The current Friday Feature
read more
duration 28:51
If you’re a member, you can select this (or any other) Friday Feature, and download it to our app for later listening. Here’s the listing of Features.
Latest wisdom from Sound Thinking
- From myth to sacramentality
Craig Bernthal: Tolkien asserts that reading fairy stories is a way to ‘recover’ the world” - Mythopoeic power
Stratford Caldecott on Tolkien’s literary achievement - God also was a Cave-man
G. K. Chesterton on the convergence of omnipotence and impotence in Bethlehem - Bemused by joy
Fr. James V. Schall, S.J., on G. K. Chesterton’s awareness of the reality of both evil and joy - The (super)natural theology of fairy-tales
Alison Milbank describes Chesterton’s belief that story-telling is an affirmation of transcendent meaning
“I’m not a member yet. Convince me that it’s worth it.”
- AUDITION some of the features on our Listen for free page (over 15 hours of listening).
- READ our mission statement and some testimonials.
- BROWSE the various sections of our catalog to see how much you’re missing.
- SCROLL down on the Meet our Guests page to see if you recognize anyone.
- SIGN UP here.
Related Features
Gratitude & stewardship
O’Connor & Thomism
On Earth as in Heaven
Faith & reason
Meet one of our Partners
The Houston Centre for Humanity and the Common Good is an initiative of Regent College (Vancouver, BC), grounded in the comprehensive vision of integrative scholarship of the late Dr. James M. Houston (1922–2026). Its main task is to foster interdisciplinary and interreligious dialogue on the central question of the late-modern world: what does it mean to be human?
Through public lectures, seminars, and a variety of publications, the Houston Centre helps others engage theological questions of humanity for the common good. Inviting a range of philosophical perspectives through collaboration with the University of British Columbia and other institutions, the Centre explores a holistic understanding of humanity that accounts for the unique social, political, and theological issues of our time. Comprising a community of leading scholars, the Centre generates dialogue across disciplines — theology, philosophy, biology, cognitive science, political studies, and more — in order to navigate the mystery of the human person.
On this page, you can browse a listing of lectures that the Houston Centre for Humanity and the Public Good has made available as Features for Mars Hill Audio members.
Click here to see news from all our Partners
A recent Bonus Feature
In this 2025 article, Antón Barba-Kay identifies three aspects of digital technology that degrade democracies and democratic norms. Rather than continuing to act as if the lie were true that digital technology is ultimately neutral, he says, we must reckon with its harms if we are to prevent our democracy from collapse. We must understand how “the implicit principles of our current digital regime” are changing our sense of personhood and weakening our capacity for speech, reason, and discernment. Our current path is leading, says Barba-Kay, toward “TikTokcracy,” a novel form of authoritarianism. Almost everything about our use of digital technology strips from us the very things democracies require: habits of disciplined, competent, and high-quality thinking, speaking, and acting. Barba-Kay proposes a way forward that could potentially reverse the degradation of democracy by envisioning and sowing the seeds for a holistic post-digital literacy.
The 18 most recent Conversations and Features we’ve released are described here.
If you’re not yet a member, you can get a free Visitor’s Pass and listen to hours of free audio. Details are here.
Our most recent Journal
Guests on Volume 169
- ALEC RYRIE, author of The Age of Hitler and How We Will Survive It, on cultural values based on a villain
- FREDERICK BAUERSCHMIDT, author of No Lasting City: Essays on Theology, Politics, and Culture, on changes in ethics in postmodernity
- ANDREW KERN, author of Unless the Lord Builds the House: Shared Foundations for Christian Education, on helping students discover the glory of each created thing
- MICHAEL D. C. DROUT, author of The Tower and the Ruin: J. R. R. Tolkien’s Creation, on Tolkien’s creation of Middle-earth and its unique impact on readers
- ROSS MCCULLOUGH, author ofThe Body of This Death: Letters from the Last Archbishop of Lancaster, on portraying faith and life in the later 21st century in fiction
- DALE AHLQUIST, editor of I Also Had My Hour: An Alternative Autobiography of G. K. Chesterton, on G. K. Chesterton’s genius and humility