrase has it — more than a technicality or formality. And it is all the more momentous if it affects a wide variety of disciplines throughout the university.

“We have recently experienced such a revolution. The dominating force in that revolution is postmodernism, an omnibus term for poststructuralism, deconstruction, new historicism, semiotics, and the like. These, in turn, give philosophical credibility and legitimacy to such other movements as feminism and multiculturalism. The effect, on both the subject matter and the methodology of the humanities, has been nothing short of revolutionary. This is not just another ‘revisionism’ of the kind that has always been the lifeblood of the academy. A revisionist thesis about the origin of World War II or the meaning of Huckleberry Finn offers a new interpretation of that particular event or work occasioned by new evidence, a new insight, or a new theory. Postmodernism is a new way of thinking about all subjects and all disciplines.

“Imported from France (which had acquired it from Germany), postmodernism made its appearance in the United States in the 1970s, first in departments of literature and then in other disciplines of the humanities. Its forefathers are Nietzsche and Heidegger, its fathers Derrida and Foucault. From Jacques Derrida postmodernism has borrowed the vocabulary and basic concepts of deconstruction: the ‘aporia’ of discourse, the indeterminacy and contrariness of language, the fictive and duplicitous nature of signs and symbols, the nonreferential character of words and their dissociation from any presumed reality, the ‘problematization’ of all subjects, events, and texts. From Michel Foucault it has adopted the idea of power: the power structure immanent not only in language — the words and ideas that ‘privilege’ the ‘hegemonic’ groups in society — but in the very nature of knowledge, which is itself an instrument and product of power. Thus traditional discourse and learning are impugned as ‘logocentric,’ ‘phallocentric,’ and ‘totalizing.’

“In literature, postmodernism entails the denial of the fixity of any text, of the authority of the author over the critic or reader, of any canon of great books, and of the very idea of greatness. In philosophy, it is a denial of the constancy of language, of any correspondence between language and reality, indeed of any essential reality or any proximate truth about reality. In history, it is a denial of the objectivity of the historian, of the factuality or reality of the past, and thus of the possibility of arriving at any truths about the past. And so with the other disciplines: it induces a radical skepticism, relativism, and subjectivism that denies not this or that truth about any subject but the very idea of truth — that denies even the ideal of truth, truth as something to aspire to even if it can never be fully attained.

“If literary critics have been in the forefront of the postmodernist movement, it is in the field of history that its revolutionary effects may be seen most clearly. For postmodernism reverses two centuries of scholarship designed to make of history a ‘discipline’ — a rigorous, critical, systematic study of the past, complete with a methodology designed to make that study as objective as possible. Before there was postmodernist history; there was ‘modernist’ history, as it may be called — the discipline as it evolved in the past two centuries under the influence first of Enlightenment rationalism, then of Germanic scholarship, and in this century of academic professionalism. Modernist history is not, pace its present critics, positivist history. It does not profess to be a science (although some early enthusiasts occasionally fell into that rhetoric). On the contrary, precisely because it is not a science, its practitioners have felt it all the more necessary to devise a methodology that compensates for its inherent weaknesses, that makes it a discipline in spite of the fact that it is not a science.

“Modernist history may be understood as an attempt to resolve the ambiguity in the word history: history in the sense of the past, and history meaning the writing about the past (‘history’ and ‘historiography,’ or ‘history-as-actuality’ and ‘history-as-record,’ as they are sometimes distinguished). For the modernist, the ambiguity itself, the fact that the word encompasses both meanings, suggests that there is an inherent, if only proximate, relation between them. To bring the historical work into the closest correspondence with the past requires a conscious effort of self-discipline on the part of the historian. And it is this self-discipline that is the basis of the ‘discipline’ of history. . . .

“This is the meaning of Leopold von Ranke’s famous and much-derided phrase: to know the past as it ‘actually happened.’ It now sounds like a vainglorious boast, but in its context it was modest enough. Distinguishing his own work from that of his more ambitious contemporaries, Ranke wrote: ‘To history has been assigned the office of judging the past, of instructing the present for the benefit of future ages. To such high offices this work does not aspire: It wants only to show what actually happened.’ Ranke himself had no illusions about the ease of that task or his own success in realizing it. ‘I know to what extent I have fallen short of my aim. One tries, one strives, but in the end it is not attained.’

“The present-day modernist is even more painfully aware of the vulnerability of the historical enterprise: the fallibility and deficiency of the historical record, the fallibility and selectivity inherent in the writing of history, and the fallibility and subjectivity of the historian. As long as historians have reflected upon their craft, they have known that the past cannot be recaptured in its totality, if only because the remains of the past are incomplete and are themselves part of the present, so that the past itself is, in this sense, irredeemably present. They have also known that the writing of history necessarily entails selection and interpretation, that there is inevitable distortion in the attempt to present a coherent account of an often inchoate past, that, therefore, every historical work is necessarily imperfect, tentative, and partial (in both senses of the word).

“Historians have also known — they would have to be extraordinarily obtuse not to — that some of the ideas and assumptions they bring to history derive not only from their own culture and place in society, but also from the ideas and beliefs to which they are committed. A century ago, the lead article in the first issue of the American Historical Review informed the profession: ‘History will not stay written. Every age demands a history written from its own standpoint — with reference to its own social condition, its thought, its beliefs, and its acquisitions — and therefore comprehensible to the men who live in it.’ Relativism in this sense, however, was not taken to absolve historians from the duty of being as objective as they could be. On the contrary, it obliged them to make the most strenuous efforts to be as objective as possible, to rise above their natural conditions and inclinations. . . .

“Just as the postmodernist historian dissolves the connection between the past and the writing about the past, or the postmodernist literary critic the connection between literature and criticism, so the postmodernist philosopher annuls the relationship between reality and language — denies, indeed, the ‘essential’ nature of reality. ‘There is no way,’ Richard Rorty declares, ‘to get outside our beliefs and our language so as to find some test other than coherence.’ Like Derrida, for whom ‘metaphysics is nothing more than mythology,’ Rorty derides the ‘real live metaphysical prig’ who still believes in reality and truth, who thinks that there is some essence or foundation in reality from which truths can be deduced: ‘You can still find philosophy professors who will solemnly tell you that they are seeking the truth, not just a story or a consensus but an honest-to-God, down-home, accurate representation of the way the world is. A few of them will even claim to write in a clear, precise, transparent way, priding themselves on manly straightforwardness, on abjuring “literary” devices.’ Philosophy, Rorty insists, should not be ‘taken seriously’ because it teaches neither wisdom nor virtue. The proper role of philosophers is to cultivate a ‘light-minded aestheticism, . . . dream up as many new contexts as possible, . . . be as polymorphous in our adjustments as possible, . . . recontextualize for the hell of it.’ Echoing those historians who would fictionalize history, Rorty pays tribute to the ‘wisdom of the novel,’ because the novel, unlike philosophy, is not burdened by ‘transcultural notions of validity.’


“The effect of postmodernism has been to create a genuinely interdisciplinary academic culture — or not so much interdisciplinary in the old sense, in which one discipline inspires and vivifies another, as transdisciplinary, in which each discipline loses its distinctive character and all become indistinguishable. ‘The historicity of [literary] texts and the textuality of history,’ ‘the historical text as literary artifact,’ the aestheticization and fictionalization of both philosophy and history, the problematization and feminization of all the disciplines — this confusion and amalgamation of genres is the hallmark of postmodernism and, perhaps, its greatest triumph. And it is here that one can see most clearly the methodological implications of postmodernism. For the loss of a distinctive disciplinary character necessarily involves the loss of a distinctive methodology — or of any methodology. . . .

“The most recent interdisciplinary trend is subjectivism, or the ‘nouveau solipsism,’ as it has been called. (Among French historians, it is known as ‘égo-histoire.’) In this country, it has been adopted mainly by feminists who have made it part of their methodology. It does not merely ‘engender’ scholarship; it personalizes it. ‘The I’s Have It’ is the apt title of a recent article describing this tendency. The approach to any subject is insistently personal, dwelling upon the feelings, emotions, beliefs, and personal experiences of the scholar. The point is not that professors have taken to writing their autobiographies, nor that they are indulging themselves in occasional reminiscences or personal reflections. What is new is the dominating presence of the author in the scholarly enterprise itself: in a study of Japanese society, or a comparison of primitive and Western culture, or the life of a Mexican peddler, or the analysis of a French painter. The traditionally impersonal, objective voice of the scholar — the ‘footnote voice,’ as it has been disparagingly called — is replaced by the ‘I,’ the triumphal personal voice of the author. ‘George Eliot, c’est moi,’ declares a biographer of the great Victorian novelist.

“It is hard to assess just how far and how deeply these new (or no longer so new) developments have penetrated into the study of the humanities. It may well be that traditional scholars still outnumber the nontraditional. But intellectual life cannot be quantified; Marxists in the 1930s and 1940s constituted a small proportion of the professoriate, yet they were influential far beyond their numbers. It may also be true that in their own research and writing a good many scholars continue to adhere to traditional methods and standards (although not, perhaps, as rigorously as they might once have done). But they are often unable to translate their own practices into their teaching, to transmit to their students methods and standards that are no longer observed in the profession as a whole.”

— from Gertrude Himmelfarb, “‘Beyond Method,’” in What’s Happened to the Humanities? edited by Alvin Kernan (Princeton University Press, 1997)

Related reading and listening

  1. Virgil and purposeful history — In this lecture from June 2019, classical educator Louis Markos examines Book II of The Aeneid to argue that Virgil had an eschatological view of history. (68 minutes)
  2. Books worthy of a lifetime of encounters —
    FROM VOL. 69
    Daniel Ritchie discusses why great books programs survive mainly in Christian institutions while declining in secular ones. (13 minutes)
  3. Personhood, limits, and academic vocation —
    FROM VOL. 39
    Marion Montgomery (1934–2002) offers a deep critique of the relationship of the academy to its community in an effort to diagnose how higher education has lost its way. (13 minutes)
  4. What higher education forgot —
    FROM VOL. 84
    Harry L. Lewis discusses higher education’s amnesia about its purposes, and how that shortchanges students. (19 minutes)
  5. A Christian philosophy of integrated education —
    FROM VOL. 61
    Michael L. Peterson discusses how Christianity could inform society’s understandings of education and human nature. (8 minutes)
  6. Education for human flourishing — Co-authors Paul Spears and Steven Loomis argue that Christians should foster education that does justice to humans in our fullness of being. (23 minutes)
  7. The social irrelevance of secular higher education —
    FROM VOL. 85
    Professor C. John Sommerville describes the increasingly marginal influence of universities in our society, and why they seem to be of no substantive relevance to people outside the school. (13 minutes)
  8. The history of Christianity and higher education —
    FROM VOL. 50
    In tracing Christianity’s relationship to the academy, Arthur F. Holmes points to Augustine as one of the first to embrace higher learning, believing God’s ordered creation to be open to study by the rational mind of man. (9 minutes)
  9. Only a dying civilization neglects its dead — Historian Dermot Quinn discusses the work of fellow historian Christopher Dawson (1889–1970). (15 minutes)
  10. Christopher Dawson: Chronicler of Christendom’s Rise and Fall — Dermot Quinn discusses historian Christopher Dawson’s meta-historical perspective and his wisdom about what makes cultures healthy or unhealthy. (54 minutes)
  11. From democracy to bureaucracy — Historian John Lukacs on the challenges of living at the End of an Age
  12. Ideas and historical consequences — Historian John Lukacs (1924–2019) discusses the relationship between institutions and character, popular sentiment versus public opinion, the distinction between patriotism and nationalism, and the very nature of studying history. (36 minutes)
  13. The historian’s communal role as storyteller —
    FROM VOL. 127
    Historian Christopher Shannon discusses how American academic historical writing presents a grand narrative of progressivism, which it defends by subscribing to an orthodoxy of objective Reason. (21 minutes)
  14. Three historians on history —
    FROM VOL. 31
    This Archive Feature presents interviews with three historians who discuss changes in historical studies. (33 minutes)
  15. Universities as the hosts of reciprocating speech — Robert Jenson on how the Christian understanding of Truth in a personal Word shaped the Western university
  16. The past as presence, not souvenir — Historian Christopher Lasch on the importance of recognizing our dependence on the past
  17. “How deep the problems go” —
    FROM VOL. 103
    Eric Miller discusses the late historian and social critic Christopher Lasch’s intense commitment to understand the logic of American cultural confusion. (20 minutes)
  18. The loss of hierarchy and humility in the academy — In interviews from 1999, literature professors Alvin Kernan and Marion Montgomery discuss how culture of the academy — its hyper-democratic posture and its loathing of limits — derails the pursuit of truth. (25 minutes)
  19. Blest be the ties of language that bind us — Marion Montgomery on the precious gift of words
  20. The academy’s deconstruction of both person and community — Marion Montgomery on cultivating “a deportment of intellect governed by a continuing concern for the truth of things”
  21. From university to multiversity to demoversity — Alvin Kernan on tectonic shifts in higher education since the 1960s
  22. Scholarship’s silos and the eclipse of meaning — Paul Tyson on how the modern academy avoids engagement with Reality
  23. Christ, the key to human meaning — Gil Bailie on how the coming of Christ affirmed the intelligibility of human history (and why the abandonment of Christ invites unreason)
  24. An outrageous idea? — In the late 1990s, George M. Marsden and James Tunstead Burtchaell both wrote books examining the claim that it was far-fetched even to imagine that scholarly work could be an expression of Christian claims about reality. (25 minutes)
  25. Christian scholars and the secularized academy — Mark Noll on why Christian intellectual vitality requires a vision for the universality of Christian truth
  26. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 159 — FEATURED GUESTS: Kirk Farney, Andrew Willard Jones, James L. Nolan, Jr., Andrew Kaethler, Peter Ramey, and Kathryn Wehr
  27. The dispiriting consequences of the commodification of knowledge — Thomas Pfau asks why so many students in universities are regarded only as consumers, who expect a good return on their investment. He also muses on some strategies for “re-spiritualizing” education. (30 minutes)
  28. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 157 — FEATURED GUESTS: Allan C. Carlson, Matthew Stewart, Steven Knepper, Holly Ordway, Norm Klassen, and Norman Wirzba
  29. Parsing the intellectual vocation — Norman Klassen and Jens Zimmermann demonstrate that some form of humanism has always been central to the purposes of higher education, and insist that the recovery of a rich, Christocentric Christian humanism is the only way for the university to recover a coherent purpose. (39 minutes)
  30. Before Church and State — Andrew Willard Jones challenges some of the conventional paradigms of thinking about political order, arguing that modern assumptions of the relationship between Church and state color how we understand history. (54 minutes
  31. The consequential witness of St. Patrick — Thomas Cahill describes how the least likely saviors of Western heritage, the Irish, copied all of classical and Christian literature while barbarians rampaged through the rest of Europe. (16 minutes)
  32. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 153 — FEATURED GUESTS: Charles C. Camosy, O. Carter Snead, Matt Feeney, Margarita A. Mooney, Louis Markos, and Alan Jacobs
  33. Analyzing the current indictment of Christopher Columbus — Robert Royal offers thoughtful listeners an alternative to the ignorant and heated indictment of Christopher Columbus that has become fashionable in recent months. (22 minutes)
  34. John Lukacs, R.I.P. — Historian John Lukacs discusses the vocation of studying history and how it is more a way of knowing human experience than it is a science. (23 minutes)
  35. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 142 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stanley Hauerwas, Perry L. Glanzer, Nathan F. Alleman, Jeffrey Bishop, Alan Jacobs, D. C. Schindler, and Marianne Wright
  36. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 140 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Rubery, James A. Herrick, Jack Baker, Jeffrey Bilbro, Timothy Gloege, David Hollinger, and Barrett Fisher
  37. The burden of creating meaning — George Parkin Grant on the insatiability of the modern will
  38. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  39. Word becomes flesh, Reality becomes fact — Henri de Lubac on the Incarnation and history
  40. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  41. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 114 — FEATURED GUESTS: Susan Cain, Brad S. Gregory, David Sehat, Augustine Thompson, O.P., Gerald R. McDermott, and Marilyn Chandler McEntyre
  42. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 105 — FEATURED GUESTS: Julian Young, Perry L. Glanzer, Kendra Creasy Dean, Brian Brock, Nicholas Carr, and Alan Jacobs
  43. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 101 — FEATURED GUESTS: James Davison Hunter, Paul Spears, Steven Loomis, James K. A. Smith, Thomas Long, and William T. Cavanaugh
  44. The Vocation of Knowledge: Higher Education and the Difference Christ Makes — Mark Noll (The Future of Christian Learning), Norman Klassen & Jens Zimmermann, (The Passionate Intellect: Incarnational Humanism and the Future of University Education),and James K. A. Smith explore the nature of Christian education. (78 minutes)
  45. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 97 — FEATURED GUESTS: Mark Noll, Stanley Fish, James Peters, Scott Moore, and Makoto Fujimura
  46. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  47. Possibility junkies — Voracious omnitasking, argues English professor Mark Edmundson, makes the lives of his students both highly promising and radically vulnerable to living lives that leave no room for reflection and self-knowledge.
  48. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 87 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Witte, Jr., Steven Keillor, Philip Bess, Scott Cairns, and Anthony Esolen
  49. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 86 — FEATURED GUESTS: Roger Lundin, Lawrence Buell, Harold K. Bush, Jr., Katherine Shaw Spaht, Steven L. Nock, Norman Klassen, and Jens Zimmermann
  50. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 84 — FEATURED GUESTS: Harry L. Lewis, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Brendan Sweetman, James Turner Johnson, David Martin, and Edward Ericson, Jr.

Links to posts and programs featuring Oliver O'Donovan:

  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 84 — FEATURED GUESTS: Harry L. Lewis, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Brendan Sweetman, James Turner Johnson, David Martin, and Edward Ericson, Jr.
  • What higher education forgot —
    FROM VOL. 84
    Harry L. Lewis discusses higher education’s amnesia about its purposes, and how that shortchanges students. (19 minutes)
  • Virgil and purposeful history — In this lecture from June 2019, classical educator Louis Markos examines Book II of The Aeneid to argue that Virgil had an eschatological view of history. (68 minutes)
  • Three historians on history —
    FROM VOL. 31
    This Archive Feature presents interviews with three historians who discuss changes in historical studies. (33 minutes)
  • The Vocation of Knowledge: Higher Education and the Difference Christ Makes — Mark Noll (The Future of Christian Learning), Norman Klassen & Jens Zimmermann, (The Passionate Intellect: Incarnational Humanism and the Future of University Education),and James K. A. Smith explore the nature of Christian education. (78 minutes)
  • The social irrelevance of secular higher education —
    FROM VOL. 85
    Professor C. John Sommerville describes the increasingly marginal influence of universities in our society, and why they seem to be of no substantive relevance to people outside the school. (13 minutes)
  • The Passionate Intellect: Incarnational Humanism & the Future of University Education, by Norman Klassen and Jens Zimmermann — Norman Klassen and Jens Zimmermann trace the history of higher education from its medieval roots to the present, focusing on how educational agendas have been assembled in light of shifting understandings of the nature of knowledge and the nature of human well-being. (6 hours 30 minutes)
  • The loss of hierarchy and humility in the academy — In interviews from 1999, literature professors Alvin Kernan and Marion Montgomery discuss how culture of the academy — its hyper-democratic posture and its loathing of limits — derails the pursuit of truth. (25 minutes)
  • The history of Christianity and higher education —
    FROM VOL. 50
    In tracing Christianity's relationship to the academy, Arthur F. Holmes points to Augustine as one of the first to embrace higher learning, believing God's ordered creation to be open to study by the rational mind of man. (9 minutes)
  • The historian’s communal role as storyteller —
    FROM VOL. 127
    Historian Christopher Shannon discusses how American academic historical writing presents a grand narrative of progressivism, which it defends by subscribing to an orthodoxy of objective Reason. (21 minutes)
  • The dispiriting consequences of the commodification of knowledge — Thomas Pfau asks why so many students in universities are regarded only as consumers, who expect a good return on their investment. He also muses on some strategies for "re-spiritualizing” education. (30 minutes)
  • The consequential witness of St. Patrick — Thomas Cahill describes how the least likely saviors of Western heritage, the Irish, copied all of classical and Christian literature while barbarians rampaged through the rest of Europe. (16 minutes)
  • Personhood, limits, and academic vocation —
    FROM VOL. 39
    Marion Montgomery (1934–2002) offers a deep critique of the relationship of the academy to its community in an effort to diagnose how higher education has lost its way. (13 minutes)
  • Parsing the intellectual vocation — Norman Klassen and Jens Zimmermann demonstrate that some form of humanism has always been central to the purposes of higher education, and insist that the recovery of a rich, Christocentric Christian humanism is the only way for the university to recover a coherent purpose. (39 minutes)
  • Only a dying civilization neglects its dead — Historian Dermot Quinn discusses the work of fellow historian Christopher Dawson (1889–1970). (15 minutes)
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 97 — FEATURED GUESTS: Mark Noll, Stanley Fish, James Peters, Scott Moore, and Makoto Fujimura
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 87 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Witte, Jr., Steven Keillor, Philip Bess, Scott Cairns, and Anthony Esolen
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 86 — FEATURED GUESTS: Roger Lundin, Lawrence Buell, Harold K. Bush, Jr., Katherine Shaw Spaht, Steven L. Nock, Norman Klassen, and Jens Zimmermann
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 78 — FEATURED GUESTS: Mark Bauerlein, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Sam Van Eman, Thomas de Zengotita, Eugene McCarraher, and John Witte, Jr.
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 75 — FEATURED GUESTS: Mark Malvasi, John Lukacs, Steve Talbott, Christian Smith, Eugene Peterson, and Rolland Hein
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 53 — FEATURED GUESTS: Lawrence Adams, Dana Gioia, Elmer M. Colyer, R. A. Herrera, Margaret Visser, and Joseph Pearce
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 159 — FEATURED GUESTS: Kirk Farney, Andrew Willard Jones, James L. Nolan, Jr., Andrew Kaethler, Peter Ramey, and Kathryn Wehr
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 157 — FEATURED GUESTS: Allan C. Carlson, Matthew Stewart, Steven Knepper, Holly Ordway, Norm Klassen, and Norman Wirzba
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 153 — FEATURED GUESTS: Charles C. Camosy, O. Carter Snead, Matt Feeney, Margarita A. Mooney, Louis Markos, and Alan Jacobs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 142 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stanley Hauerwas, Perry L. Glanzer, Nathan F. Alleman, Jeffrey Bishop, Alan Jacobs, D. C. Schindler, and Marianne Wright
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 140 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Rubery, James A. Herrick, Jack Baker, Jeffrey Bilbro, Timothy Gloege, David Hollinger, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 114 — FEATURED GUESTS: Susan Cain, Brad S. Gregory, David Sehat, Augustine Thompson, O.P., Gerald R. McDermott, and Marilyn Chandler McEntyre
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 105 — FEATURED GUESTS: Julian Young, Perry L. Glanzer, Kendra Creasy Dean, Brian Brock, Nicholas Carr, and Alan Jacobs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 101 — FEATURED GUESTS: James Davison Hunter, Paul Spears, Steven Loomis, James K. A. Smith, Thomas Long, and William T. Cavanaugh
  • Manners and the Civil Society — Three essayists reflect on the relationship between manners and morals, and address the way in which the survival of a democratic society depends upon its citizens' respect for one another. (90 minutes)
  • Louise Cowan: “The Necessity of the Classics” — Louise Cowan insists that what we label the classics “have become classics because they elicit greatness of soul,” and that such aspiration can only be informed by such works. (35 minutes)
  • John Lukacs, R.I.P. — Historian John Lukacs discusses the vocation of studying history and how it is more a way of knowing human experience than it is a science. (23 minutes)
  • Ideas and historical consequences — Historian John Lukacs (1924–2019) discusses the relationship between institutions and character, popular sentiment versus public opinion, the distinction between patriotism and nationalism, and the very nature of studying history. (36 minutes)
  • Education for human flourishing — Co-authors Paul Spears and Steven Loomis argue that Christians should foster education that does justice to humans in our fullness of being. (23 minutes)
  • Christopher Dawson: Chronicler of Christendom’s Rise and Fall — Dermot Quinn discusses historian Christopher Dawson’s meta-historical perspective and his wisdom about what makes cultures healthy or unhealthy. (54 minutes)
  • Books worthy of a lifetime of encounters —
    FROM VOL. 69
    Daniel Ritchie discusses why great books programs survive mainly in Christian institutions while declining in secular ones. (13 minutes)
  • Before Church and State — Andrew Willard Jones challenges some of the conventional paradigms of thinking about political order, arguing that modern assumptions of the relationship between Church and state color how we understand history. (54 minutes
  • Analyzing the current indictment of Christopher Columbus — Robert Royal offers thoughtful listeners an alternative to the ignorant and heated indictment of Christopher Columbus that has become fashionable in recent months. (22 minutes)
  • An outrageous idea? — In the late 1990s, George M. Marsden and James Tunstead Burtchaell both wrote books examining the claim that it was far-fetched even to imagine that scholarly work could be an expression of Christian claims about reality. (25 minutes)
  • A Christian philosophy of integrated education —
    FROM VOL. 61
    Michael L. Peterson discusses how Christianity could inform society’s understandings of education and human nature. (8 minutes)
  • “How deep the problems go” —
    FROM VOL. 103
    Eric Miller discusses the late historian and social critic Christopher Lasch’s intense commitment to understand the logic of American cultural confusion. (20 minutes)

Links to posts and programs featuring Adam K. Webb:

Links to posts and programs featuring Mark Bauerlein:

Links to posts and programs featuring Felicia Wu Song:

Links to posts and programs featuring Joseph E. Davis:

Links to posts and programs featuring Thaddeus Kozinski:

Links to posts and programs featuring Craig M. Gay:

Links to posts and programs featuring Mark T. Mitchell:

Links to posts and programs featuring Karen Dieleman:

Links to posts and programs featuring Tim Clydesdale:

Links to posts and programs featuring J. Mark Bertrand:

Links to posts and programs featuring Mathew Levering:

Links to posts and programs featuring Mark G. Malvasi:

Links to posts and programs featuring Kirk Farney:

Links to posts and programs featuring Bradley J. Birzer:

Links to posts and programs featuring Ralph C. Wood:

Links to posts and programs featuring Paul Heintzman:

Links to posts and programs featuring Gil Bailie:

Links to posts and programs featuring Zygmunt Bauman:

Links to posts and programs featuring Matthew Lee Anderson:

Links to posts and programs featuring Mike Aquilina:

Links to posts and programs featuring Bishop Robert Barron:

Links to posts and programs featuring Frederick Buechner:

Links to posts and programs featuring Jeffrey Bilbro:

Links to posts and programs featuring James A. Herrick:

Links to posts and programs featuring Andrew Wilson:

Links to posts and programs featuring Susan Cain:

Links to posts and programs featuring Marilyn McEntyre:

Links to posts and programs featuring Andrew Spencer:

Links to posts and programs featuring Albert Borgmann:

Links to posts and programs featuring Catherine Prescott:

Links to posts and programs featuring Maggie M. Jackson:

Links to posts and programs featuring Garret Keizer:

Links to posts and programs featuring Andy Crouch:

Links to posts and programs featuring Kyle Hughes:

Links to posts and programs featuring Philip G. Ryken:

Links to posts and programs featuring Eric Miller:

Links to posts and programs featuring Landon Loftin:

  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 84 — FEATURED GUESTS: Harry L. Lewis, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Brendan Sweetman, James Turner Johnson, David Martin, and Edward Ericson, Jr.
  • What higher education forgot —
    FROM VOL. 84
    Harry L. Lewis discusses higher education’s amnesia about its purposes, and how that shortchanges students. (19 minutes)
  • Virgil and purposeful history — In this lecture from June 2019, classical educator Louis Markos examines Book II of The Aeneid to argue that Virgil had an eschatological view of history. (68 minutes)
  • Three historians on history —
    FROM VOL. 31
    This Archive Feature presents interviews with three historians who discuss changes in historical studies. (33 minutes)
  • The Vocation of Knowledge: Higher Education and the Difference Christ Makes — Mark Noll (The Future of Christian Learning), Norman Klassen & Jens Zimmermann, (The Passionate Intellect: Incarnational Humanism and the Future of University Education),and James K. A. Smith explore the nature of Christian education. (78 minutes)
  • The social irrelevance of secular higher education —
    FROM VOL. 85
    Professor C. John Sommerville describes the increasingly marginal influence of universities in our society, and why they seem to be of no substantive relevance to people outside the school. (13 minutes)
  • The Passionate Intellect: Incarnational Humanism & the Future of University Education, by Norman Klassen and Jens Zimmermann — Norman Klassen and Jens Zimmermann trace the history of higher education from its medieval roots to the present, focusing on how educational agendas have been assembled in light of shifting understandings of the nature of knowledge and the nature of human well-being. (6 hours 30 minutes)
  • The loss of hierarchy and humility in the academy — In interviews from 1999, literature professors Alvin Kernan and Marion Montgomery discuss how culture of the academy — its hyper-democratic posture and its loathing of limits — derails the pursuit of truth. (25 minutes)
  • The history of Christianity and higher education —
    FROM VOL. 50
    In tracing Christianity's relationship to the academy, Arthur F. Holmes points to Augustine as one of the first to embrace higher learning, believing God's ordered creation to be open to study by the rational mind of man. (9 minutes)
  • The historian’s communal role as storyteller —
    FROM VOL. 127
    Historian Christopher Shannon discusses how American academic historical writing presents a grand narrative of progressivism, which it defends by subscribing to an orthodoxy of objective Reason. (21 minutes)
  • The dispiriting consequences of the commodification of knowledge — Thomas Pfau asks why so many students in universities are regarded only as consumers, who expect a good return on their investment. He also muses on some strategies for "re-spiritualizing” education. (30 minutes)
  • The consequential witness of St. Patrick — Thomas Cahill describes how the least likely saviors of Western heritage, the Irish, copied all of classical and Christian literature while barbarians rampaged through the rest of Europe. (16 minutes)
  • Personhood, limits, and academic vocation —
    FROM VOL. 39
    Marion Montgomery (1934–2002) offers a deep critique of the relationship of the academy to its community in an effort to diagnose how higher education has lost its way. (13 minutes)
  • Parsing the intellectual vocation — Norman Klassen and Jens Zimmermann demonstrate that some form of humanism has always been central to the purposes of higher education, and insist that the recovery of a rich, Christocentric Christian humanism is the only way for the university to recover a coherent purpose. (39 minutes)
  • Only a dying civilization neglects its dead — Historian Dermot Quinn discusses the work of fellow historian Christopher Dawson (1889–1970). (15 minutes)
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 97 — FEATURED GUESTS: Mark Noll, Stanley Fish, James Peters, Scott Moore, and Makoto Fujimura
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 87 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Witte, Jr., Steven Keillor, Philip Bess, Scott Cairns, and Anthony Esolen
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 86 — FEATURED GUESTS: Roger Lundin, Lawrence Buell, Harold K. Bush, Jr., Katherine Shaw Spaht, Steven L. Nock, Norman Klassen, and Jens Zimmermann
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 78 — FEATURED GUESTS: Mark Bauerlein, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Sam Van Eman, Thomas de Zengotita, Eugene McCarraher, and John Witte, Jr.
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 75 — FEATURED GUESTS: Mark Malvasi, John Lukacs, Steve Talbott, Christian Smith, Eugene Peterson, and Rolland Hein
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 53 — FEATURED GUESTS: Lawrence Adams, Dana Gioia, Elmer M. Colyer, R. A. Herrera, Margaret Visser, and Joseph Pearce
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 159 — FEATURED GUESTS: Kirk Farney, Andrew Willard Jones, James L. Nolan, Jr., Andrew Kaethler, Peter Ramey, and Kathryn Wehr
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 157 — FEATURED GUESTS: Allan C. Carlson, Matthew Stewart, Steven Knepper, Holly Ordway, Norm Klassen, and Norman Wirzba
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 153 — FEATURED GUESTS: Charles C. Camosy, O. Carter Snead, Matt Feeney, Margarita A. Mooney, Louis Markos, and Alan Jacobs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 142 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stanley Hauerwas, Perry L. Glanzer, Nathan F. Alleman, Jeffrey Bishop, Alan Jacobs, D. C. Schindler, and Marianne Wright
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 140 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Rubery, James A. Herrick, Jack Baker, Jeffrey Bilbro, Timothy Gloege, David Hollinger, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 114 — FEATURED GUESTS: Susan Cain, Brad S. Gregory, David Sehat, Augustine Thompson, O.P., Gerald R. McDermott, and Marilyn Chandler McEntyre
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 105 — FEATURED GUESTS: Julian Young, Perry L. Glanzer, Kendra Creasy Dean, Brian Brock, Nicholas Carr, and Alan Jacobs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 101 — FEATURED GUESTS: James Davison Hunter, Paul Spears, Steven Loomis, James K. A. Smith, Thomas Long, and William T. Cavanaugh
  • Manners and the Civil Society — Three essayists reflect on the relationship between manners and morals, and address the way in which the survival of a democratic society depends upon its citizens' respect for one another. (90 minutes)
  • Louise Cowan: “The Necessity of the Classics” — Louise Cowan insists that what we label the classics “have become classics because they elicit greatness of soul,” and that such aspiration can only be informed by such works. (35 minutes)
  • John Lukacs, R.I.P. — Historian John Lukacs discusses the vocation of studying history and how it is more a way of knowing human experience than it is a science. (23 minutes)
  • Ideas and historical consequences — Historian John Lukacs (1924–2019) discusses the relationship between institutions and character, popular sentiment versus public opinion, the distinction between patriotism and nationalism, and the very nature of studying history. (36 minutes)
  • Education for human flourishing — Co-authors Paul Spears and Steven Loomis argue that Christians should foster education that does justice to humans in our fullness of being. (23 minutes)
  • Christopher Dawson: Chronicler of Christendom’s Rise and Fall — Dermot Quinn discusses historian Christopher Dawson’s meta-historical perspective and his wisdom about what makes cultures healthy or unhealthy. (54 minutes)
  • Books worthy of a lifetime of encounters —
    FROM VOL. 69
    Daniel Ritchie discusses why great books programs survive mainly in Christian institutions while declining in secular ones. (13 minutes)
  • Before Church and State — Andrew Willard Jones challenges some of the conventional paradigms of thinking about political order, arguing that modern assumptions of the relationship between Church and state color how we understand history. (54 minutes
  • Analyzing the current indictment of Christopher Columbus — Robert Royal offers thoughtful listeners an alternative to the ignorant and heated indictment of Christopher Columbus that has become fashionable in recent months. (22 minutes)
  • An outrageous idea? — In the late 1990s, George M. Marsden and James Tunstead Burtchaell both wrote books examining the claim that it was far-fetched even to imagine that scholarly work could be an expression of Christian claims about reality. (25 minutes)
  • A Christian philosophy of integrated education —
    FROM VOL. 61
    Michael L. Peterson discusses how Christianity could inform society’s understandings of education and human nature. (8 minutes)
  • “How deep the problems go” —
    FROM VOL. 103
    Eric Miller discusses the late historian and social critic Christopher Lasch’s intense commitment to understand the logic of American cultural confusion. (20 minutes)

Links to posts and programs featuring Barry Hankins:

  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 84 — FEATURED GUESTS: Harry L. Lewis, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Brendan Sweetman, James Turner Johnson, David Martin, and Edward Ericson, Jr.
  • What higher education forgot —
    FROM VOL. 84
    Harry L. Lewis discusses higher education’s amnesia about its purposes, and how that shortchanges students. (19 minutes)
  • Virgil and purposeful history — In this lecture from June 2019, classical educator Louis Markos examines Book II of The Aeneid to argue that Virgil had an eschatological view of history. (68 minutes)
  • Three historians on history —
    FROM VOL. 31
    This Archive Feature presents interviews with three historians who discuss changes in historical studies. (33 minutes)
  • The Vocation of Knowledge: Higher Education and the Difference Christ Makes — Mark Noll (The Future of Christian Learning), Norman Klassen & Jens Zimmermann, (The Passionate Intellect: Incarnational Humanism and the Future of University Education),and James K. A. Smith explore the nature of Christian education. (78 minutes)
  • The social irrelevance of secular higher education —
    FROM VOL. 85
    Professor C. John Sommerville describes the increasingly marginal influence of universities in our society, and why they seem to be of no substantive relevance to people outside the school. (13 minutes)
  • The Passionate Intellect: Incarnational Humanism & the Future of University Education, by Norman Klassen and Jens Zimmermann — Norman Klassen and Jens Zimmermann trace the history of higher education from its medieval roots to the present, focusing on how educational agendas have been assembled in light of shifting understandings of the nature of knowledge and the nature of human well-being. (6 hours 30 minutes)
  • The loss of hierarchy and humility in the academy — In interviews from 1999, literature professors Alvin Kernan and Marion Montgomery discuss how culture of the academy — its hyper-democratic posture and its loathing of limits — derails the pursuit of truth. (25 minutes)
  • The history of Christianity and higher education —
    FROM VOL. 50
    In tracing Christianity's relationship to the academy, Arthur F. Holmes points to Augustine as one of the first to embrace higher learning, believing God's ordered creation to be open to study by the rational mind of man. (9 minutes)
  • The historian’s communal role as storyteller —
    FROM VOL. 127
    Historian Christopher Shannon discusses how American academic historical writing presents a grand narrative of progressivism, which it defends by subscribing to an orthodoxy of objective Reason. (21 minutes)
  • The dispiriting consequences of the commodification of knowledge — Thomas Pfau asks why so many students in universities are regarded only as consumers, who expect a good return on their investment. He also muses on some strategies for "re-spiritualizing” education. (30 minutes)
  • The consequential witness of St. Patrick — Thomas Cahill describes how the least likely saviors of Western heritage, the Irish, copied all of classical and Christian literature while barbarians rampaged through the rest of Europe. (16 minutes)
  • Personhood, limits, and academic vocation —
    FROM VOL. 39
    Marion Montgomery (1934–2002) offers a deep critique of the relationship of the academy to its community in an effort to diagnose how higher education has lost its way. (13 minutes)
  • Parsing the intellectual vocation — Norman Klassen and Jens Zimmermann demonstrate that some form of humanism has always been central to the purposes of higher education, and insist that the recovery of a rich, Christocentric Christian humanism is the only way for the university to recover a coherent purpose. (39 minutes)
  • Only a dying civilization neglects its dead — Historian Dermot Quinn discusses the work of fellow historian Christopher Dawson (1889–1970). (15 minutes)
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 97 — FEATURED GUESTS: Mark Noll, Stanley Fish, James Peters, Scott Moore, and Makoto Fujimura
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 87 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Witte, Jr., Steven Keillor, Philip Bess, Scott Cairns, and Anthony Esolen
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 86 — FEATURED GUESTS: Roger Lundin, Lawrence Buell, Harold K. Bush, Jr., Katherine Shaw Spaht, Steven L. Nock, Norman Klassen, and Jens Zimmermann
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 78 — FEATURED GUESTS: Mark Bauerlein, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Sam Van Eman, Thomas de Zengotita, Eugene McCarraher, and John Witte, Jr.
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 75 — FEATURED GUESTS: Mark Malvasi, John Lukacs, Steve Talbott, Christian Smith, Eugene Peterson, and Rolland Hein
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 53 — FEATURED GUESTS: Lawrence Adams, Dana Gioia, Elmer M. Colyer, R. A. Herrera, Margaret Visser, and Joseph Pearce
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 159 — FEATURED GUESTS: Kirk Farney, Andrew Willard Jones, James L. Nolan, Jr., Andrew Kaethler, Peter Ramey, and Kathryn Wehr
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 157 — FEATURED GUESTS: Allan C. Carlson, Matthew Stewart, Steven Knepper, Holly Ordway, Norm Klassen, and Norman Wirzba
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 153 — FEATURED GUESTS: Charles C. Camosy, O. Carter Snead, Matt Feeney, Margarita A. Mooney, Louis Markos, and Alan Jacobs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 142 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stanley Hauerwas, Perry L. Glanzer, Nathan F. Alleman, Jeffrey Bishop, Alan Jacobs, D. C. Schindler, and Marianne Wright
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 140 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Rubery, James A. Herrick, Jack Baker, Jeffrey Bilbro, Timothy Gloege, David Hollinger, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 114 — FEATURED GUESTS: Susan Cain, Brad S. Gregory, David Sehat, Augustine Thompson, O.P., Gerald R. McDermott, and Marilyn Chandler McEntyre
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 105 — FEATURED GUESTS: Julian Young, Perry L. Glanzer, Kendra Creasy Dean, Brian Brock, Nicholas Carr, and Alan Jacobs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 101 — FEATURED GUESTS: James Davison Hunter, Paul Spears, Steven Loomis, James K. A. Smith, Thomas Long, and William T. Cavanaugh
  • Manners and the Civil Society — Three essayists reflect on the relationship between manners and morals, and address the way in which the survival of a democratic society depends upon its citizens' respect for one another. (90 minutes)
  • Louise Cowan: “The Necessity of the Classics” — Louise Cowan insists that what we label the classics “have become classics because they elicit greatness of soul,” and that such aspiration can only be informed by such works. (35 minutes)
  • John Lukacs, R.I.P. — Historian John Lukacs discusses the vocation of studying history and how it is more a way of knowing human experience than it is a science. (23 minutes)
  • Ideas and historical consequences — Historian John Lukacs (1924–2019) discusses the relationship between institutions and character, popular sentiment versus public opinion, the distinction between patriotism and nationalism, and the very nature of studying history. (36 minutes)
  • Education for human flourishing — Co-authors Paul Spears and Steven Loomis argue that Christians should foster education that does justice to humans in our fullness of being. (23 minutes)
  • Christopher Dawson: Chronicler of Christendom’s Rise and Fall — Dermot Quinn discusses historian Christopher Dawson’s meta-historical perspective and his wisdom about what makes cultures healthy or unhealthy. (54 minutes)
  • Books worthy of a lifetime of encounters —
    FROM VOL. 69
    Daniel Ritchie discusses why great books programs survive mainly in Christian institutions while declining in secular ones. (13 minutes)
  • Before Church and State — Andrew Willard Jones challenges some of the conventional paradigms of thinking about political order, arguing that modern assumptions of the relationship between Church and state color how we understand history. (54 minutes
  • Analyzing the current indictment of Christopher Columbus — Robert Royal offers thoughtful listeners an alternative to the ignorant and heated indictment of Christopher Columbus that has become fashionable in recent months. (22 minutes)
  • An outrageous idea? — In the late 1990s, George M. Marsden and James Tunstead Burtchaell both wrote books examining the claim that it was far-fetched even to imagine that scholarly work could be an expression of Christian claims about reality. (25 minutes)
  • A Christian philosophy of integrated education —
    FROM VOL. 61
    Michael L. Peterson discusses how Christianity could inform society’s understandings of education and human nature. (8 minutes)
  • “How deep the problems go” —
    FROM VOL. 103
    Eric Miller discusses the late historian and social critic Christopher Lasch’s intense commitment to understand the logic of American cultural confusion. (20 minutes)

Links to posts and programs featuring Quentin Schultze:

  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 84 — FEATURED GUESTS: Harry L. Lewis, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Brendan Sweetman, James Turner Johnson, David Martin, and Edward Ericson, Jr.
  • What higher education forgot —
    FROM VOL. 84
    Harry L. Lewis discusses higher education’s amnesia about its purposes, and how that shortchanges students. (19 minutes)
  • Virgil and purposeful history — In this lecture from June 2019, classical educator Louis Markos examines Book II of The Aeneid to argue that Virgil had an eschatological view of history. (68 minutes)
  • Three historians on history —
    FROM VOL. 31
    This Archive Feature presents interviews with three historians who discuss changes in historical studies. (33 minutes)
  • The Vocation of Knowledge: Higher Education and the Difference Christ Makes — Mark Noll (The Future of Christian Learning), Norman Klassen & Jens Zimmermann, (The Passionate Intellect: Incarnational Humanism and the Future of University Education),and James K. A. Smith explore the nature of Christian education. (78 minutes)
  • The social irrelevance of secular higher education —
    FROM VOL. 85
    Professor C. John Sommerville describes the increasingly marginal influence of universities in our society, and why they seem to be of no substantive relevance to people outside the school. (13 minutes)
  • The Passionate Intellect: Incarnational Humanism & the Future of University Education, by Norman Klassen and Jens Zimmermann — Norman Klassen and Jens Zimmermann trace the history of higher education from its medieval roots to the present, focusing on how educational agendas have been assembled in light of shifting understandings of the nature of knowledge and the nature of human well-being. (6 hours 30 minutes)
  • The loss of hierarchy and humility in the academy — In interviews from 1999, literature professors Alvin Kernan and Marion Montgomery discuss how culture of the academy — its hyper-democratic posture and its loathing of limits — derails the pursuit of truth. (25 minutes)
  • The history of Christianity and higher education —
    FROM VOL. 50
    In tracing Christianity's relationship to the academy, Arthur F. Holmes points to Augustine as one of the first to embrace higher learning, believing God's ordered creation to be open to study by the rational mind of man. (9 minutes)
  • The historian’s communal role as storyteller —
    FROM VOL. 127
    Historian Christopher Shannon discusses how American academic historical writing presents a grand narrative of progressivism, which it defends by subscribing to an orthodoxy of objective Reason. (21 minutes)
  • The dispiriting consequences of the commodification of knowledge — Thomas Pfau asks why so many students in universities are regarded only as consumers, who expect a good return on their investment. He also muses on some strategies for "re-spiritualizing” education. (30 minutes)
  • The consequential witness of St. Patrick — Thomas Cahill describes how the least likely saviors of Western heritage, the Irish, copied all of classical and Christian literature while barbarians rampaged through the rest of Europe. (16 minutes)
  • Personhood, limits, and academic vocation —
    FROM VOL. 39
    Marion Montgomery (1934–2002) offers a deep critique of the relationship of the academy to its community in an effort to diagnose how higher education has lost its way. (13 minutes)
  • Parsing the intellectual vocation — Norman Klassen and Jens Zimmermann demonstrate that some form of humanism has always been central to the purposes of higher education, and insist that the recovery of a rich, Christocentric Christian humanism is the only way for the university to recover a coherent purpose. (39 minutes)
  • Only a dying civilization neglects its dead — Historian Dermot Quinn discusses the work of fellow historian Christopher Dawson (1889–1970). (15 minutes)
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 97 — FEATURED GUESTS: Mark Noll, Stanley Fish, James Peters, Scott Moore, and Makoto Fujimura
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 87 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Witte, Jr., Steven Keillor, Philip Bess, Scott Cairns, and Anthony Esolen
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 86 — FEATURED GUESTS: Roger Lundin, Lawrence Buell, Harold K. Bush, Jr., Katherine Shaw Spaht, Steven L. Nock, Norman Klassen, and Jens Zimmermann
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 78 — FEATURED GUESTS: Mark Bauerlein, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Sam Van Eman, Thomas de Zengotita, Eugene McCarraher, and John Witte, Jr.
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 75 — FEATURED GUESTS: Mark Malvasi, John Lukacs, Steve Talbott, Christian Smith, Eugene Peterson, and Rolland Hein
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 53 — FEATURED GUESTS: Lawrence Adams, Dana Gioia, Elmer M. Colyer, R. A. Herrera, Margaret Visser, and Joseph Pearce
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 159 — FEATURED GUESTS: Kirk Farney, Andrew Willard Jones, James L. Nolan, Jr., Andrew Kaethler, Peter Ramey, and Kathryn Wehr
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 157 — FEATURED GUESTS: Allan C. Carlson, Matthew Stewart, Steven Knepper, Holly Ordway, Norm Klassen, and Norman Wirzba
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 153 — FEATURED GUESTS: Charles C. Camosy, O. Carter Snead, Matt Feeney, Margarita A. Mooney, Louis Markos, and Alan Jacobs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 142 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stanley Hauerwas, Perry L. Glanzer, Nathan F. Alleman, Jeffrey Bishop, Alan Jacobs, D. C. Schindler, and Marianne Wright
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 140 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Rubery, James A. Herrick, Jack Baker, Jeffrey Bilbro, Timothy Gloege, David Hollinger, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 114 — FEATURED GUESTS: Susan Cain, Brad S. Gregory, David Sehat, Augustine Thompson, O.P., Gerald R. McDermott, and Marilyn Chandler McEntyre
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 105 — FEATURED GUESTS: Julian Young, Perry L. Glanzer, Kendra Creasy Dean, Brian Brock, Nicholas Carr, and Alan Jacobs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 101 — FEATURED GUESTS: James Davison Hunter, Paul Spears, Steven Loomis, James K. A. Smith, Thomas Long, and William T. Cavanaugh
  • Manners and the Civil Society — Three essayists reflect on the relationship between manners and morals, and address the way in which the survival of a democratic society depends upon its citizens' respect for one another. (90 minutes)
  • Louise Cowan: “The Necessity of the Classics” — Louise Cowan insists that what we label the classics “have become classics because they elicit greatness of soul,” and that such aspiration can only be informed by such works. (35 minutes)
  • John Lukacs, R.I.P. — Historian John Lukacs discusses the vocation of studying history and how it is more a way of knowing human experience than it is a science. (23 minutes)
  • Ideas and historical consequences — Historian John Lukacs (1924–2019) discusses the relationship between institutions and character, popular sentiment versus public opinion, the distinction between patriotism and nationalism, and the very nature of studying history. (36 minutes)
  • Education for human flourishing — Co-authors Paul Spears and Steven Loomis argue that Christians should foster education that does justice to humans in our fullness of being. (23 minutes)
  • Christopher Dawson: Chronicler of Christendom’s Rise and Fall — Dermot Quinn discusses historian Christopher Dawson’s meta-historical perspective and his wisdom about what makes cultures healthy or unhealthy. (54 minutes)
  • Books worthy of a lifetime of encounters —
    FROM VOL. 69
    Daniel Ritchie discusses why great books programs survive mainly in Christian institutions while declining in secular ones. (13 minutes)
  • Before Church and State — Andrew Willard Jones challenges some of the conventional paradigms of thinking about political order, arguing that modern assumptions of the relationship between Church and state color how we understand history. (54 minutes
  • Analyzing the current indictment of Christopher Columbus — Robert Royal offers thoughtful listeners an alternative to the ignorant and heated indictment of Christopher Columbus that has become fashionable in recent months. (22 minutes)
  • An outrageous idea? — In the late 1990s, George M. Marsden and James Tunstead Burtchaell both wrote books examining the claim that it was far-fetched even to imagine that scholarly work could be an expression of Christian claims about reality. (25 minutes)
  • A Christian philosophy of integrated education —
    FROM VOL. 61
    Michael L. Peterson discusses how Christianity could inform society’s understandings of education and human nature. (8 minutes)
  • “How deep the problems go” —
    FROM VOL. 103
    Eric Miller discusses the late historian and social critic Christopher Lasch’s intense commitment to understand the logic of American cultural confusion. (20 minutes)

Links to posts and programs featuring Paul Walker:

  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 84 — FEATURED GUESTS: Harry L. Lewis, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Brendan Sweetman, James Turner Johnson, David Martin, and Edward Ericson, Jr.
  • What higher education forgot —
    FROM VOL. 84
    Harry L. Lewis discusses higher education’s amnesia about its purposes, and how that shortchanges students. (19 minutes)
  • Virgil and purposeful history — In this lecture from June 2019, classical educator Louis Markos examines Book II of The Aeneid to argue that Virgil had an eschatological view of history. (68 minutes)
  • Three historians on history —
    FROM VOL. 31
    This Archive Feature presents interviews with three historians who discuss changes in historical studies. (33 minutes)
  • The Vocation of Knowledge: Higher Education and the Difference Christ Makes — Mark Noll (The Future of Christian Learning), Norman Klassen & Jens Zimmermann, (The Passionate Intellect: Incarnational Humanism and the Future of University Education),and James K. A. Smith explore the nature of Christian education. (78 minutes)
  • The social irrelevance of secular higher education —
    FROM VOL. 85
    Professor C. John Sommerville describes the increasingly marginal influence of universities in our society, and why they seem to be of no substantive relevance to people outside the school. (13 minutes)
  • The Passionate Intellect: Incarnational Humanism & the Future of University Education, by Norman Klassen and Jens Zimmermann — Norman Klassen and Jens Zimmermann trace the history of higher education from its medieval roots to the present, focusing on how educational agendas have been assembled in light of shifting understandings of the nature of knowledge and the nature of human well-being. (6 hours 30 minutes)
  • The loss of hierarchy and humility in the academy — In interviews from 1999, literature professors Alvin Kernan and Marion Montgomery discuss how culture of the academy — its hyper-democratic posture and its loathing of limits — derails the pursuit of truth. (25 minutes)
  • The history of Christianity and higher education —
    FROM VOL. 50
    In tracing Christianity's relationship to the academy, Arthur F. Holmes points to Augustine as one of the first to embrace higher learning, believing God's ordered creation to be open to study by the rational mind of man. (9 minutes)
  • The historian’s communal role as storyteller —
    FROM VOL. 127
    Historian Christopher Shannon discusses how American academic historical writing presents a grand narrative of progressivism, which it defends by subscribing to an orthodoxy of objective Reason. (21 minutes)
  • The dispiriting consequences of the commodification of knowledge — Thomas Pfau asks why so many students in universities are regarded only as consumers, who expect a good return on their investment. He also muses on some strategies for "re-spiritualizing” education. (30 minutes)
  • The consequential witness of St. Patrick — Thomas Cahill describes how the least likely saviors of Western heritage, the Irish, copied all of classical and Christian literature while barbarians rampaged through the rest of Europe. (16 minutes)
  • Personhood, limits, and academic vocation —
    FROM VOL. 39
    Marion Montgomery (1934–2002) offers a deep critique of the relationship of the academy to its community in an effort to diagnose how higher education has lost its way. (13 minutes)
  • Parsing the intellectual vocation — Norman Klassen and Jens Zimmermann demonstrate that some form of humanism has always been central to the purposes of higher education, and insist that the recovery of a rich, Christocentric Christian humanism is the only way for the university to recover a coherent purpose. (39 minutes)
  • Only a dying civilization neglects its dead — Historian Dermot Quinn discusses the work of fellow historian Christopher Dawson (1889–1970). (15 minutes)
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 97 — FEATURED GUESTS: Mark Noll, Stanley Fish, James Peters, Scott Moore, and Makoto Fujimura
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 87 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Witte, Jr., Steven Keillor, Philip Bess, Scott Cairns, and Anthony Esolen
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 86 — FEATURED GUESTS: Roger Lundin, Lawrence Buell, Harold K. Bush, Jr., Katherine Shaw Spaht, Steven L. Nock, Norman Klassen, and Jens Zimmermann
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 78 — FEATURED GUESTS: Mark Bauerlein, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Sam Van Eman, Thomas de Zengotita, Eugene McCarraher, and John Witte, Jr.
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 75 — FEATURED GUESTS: Mark Malvasi, John Lukacs, Steve Talbott, Christian Smith, Eugene Peterson, and Rolland Hein
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 53 — FEATURED GUESTS: Lawrence Adams, Dana Gioia, Elmer M. Colyer, R. A. Herrera, Margaret Visser, and Joseph Pearce
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 159 — FEATURED GUESTS: Kirk Farney, Andrew Willard Jones, James L. Nolan, Jr., Andrew Kaethler, Peter Ramey, and Kathryn Wehr
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 157 — FEATURED GUESTS: Allan C. Carlson, Matthew Stewart, Steven Knepper, Holly Ordway, Norm Klassen, and Norman Wirzba
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 153 — FEATURED GUESTS: Charles C. Camosy, O. Carter Snead, Matt Feeney, Margarita A. Mooney, Louis Markos, and Alan Jacobs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 142 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stanley Hauerwas, Perry L. Glanzer, Nathan F. Alleman, Jeffrey Bishop, Alan Jacobs, D. C. Schindler, and Marianne Wright
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 140 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Rubery, James A. Herrick, Jack Baker, Jeffrey Bilbro, Timothy Gloege, David Hollinger, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 114 — FEATURED GUESTS: Susan Cain, Brad S. Gregory, David Sehat, Augustine Thompson, O.P., Gerald R. McDermott, and Marilyn Chandler McEntyre
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 105 — FEATURED GUESTS: Julian Young, Perry L. Glanzer, Kendra Creasy Dean, Brian Brock, Nicholas Carr, and Alan Jacobs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 101 — FEATURED GUESTS: James Davison Hunter, Paul Spears, Steven Loomis, James K. A. Smith, Thomas Long, and William T. Cavanaugh
  • Manners and the Civil Society — Three essayists reflect on the relationship between manners and morals, and address the way in which the survival of a democratic society depends upon its citizens' respect for one another. (90 minutes)
  • Louise Cowan: “The Necessity of the Classics” — Louise Cowan insists that what we label the classics “have become classics because they elicit greatness of soul,” and that such aspiration can only be informed by such works. (35 minutes)
  • John Lukacs, R.I.P. — Historian John Lukacs discusses the vocation of studying history and how it is more a way of knowing human experience than it is a science. (23 minutes)
  • Ideas and historical consequences — Historian John Lukacs (1924–2019) discusses the relationship between institutions and character, popular sentiment versus public opinion, the distinction between patriotism and nationalism, and the very nature of studying history. (36 minutes)
  • Education for human flourishing — Co-authors Paul Spears and Steven Loomis argue that Christians should foster education that does justice to humans in our fullness of being. (23 minutes)
  • Christopher Dawson: Chronicler of Christendom’s Rise and Fall — Dermot Quinn discusses historian Christopher Dawson’s meta-historical perspective and his wisdom about what makes cultures healthy or unhealthy. (54 minutes)
  • Books worthy of a lifetime of encounters —
    FROM VOL. 69
    Daniel Ritchie discusses why great books programs survive mainly in Christian institutions while declining in secular ones. (13 minutes)
  • Before Church and State — Andrew Willard Jones challenges some of the conventional paradigms of thinking about political order, arguing that modern assumptions of the relationship between Church and state color how we understand history. (54 minutes
  • Analyzing the current indictment of Christopher Columbus — Robert Royal offers thoughtful listeners an alternative to the ignorant and heated indictment of Christopher Columbus that has become fashionable in recent months. (22 minutes)
  • An outrageous idea? — In the late 1990s, George M. Marsden and James Tunstead Burtchaell both wrote books examining the claim that it was far-fetched even to imagine that scholarly work could be an expression of Christian claims about reality. (25 minutes)
  • A Christian philosophy of integrated education —
    FROM VOL. 61
    Michael L. Peterson discusses how Christianity could inform society’s understandings of education and human nature. (8 minutes)
  • “How deep the problems go” —
    FROM VOL. 103
    Eric Miller discusses the late historian and social critic Christopher Lasch’s intense commitment to understand the logic of American cultural confusion. (20 minutes)

Links to posts and programs featuring Jason Peters:

  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 84 — FEATURED GUESTS: Harry L. Lewis, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Brendan Sweetman, James Turner Johnson, David Martin, and Edward Ericson, Jr.
  • What higher education forgot —
    FROM VOL. 84
    Harry L. Lewis discusses higher education’s amnesia about its purposes, and how that shortchanges students. (19 minutes)
  • Virgil and purposeful history — In this lecture from June 2019, classical educator Louis Markos examines Book II of The Aeneid to argue that Virgil had an eschatological view of history. (68 minutes)
  • Three historians on history —
    FROM VOL. 31
    This Archive Feature presents interviews with three historians who discuss changes in historical studies. (33 minutes)
  • The Vocation of Knowledge: Higher Education and the Difference Christ Makes — Mark Noll (The Future of Christian Learning), Norman Klassen & Jens Zimmermann, (The Passionate Intellect: Incarnational Humanism and the Future of University Education),and James K. A. Smith explore the nature of Christian education. (78 minutes)
  • The social irrelevance of secular higher education —
    FROM VOL. 85
    Professor C. John Sommerville describes the increasingly marginal influence of universities in our society, and why they seem to be of no substantive relevance to people outside the school. (13 minutes)
  • The Passionate Intellect: Incarnational Humanism & the Future of University Education, by Norman Klassen and Jens Zimmermann — Norman Klassen and Jens Zimmermann trace the history of higher education from its medieval roots to the present, focusing on how educational agendas have been assembled in light of shifting understandings of the nature of knowledge and the nature of human well-being. (6 hours 30 minutes)
  • The loss of hierarchy and humility in the academy — In interviews from 1999, literature professors Alvin Kernan and Marion Montgomery discuss how culture of the academy — its hyper-democratic posture and its loathing of limits — derails the pursuit of truth. (25 minutes)
  • The history of Christianity and higher education —
    FROM VOL. 50
    In tracing Christianity's relationship to the academy, Arthur F. Holmes points to Augustine as one of the first to embrace higher learning, believing God's ordered creation to be open to study by the rational mind of man. (9 minutes)
  • The historian’s communal role as storyteller —
    FROM VOL. 127
    Historian Christopher Shannon discusses how American academic historical writing presents a grand narrative of progressivism, which it defends by subscribing to an orthodoxy of objective Reason. (21 minutes)
  • The dispiriting consequences of the commodification of knowledge — Thomas Pfau asks why so many students in universities are regarded only as consumers, who expect a good return on their investment. He also muses on some strategies for "re-spiritualizing” education. (30 minutes)
  • The consequential witness of St. Patrick — Thomas Cahill describes how the least likely saviors of Western heritage, the Irish, copied all of classical and Christian literature while barbarians rampaged through the rest of Europe. (16 minutes)
  • Personhood, limits, and academic vocation —
    FROM VOL. 39
    Marion Montgomery (1934–2002) offers a deep critique of the relationship of the academy to its community in an effort to diagnose how higher education has lost its way. (13 minutes)
  • Parsing the intellectual vocation — Norman Klassen and Jens Zimmermann demonstrate that some form of humanism has always been central to the purposes of higher education, and insist that the recovery of a rich, Christocentric Christian humanism is the only way for the university to recover a coherent purpose. (39 minutes)
  • Only a dying civilization neglects its dead — Historian Dermot Quinn discusses the work of fellow historian Christopher Dawson (1889–1970). (15 minutes)
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 97 — FEATURED GUESTS: Mark Noll, Stanley Fish, James Peters, Scott Moore, and Makoto Fujimura
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 87 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Witte, Jr., Steven Keillor, Philip Bess, Scott Cairns, and Anthony Esolen
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 86 — FEATURED GUESTS: Roger Lundin, Lawrence Buell, Harold K. Bush, Jr., Katherine Shaw Spaht, Steven L. Nock, Norman Klassen, and Jens Zimmermann
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 78 — FEATURED GUESTS: Mark Bauerlein, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Sam Van Eman, Thomas de Zengotita, Eugene McCarraher, and John Witte, Jr.
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 75 — FEATURED GUESTS: Mark Malvasi, John Lukacs, Steve Talbott, Christian Smith, Eugene Peterson, and Rolland Hein
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 53 — FEATURED GUESTS: Lawrence Adams, Dana Gioia, Elmer M. Colyer, R. A. Herrera, Margaret Visser, and Joseph Pearce
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 159 — FEATURED GUESTS: Kirk Farney, Andrew Willard Jones, James L. Nolan, Jr., Andrew Kaethler, Peter Ramey, and Kathryn Wehr
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 157 — FEATURED GUESTS: Allan C. Carlson, Matthew Stewart, Steven Knepper, Holly Ordway, Norm Klassen, and Norman Wirzba
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 153 — FEATURED GUESTS: Charles C. Camosy, O. Carter Snead, Matt Feeney, Margarita A. Mooney, Louis Markos, and Alan Jacobs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 142 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stanley Hauerwas, Perry L. Glanzer, Nathan F. Alleman, Jeffrey Bishop, Alan Jacobs, D. C. Schindler, and Marianne Wright
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 140 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Rubery, James A. Herrick, Jack Baker, Jeffrey Bilbro, Timothy Gloege, David Hollinger, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 114 — FEATURED GUESTS: Susan Cain, Brad S. Gregory, David Sehat, Augustine Thompson, O.P., Gerald R. McDermott, and Marilyn Chandler McEntyre
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 105 — FEATURED GUESTS: Julian Young, Perry L. Glanzer, Kendra Creasy Dean, Brian Brock, Nicholas Carr, and Alan Jacobs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 101 — FEATURED GUESTS: James Davison Hunter, Paul Spears, Steven Loomis, James K. A. Smith, Thomas Long, and William T. Cavanaugh
  • Manners and the Civil Society — Three essayists reflect on the relationship between manners and morals, and address the way in which the survival of a democratic society depends upon its citizens' respect for one another. (90 minutes)
  • Louise Cowan: “The Necessity of the Classics” — Louise Cowan insists that what we label the classics “have become classics because they elicit greatness of soul,” and that such aspiration can only be informed by such works. (35 minutes)
  • John Lukacs, R.I.P. — Historian John Lukacs discusses the vocation of studying history and how it is more a way of knowing human experience than it is a science. (23 minutes)
  • Ideas and historical consequences — Historian John Lukacs (1924–2019) discusses the relationship between institutions and character, popular sentiment versus public opinion, the distinction between patriotism and nationalism, and the very nature of studying history. (36 minutes)
  • Education for human flourishing — Co-authors Paul Spears and Steven Loomis argue that Christians should foster education that does justice to humans in our fullness of being. (23 minutes)
  • Christopher Dawson: Chronicler of Christendom’s Rise and Fall — Dermot Quinn discusses historian Christopher Dawson’s meta-historical perspective and his wisdom about what makes cultures healthy or unhealthy. (54 minutes)
  • Books worthy of a lifetime of encounters —
    FROM VOL. 69
    Daniel Ritchie discusses why great books programs survive mainly in Christian institutions while declining in secular ones. (13 minutes)
  • Before Church and State — Andrew Willard Jones challenges some of the conventional paradigms of thinking about political order, arguing that modern assumptions of the relationship between Church and state color how we understand history. (54 minutes
  • Analyzing the current indictment of Christopher Columbus — Robert Royal offers thoughtful listeners an alternative to the ignorant and heated indictment of Christopher Columbus that has become fashionable in recent months. (22 minutes)
  • An outrageous idea? — In the late 1990s, George M. Marsden and James Tunstead Burtchaell both wrote books examining the claim that it was far-fetched even to imagine that scholarly work could be an expression of Christian claims about reality. (25 minutes)
  • A Christian philosophy of integrated education —
    FROM VOL. 61
    Michael L. Peterson discusses how Christianity could inform society’s understandings of education and human nature. (8 minutes)
  • “How deep the problems go” —
    FROM VOL. 103
    Eric Miller discusses the late historian and social critic Christopher Lasch’s intense commitment to understand the logic of American cultural confusion. (20 minutes)

Links to posts and programs featuring Alexander Lingas:

  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 84 — FEATURED GUESTS: Harry L. Lewis, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Brendan Sweetman, James Turner Johnson, David Martin, and Edward Ericson, Jr.
  • What higher education forgot —
    FROM VOL. 84
    Harry L. Lewis discusses higher education’s amnesia about its purposes, and how that shortchanges students. (19 minutes)
  • Virgil and purposeful history — In this lecture from June 2019, classical educator Louis Markos examines Book II of The Aeneid to argue that Virgil had an eschatological view of history. (68 minutes)
  • Three historians on history —
    FROM VOL. 31
    This Archive Feature presents interviews with three historians who discuss changes in historical studies. (33 minutes)
  • The Vocation of Knowledge: Higher Education and the Difference Christ Makes — Mark Noll (The Future of Christian Learning), Norman Klassen & Jens Zimmermann, (The Passionate Intellect: Incarnational Humanism and the Future of University Education),and James K. A. Smith explore the nature of Christian education. (78 minutes)
  • The social irrelevance of secular higher education —
    FROM VOL. 85
    Professor C. John Sommerville describes the increasingly marginal influence of universities in our society, and why they seem to be of no substantive relevance to people outside the school. (13 minutes)
  • The Passionate Intellect: Incarnational Humanism & the Future of University Education, by Norman Klassen and Jens Zimmermann — Norman Klassen and Jens Zimmermann trace the history of higher education from its medieval roots to the present, focusing on how educational agendas have been assembled in light of shifting understandings of the nature of knowledge and the nature of human well-being. (6 hours 30 minutes)
  • The loss of hierarchy and humility in the academy — In interviews from 1999, literature professors Alvin Kernan and Marion Montgomery discuss how culture of the academy — its hyper-democratic posture and its loathing of limits — derails the pursuit of truth. (25 minutes)
  • The history of Christianity and higher education —
    FROM VOL. 50
    In tracing Christianity's relationship to the academy, Arthur F. Holmes points to Augustine as one of the first to embrace higher learning, believing God's ordered creation to be open to study by the rational mind of man. (9 minutes)
  • The historian’s communal role as storyteller —
    FROM VOL. 127
    Historian Christopher Shannon discusses how American academic historical writing presents a grand narrative of progressivism, which it defends by subscribing to an orthodoxy of objective Reason. (21 minutes)
  • The dispiriting consequences of the commodification of knowledge — Thomas Pfau asks why so many students in universities are regarded only as consumers, who expect a good return on their investment. He also muses on some strategies for "re-spiritualizing” education. (30 minutes)
  • The consequential witness of St. Patrick — Thomas Cahill describes how the least likely saviors of Western heritage, the Irish, copied all of classical and Christian literature while barbarians rampaged through the rest of Europe. (16 minutes)
  • Personhood, limits, and academic vocation —
    FROM VOL. 39
    Marion Montgomery (1934–2002) offers a deep critique of the relationship of the academy to its community in an effort to diagnose how higher education has lost its way. (13 minutes)
  • Parsing the intellectual vocation — Norman Klassen and Jens Zimmermann demonstrate that some form of humanism has always been central to the purposes of higher education, and insist that the recovery of a rich, Christocentric Christian humanism is the only way for the university to recover a coherent purpose. (39 minutes)
  • Only a dying civilization neglects its dead — Historian Dermot Quinn discusses the work of fellow historian Christopher Dawson (1889–1970). (15 minutes)
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 97 — FEATURED GUESTS: Mark Noll, Stanley Fish, James Peters, Scott Moore, and Makoto Fujimura
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 87 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Witte, Jr., Steven Keillor, Philip Bess, Scott Cairns, and Anthony Esolen
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 86 — FEATURED GUESTS: Roger Lundin, Lawrence Buell, Harold K. Bush, Jr., Katherine Shaw Spaht, Steven L. Nock, Norman Klassen, and Jens Zimmermann
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 78 — FEATURED GUESTS: Mark Bauerlein, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Sam Van Eman, Thomas de Zengotita, Eugene McCarraher, and John Witte, Jr.
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 75 — FEATURED GUESTS: Mark Malvasi, John Lukacs, Steve Talbott, Christian Smith, Eugene Peterson, and Rolland Hein
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 53 — FEATURED GUESTS: Lawrence Adams, Dana Gioia, Elmer M. Colyer, R. A. Herrera, Margaret Visser, and Joseph Pearce
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 159 — FEATURED GUESTS: Kirk Farney, Andrew Willard Jones, James L. Nolan, Jr., Andrew Kaethler, Peter Ramey, and Kathryn Wehr
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 157 — FEATURED GUESTS: Allan C. Carlson, Matthew Stewart, Steven Knepper, Holly Ordway, Norm Klassen, and Norman Wirzba
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 153 — FEATURED GUESTS: Charles C. Camosy, O. Carter Snead, Matt Feeney, Margarita A. Mooney, Louis Markos, and Alan Jacobs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 142 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stanley Hauerwas, Perry L. Glanzer, Nathan F. Alleman, Jeffrey Bishop, Alan Jacobs, D. C. Schindler, and Marianne Wright
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 140 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Rubery, James A. Herrick, Jack Baker, Jeffrey Bilbro, Timothy Gloege, David Hollinger, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 114 — FEATURED GUESTS: Susan Cain, Brad S. Gregory, David Sehat, Augustine Thompson, O.P., Gerald R. McDermott, and Marilyn Chandler McEntyre
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 105 — FEATURED GUESTS: Julian Young, Perry L. Glanzer, Kendra Creasy Dean, Brian Brock, Nicholas Carr, and Alan Jacobs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 101 — FEATURED GUESTS: James Davison Hunter, Paul Spears, Steven Loomis, James K. A. Smith, Thomas Long, and William T. Cavanaugh
  • Manners and the Civil Society — Three essayists reflect on the relationship between manners and morals, and address the way in which the survival of a democratic society depends upon its citizens' respect for one another. (90 minutes)
  • Louise Cowan: “The Necessity of the Classics” — Louise Cowan insists that what we label the classics “have become classics because they elicit greatness of soul,” and that such aspiration can only be informed by such works. (35 minutes)
  • John Lukacs, R.I.P. — Historian John Lukacs discusses the vocation of studying history and how it is more a way of knowing human experience than it is a science. (23 minutes)
  • Ideas and historical consequences — Historian John Lukacs (1924–2019) discusses the relationship between institutions and character, popular sentiment versus public opinion, the distinction between patriotism and nationalism, and the very nature of studying history. (36 minutes)
  • Education for human flourishing — Co-authors Paul Spears and Steven Loomis argue that Christians should foster education that does justice to humans in our fullness of being. (23 minutes)
  • Christopher Dawson: Chronicler of Christendom’s Rise and Fall — Dermot Quinn discusses historian Christopher Dawson’s meta-historical perspective and his wisdom about what makes cultures healthy or unhealthy. (54 minutes)
  • Books worthy of a lifetime of encounters —
    FROM VOL. 69
    Daniel Ritchie discusses why great books programs survive mainly in Christian institutions while declining in secular ones. (13 minutes)
  • Before Church and State — Andrew Willard Jones challenges some of the conventional paradigms of thinking about political order, arguing that modern assumptions of the relationship between Church and state color how we understand history. (54 minutes
  • Analyzing the current indictment of Christopher Columbus — Robert Royal offers thoughtful listeners an alternative to the ignorant and heated indictment of Christopher Columbus that has become fashionable in recent months. (22 minutes)
  • An outrageous idea? — In the late 1990s, George M. Marsden and James Tunstead Burtchaell both wrote books examining the claim that it was far-fetched even to imagine that scholarly work could be an expression of Christian claims about reality. (25 minutes)
  • A Christian philosophy of integrated education —
    FROM VOL. 61
    Michael L. Peterson discusses how Christianity could inform society’s understandings of education and human nature. (8 minutes)
  • “How deep the problems go” —
    FROM VOL. 103
    Eric Miller discusses the late historian and social critic Christopher Lasch’s intense commitment to understand the logic of American cultural confusion. (20 minutes)

Links to posts and programs featuring Fr. Damian Ference:

  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 84 — FEATURED GUESTS: Harry L. Lewis, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Brendan Sweetman, James Turner Johnson, David Martin, and Edward Ericson, Jr.
  • What higher education forgot —
    FROM VOL. 84
    Harry L. Lewis discusses higher education’s amnesia about its purposes, and how that shortchanges students. (19 minutes)
  • Virgil and purposeful history — In this lecture from June 2019, classical educator Louis Markos examines Book II of The Aeneid to argue that Virgil had an eschatological view of history. (68 minutes)
  • Three historians on history —
    FROM VOL. 31
    This Archive Feature presents interviews with three historians who discuss changes in historical studies. (33 minutes)
  • The Vocation of Knowledge: Higher Education and the Difference Christ Makes — Mark Noll (The Future of Christian Learning), Norman Klassen & Jens Zimmermann, (The Passionate Intellect: Incarnational Humanism and the Future of University Education),and James K. A. Smith explore the nature of Christian education. (78 minutes)
  • The social irrelevance of secular higher education —
    FROM VOL. 85
    Professor C. John Sommerville describes the increasingly marginal influence of universities in our society, and why they seem to be of no substantive relevance to people outside the school. (13 minutes)
  • The Passionate Intellect: Incarnational Humanism & the Future of University Education, by Norman Klassen and Jens Zimmermann — Norman Klassen and Jens Zimmermann trace the history of higher education from its medieval roots to the present, focusing on how educational agendas have been assembled in light of shifting understandings of the nature of knowledge and the nature of human well-being. (6 hours 30 minutes)
  • The loss of hierarchy and humility in the academy — In interviews from 1999, literature professors Alvin Kernan and Marion Montgomery discuss how culture of the academy — its hyper-democratic posture and its loathing of limits — derails the pursuit of truth. (25 minutes)
  • The history of Christianity and higher education —
    FROM VOL. 50
    In tracing Christianity's relationship to the academy, Arthur F. Holmes points to Augustine as one of the first to embrace higher learning, believing God's ordered creation to be open to study by the rational mind of man. (9 minutes)
  • The historian’s communal role as storyteller —
    FROM VOL. 127
    Historian Christopher Shannon discusses how American academic historical writing presents a grand narrative of progressivism, which it defends by subscribing to an orthodoxy of objective Reason. (21 minutes)
  • The dispiriting consequences of the commodification of knowledge — Thomas Pfau asks why so many students in universities are regarded only as consumers, who expect a good return on their investment. He also muses on some strategies for "re-spiritualizing” education. (30 minutes)
  • The consequential witness of St. Patrick — Thomas Cahill describes how the least likely saviors of Western heritage, the Irish, copied all of classical and Christian literature while barbarians rampaged through the rest of Europe. (16 minutes)
  • Personhood, limits, and academic vocation —
    FROM VOL. 39
    Marion Montgomery (1934–2002) offers a deep critique of the relationship of the academy to its community in an effort to diagnose how higher education has lost its way. (13 minutes)
  • Parsing the intellectual vocation — Norman Klassen and Jens Zimmermann demonstrate that some form of humanism has always been central to the purposes of higher education, and insist that the recovery of a rich, Christocentric Christian humanism is the only way for the university to recover a coherent purpose. (39 minutes)
  • Only a dying civilization neglects its dead — Historian Dermot Quinn discusses the work of fellow historian Christopher Dawson (1889–1970). (15 minutes)
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 97 — FEATURED GUESTS: Mark Noll, Stanley Fish, James Peters, Scott Moore, and Makoto Fujimura
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 87 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Witte, Jr., Steven Keillor, Philip Bess, Scott Cairns, and Anthony Esolen
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 86 — FEATURED GUESTS: Roger Lundin, Lawrence Buell, Harold K. Bush, Jr., Katherine Shaw Spaht, Steven L. Nock, Norman Klassen, and Jens Zimmermann
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 78 — FEATURED GUESTS: Mark Bauerlein, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Sam Van Eman, Thomas de Zengotita, Eugene McCarraher, and John Witte, Jr.
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 75 — FEATURED GUESTS: Mark Malvasi, John Lukacs, Steve Talbott, Christian Smith, Eugene Peterson, and Rolland Hein
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 53 — FEATURED GUESTS: Lawrence Adams, Dana Gioia, Elmer M. Colyer, R. A. Herrera, Margaret Visser, and Joseph Pearce
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 159 — FEATURED GUESTS: Kirk Farney, Andrew Willard Jones, James L. Nolan, Jr., Andrew Kaethler, Peter Ramey, and Kathryn Wehr
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 157 — FEATURED GUESTS: Allan C. Carlson, Matthew Stewart, Steven Knepper, Holly Ordway, Norm Klassen, and Norman Wirzba
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 153 — FEATURED GUESTS: Charles C. Camosy, O. Carter Snead, Matt Feeney, Margarita A. Mooney, Louis Markos, and Alan Jacobs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 142 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stanley Hauerwas, Perry L. Glanzer, Nathan F. Alleman, Jeffrey Bishop, Alan Jacobs, D. C. Schindler, and Marianne Wright
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 140 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Rubery, James A. Herrick, Jack Baker, Jeffrey Bilbro, Timothy Gloege, David Hollinger, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 114 — FEATURED GUESTS: Susan Cain, Brad S. Gregory, David Sehat, Augustine Thompson, O.P., Gerald R. McDermott, and Marilyn Chandler McEntyre
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 105 — FEATURED GUESTS: Julian Young, Perry L. Glanzer, Kendra Creasy Dean, Brian Brock, Nicholas Carr, and Alan Jacobs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 101 — FEATURED GUESTS: James Davison Hunter, Paul Spears, Steven Loomis, James K. A. Smith, Thomas Long, and William T. Cavanaugh
  • Manners and the Civil Society — Three essayists reflect on the relationship between manners and morals, and address the way in which the survival of a democratic society depends upon its citizens' respect for one another. (90 minutes)
  • Louise Cowan: “The Necessity of the Classics” — Louise Cowan insists that what we label the classics “have become classics because they elicit greatness of soul,” and that such aspiration can only be informed by such works. (35 minutes)
  • John Lukacs, R.I.P. — Historian John Lukacs discusses the vocation of studying history and how it is more a way of knowing human experience than it is a science. (23 minutes)
  • Ideas and historical consequences — Historian John Lukacs (1924–2019) discusses the relationship between institutions and character, popular sentiment versus public opinion, the distinction between patriotism and nationalism, and the very nature of studying history. (36 minutes)
  • Education for human flourishing — Co-authors Paul Spears and Steven Loomis argue that Christians should foster education that does justice to humans in our fullness of being. (23 minutes)
  • Christopher Dawson: Chronicler of Christendom’s Rise and Fall — Dermot Quinn discusses historian Christopher Dawson’s meta-historical perspective and his wisdom about what makes cultures healthy or unhealthy. (54 minutes)
  • Books worthy of a lifetime of encounters —
    FROM VOL. 69
    Daniel Ritchie discusses why great books programs survive mainly in Christian institutions while declining in secular ones. (13 minutes)
  • Before Church and State — Andrew Willard Jones challenges some of the conventional paradigms of thinking about political order, arguing that modern assumptions of the relationship between Church and state color how we understand history. (54 minutes
  • Analyzing the current indictment of Christopher Columbus — Robert Royal offers thoughtful listeners an alternative to the ignorant and heated indictment of Christopher Columbus that has become fashionable in recent months. (22 minutes)
  • An outrageous idea? — In the late 1990s, George M. Marsden and James Tunstead Burtchaell both wrote books examining the claim that it was far-fetched even to imagine that scholarly work could be an expression of Christian claims about reality. (25 minutes)
  • A Christian philosophy of integrated education —
    FROM VOL. 61
    Michael L. Peterson discusses how Christianity could inform society’s understandings of education and human nature. (8 minutes)
  • “How deep the problems go” —
    FROM VOL. 103
    Eric Miller discusses the late historian and social critic Christopher Lasch’s intense commitment to understand the logic of American cultural confusion. (20 minutes)

Links to lectures and commentary by Ken Myers:

  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 84 — FEATURED GUESTS: Harry L. Lewis, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Brendan Sweetman, James Turner Johnson, David Martin, and Edward Ericson, Jr.
  • What higher education forgot —
    FROM VOL. 84
    Harry L. Lewis discusses higher education’s amnesia about its purposes, and how that shortchanges students. (19 minutes)
  • Virgil and purposeful history — In this lecture from June 2019, classical educator Louis Markos examines Book II of The Aeneid to argue that Virgil had an eschatological view of history. (68 minutes)
  • Three historians on history —
    FROM VOL. 31
    This Archive Feature presents interviews with three historians who discuss changes in historical studies. (33 minutes)
  • The Vocation of Knowledge: Higher Education and the Difference Christ Makes — Mark Noll (The Future of Christian Learning), Norman Klassen & Jens Zimmermann, (The Passionate Intellect: Incarnational Humanism and the Future of University Education),and James K. A. Smith explore the nature of Christian education. (78 minutes)
  • The social irrelevance of secular higher education —
    FROM VOL. 85
    Professor C. John Sommerville describes the increasingly marginal influence of universities in our society, and why they seem to be of no substantive relevance to people outside the school. (13 minutes)
  • The Passionate Intellect: Incarnational Humanism & the Future of University Education, by Norman Klassen and Jens Zimmermann — Norman Klassen and Jens Zimmermann trace the history of higher education from its medieval roots to the present, focusing on how educational agendas have been assembled in light of shifting understandings of the nature of knowledge and the nature of human well-being. (6 hours 30 minutes)
  • The loss of hierarchy and humility in the academy — In interviews from 1999, literature professors Alvin Kernan and Marion Montgomery discuss how culture of the academy — its hyper-democratic posture and its loathing of limits — derails the pursuit of truth. (25 minutes)
  • The history of Christianity and higher education —
    FROM VOL. 50
    In tracing Christianity's relationship to the academy, Arthur F. Holmes points to Augustine as one of the first to embrace higher learning, believing God's ordered creation to be open to study by the rational mind of man. (9 minutes)
  • The historian’s communal role as storyteller —
    FROM VOL. 127
    Historian Christopher Shannon discusses how American academic historical writing presents a grand narrative of progressivism, which it defends by subscribing to an orthodoxy of objective Reason. (21 minutes)
  • The dispiriting consequences of the commodification of knowledge — Thomas Pfau asks why so many students in universities are regarded only as consumers, who expect a good return on their investment. He also muses on some strategies for "re-spiritualizing” education. (30 minutes)
  • The consequential witness of St. Patrick — Thomas Cahill describes how the least likely saviors of Western heritage, the Irish, copied all of classical and Christian literature while barbarians rampaged through the rest of Europe. (16 minutes)
  • Personhood, limits, and academic vocation —
    FROM VOL. 39
    Marion Montgomery (1934–2002) offers a deep critique of the relationship of the academy to its community in an effort to diagnose how higher education has lost its way. (13 minutes)
  • Parsing the intellectual vocation — Norman Klassen and Jens Zimmermann demonstrate that some form of humanism has always been central to the purposes of higher education, and insist that the recovery of a rich, Christocentric Christian humanism is the only way for the university to recover a coherent purpose. (39 minutes)
  • Only a dying civilization neglects its dead — Historian Dermot Quinn discusses the work of fellow historian Christopher Dawson (1889–1970). (15 minutes)
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 97 — FEATURED GUESTS: Mark Noll, Stanley Fish, James Peters, Scott Moore, and Makoto Fujimura
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 87 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Witte, Jr., Steven Keillor, Philip Bess, Scott Cairns, and Anthony Esolen
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 86 — FEATURED GUESTS: Roger Lundin, Lawrence Buell, Harold K. Bush, Jr., Katherine Shaw Spaht, Steven L. Nock, Norman Klassen, and Jens Zimmermann
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 78 — FEATURED GUESTS: Mark Bauerlein, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Sam Van Eman, Thomas de Zengotita, Eugene McCarraher, and John Witte, Jr.
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 75 — FEATURED GUESTS: Mark Malvasi, John Lukacs, Steve Talbott, Christian Smith, Eugene Peterson, and Rolland Hein
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 53 — FEATURED GUESTS: Lawrence Adams, Dana Gioia, Elmer M. Colyer, R. A. Herrera, Margaret Visser, and Joseph Pearce
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 159 — FEATURED GUESTS: Kirk Farney, Andrew Willard Jones, James L. Nolan, Jr., Andrew Kaethler, Peter Ramey, and Kathryn Wehr
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 157 — FEATURED GUESTS: Allan C. Carlson, Matthew Stewart, Steven Knepper, Holly Ordway, Norm Klassen, and Norman Wirzba
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 153 — FEATURED GUESTS: Charles C. Camosy, O. Carter Snead, Matt Feeney, Margarita A. Mooney, Louis Markos, and Alan Jacobs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 142 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stanley Hauerwas, Perry L. Glanzer, Nathan F. Alleman, Jeffrey Bishop, Alan Jacobs, D. C. Schindler, and Marianne Wright
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 140 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Rubery, James A. Herrick, Jack Baker, Jeffrey Bilbro, Timothy Gloege, David Hollinger, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 114 — FEATURED GUESTS: Susan Cain, Brad S. Gregory, David Sehat, Augustine Thompson, O.P., Gerald R. McDermott, and Marilyn Chandler McEntyre
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 105 — FEATURED GUESTS: Julian Young, Perry L. Glanzer, Kendra Creasy Dean, Brian Brock, Nicholas Carr, and Alan Jacobs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 101 — FEATURED GUESTS: James Davison Hunter, Paul Spears, Steven Loomis, James K. A. Smith, Thomas Long, and William T. Cavanaugh
  • Manners and the Civil Society — Three essayists reflect on the relationship between manners and morals, and address the way in which the survival of a democratic society depends upon its citizens' respect for one another. (90 minutes)
  • Louise Cowan: “The Necessity of the Classics” — Louise Cowan insists that what we label the classics “have become classics because they elicit greatness of soul,” and that such aspiration can only be informed by such works. (35 minutes)
  • John Lukacs, R.I.P. — Historian John Lukacs discusses the vocation of studying history and how it is more a way of knowing human experience than it is a science. (23 minutes)
  • Ideas and historical consequences — Historian John Lukacs (1924–2019) discusses the relationship between institutions and character, popular sentiment versus public opinion, the distinction between patriotism and nationalism, and the very nature of studying history. (36 minutes)
  • Education for human flourishing — Co-authors Paul Spears and Steven Loomis argue that Christians should foster education that does justice to humans in our fullness of being. (23 minutes)
  • Christopher Dawson: Chronicler of Christendom’s Rise and Fall — Dermot Quinn discusses historian Christopher Dawson’s meta-historical perspective and his wisdom about what makes cultures healthy or unhealthy. (54 minutes)
  • Books worthy of a lifetime of encounters —
    FROM VOL. 69
    Daniel Ritchie discusses why great books programs survive mainly in Christian institutions while declining in secular ones. (13 minutes)
  • Before Church and State — Andrew Willard Jones challenges some of the conventional paradigms of thinking about political order, arguing that modern assumptions of the relationship between Church and state color how we understand history. (54 minutes
  • Analyzing the current indictment of Christopher Columbus — Robert Royal offers thoughtful listeners an alternative to the ignorant and heated indictment of Christopher Columbus that has become fashionable in recent months. (22 minutes)
  • An outrageous idea? — In the late 1990s, George M. Marsden and James Tunstead Burtchaell both wrote books examining the claim that it was far-fetched even to imagine that scholarly work could be an expression of Christian claims about reality. (25 minutes)
  • A Christian philosophy of integrated education —
    FROM VOL. 61
    Michael L. Peterson discusses how Christianity could inform society’s understandings of education and human nature. (8 minutes)
  • “How deep the problems go” —
    FROM VOL. 103
    Eric Miller discusses the late historian and social critic Christopher Lasch’s intense commitment to understand the logic of American cultural confusion. (20 minutes)

Links to posts and programs featuring David Cayley:

  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 84 — FEATURED GUESTS: Harry L. Lewis, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Brendan Sweetman, James Turner Johnson, David Martin, and Edward Ericson, Jr.
  • What higher education forgot —
    FROM VOL. 84
    Harry L. Lewis discusses higher education’s amnesia about its purposes, and how that shortchanges students. (19 minutes)
  • Virgil and purposeful history — In this lecture from June 2019, classical educator Louis Markos examines Book II of The Aeneid to argue that Virgil had an eschatological view of history. (68 minutes)
  • Three historians on history —
    FROM VOL. 31
    This Archive Feature presents interviews with three historians who discuss changes in historical studies. (33 minutes)
  • The Vocation of Knowledge: Higher Education and the Difference Christ Makes — Mark Noll (The Future of Christian Learning), Norman Klassen & Jens Zimmermann, (The Passionate Intellect: Incarnational Humanism and the Future of University Education),and James K. A. Smith explore the nature of Christian education. (78 minutes)
  • The social irrelevance of secular higher education —
    FROM VOL. 85
    Professor C. John Sommerville describes the increasingly marginal influence of universities in our society, and why they seem to be of no substantive relevance to people outside the school. (13 minutes)
  • The Passionate Intellect: Incarnational Humanism & the Future of University Education, by Norman Klassen and Jens Zimmermann — Norman Klassen and Jens Zimmermann trace the history of higher education from its medieval roots to the present, focusing on how educational agendas have been assembled in light of shifting understandings of the nature of knowledge and the nature of human well-being. (6 hours 30 minutes)
  • The loss of hierarchy and humility in the academy — In interviews from 1999, literature professors Alvin Kernan and Marion Montgomery discuss how culture of the academy — its hyper-democratic posture and its loathing of limits — derails the pursuit of truth. (25 minutes)
  • The history of Christianity and higher education —
    FROM VOL. 50
    In tracing Christianity's relationship to the academy, Arthur F. Holmes points to Augustine as one of the first to embrace higher learning, believing God's ordered creation to be open to study by the rational mind of man. (9 minutes)
  • The historian’s communal role as storyteller —
    FROM VOL. 127
    Historian Christopher Shannon discusses how American academic historical writing presents a grand narrative of progressivism, which it defends by subscribing to an orthodoxy of objective Reason. (21 minutes)
  • The dispiriting consequences of the commodification of knowledge — Thomas Pfau asks why so many students in universities are regarded only as consumers, who expect a good return on their investment. He also muses on some strategies for "re-spiritualizing” education. (30 minutes)
  • The consequential witness of St. Patrick — Thomas Cahill describes how the least likely saviors of Western heritage, the Irish, copied all of classical and Christian literature while barbarians rampaged through the rest of Europe. (16 minutes)
  • Personhood, limits, and academic vocation —
    FROM VOL. 39
    Marion Montgomery (1934–2002) offers a deep critique of the relationship of the academy to its community in an effort to diagnose how higher education has lost its way. (13 minutes)
  • Parsing the intellectual vocation — Norman Klassen and Jens Zimmermann demonstrate that some form of humanism has always been central to the purposes of higher education, and insist that the recovery of a rich, Christocentric Christian humanism is the only way for the university to recover a coherent purpose. (39 minutes)
  • Only a dying civilization neglects its dead — Historian Dermot Quinn discusses the work of fellow historian Christopher Dawson (1889–1970). (15 minutes)
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 97 — FEATURED GUESTS: Mark Noll, Stanley Fish, James Peters, Scott Moore, and Makoto Fujimura
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 87 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Witte, Jr., Steven Keillor, Philip Bess, Scott Cairns, and Anthony Esolen
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 86 — FEATURED GUESTS: Roger Lundin, Lawrence Buell, Harold K. Bush, Jr., Katherine Shaw Spaht, Steven L. Nock, Norman Klassen, and Jens Zimmermann
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 78 — FEATURED GUESTS: Mark Bauerlein, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Sam Van Eman, Thomas de Zengotita, Eugene McCarraher, and John Witte, Jr.
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 75 — FEATURED GUESTS: Mark Malvasi, John Lukacs, Steve Talbott, Christian Smith, Eugene Peterson, and Rolland Hein
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 53 — FEATURED GUESTS: Lawrence Adams, Dana Gioia, Elmer M. Colyer, R. A. Herrera, Margaret Visser, and Joseph Pearce
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 159 — FEATURED GUESTS: Kirk Farney, Andrew Willard Jones, James L. Nolan, Jr., Andrew Kaethler, Peter Ramey, and Kathryn Wehr
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 157 — FEATURED GUESTS: Allan C. Carlson, Matthew Stewart, Steven Knepper, Holly Ordway, Norm Klassen, and Norman Wirzba
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 153 — FEATURED GUESTS: Charles C. Camosy, O. Carter Snead, Matt Feeney, Margarita A. Mooney, Louis Markos, and Alan Jacobs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 142 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stanley Hauerwas, Perry L. Glanzer, Nathan F. Alleman, Jeffrey Bishop, Alan Jacobs, D. C. Schindler, and Marianne Wright
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 140 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Rubery, James A. Herrick, Jack Baker, Jeffrey Bilbro, Timothy Gloege, David Hollinger, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 114 — FEATURED GUESTS: Susan Cain, Brad S. Gregory, David Sehat, Augustine Thompson, O.P., Gerald R. McDermott, and Marilyn Chandler McEntyre
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 105 — FEATURED GUESTS: Julian Young, Perry L. Glanzer, Kendra Creasy Dean, Brian Brock, Nicholas Carr, and Alan Jacobs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 101 — FEATURED GUESTS: James Davison Hunter, Paul Spears, Steven Loomis, James K. A. Smith, Thomas Long, and William T. Cavanaugh
  • Manners and the Civil Society — Three essayists reflect on the relationship between manners and morals, and address the way in which the survival of a democratic society depends upon its citizens' respect for one another. (90 minutes)
  • Louise Cowan: “The Necessity of the Classics” — Louise Cowan insists that what we label the classics “have become classics because they elicit greatness of soul,” and that such aspiration can only be informed by such works. (35 minutes)
  • John Lukacs, R.I.P. — Historian John Lukacs discusses the vocation of studying history and how it is more a way of knowing human experience than it is a science. (23 minutes)
  • Ideas and historical consequences — Historian John Lukacs (1924–2019) discusses the relationship between institutions and character, popular sentiment versus public opinion, the distinction between patriotism and nationalism, and the very nature of studying history. (36 minutes)
  • Education for human flourishing — Co-authors Paul Spears and Steven Loomis argue that Christians should foster education that does justice to humans in our fullness of being. (23 minutes)
  • Christopher Dawson: Chronicler of Christendom’s Rise and Fall — Dermot Quinn discusses historian Christopher Dawson’s meta-historical perspective and his wisdom about what makes cultures healthy or unhealthy. (54 minutes)
  • Books worthy of a lifetime of encounters —
    FROM VOL. 69
    Daniel Ritchie discusses why great books programs survive mainly in Christian institutions while declining in secular ones. (13 minutes)
  • Before Church and State — Andrew Willard Jones challenges some of the conventional paradigms of thinking about political order, arguing that modern assumptions of the relationship between Church and state color how we understand history. (54 minutes
  • Analyzing the current indictment of Christopher Columbus — Robert Royal offers thoughtful listeners an alternative to the ignorant and heated indictment of Christopher Columbus that has become fashionable in recent months. (22 minutes)
  • An outrageous idea? — In the late 1990s, George M. Marsden and James Tunstead Burtchaell both wrote books examining the claim that it was far-fetched even to imagine that scholarly work could be an expression of Christian claims about reality. (25 minutes)
  • A Christian philosophy of integrated education —
    FROM VOL. 61
    Michael L. Peterson discusses how Christianity could inform society’s understandings of education and human nature. (8 minutes)
  • “How deep the problems go” —
    FROM VOL. 103
    Eric Miller discusses the late historian and social critic Christopher Lasch’s intense commitment to understand the logic of American cultural confusion. (20 minutes)
Tags: