The current Friday Feature
duration 40:33
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
- Seeking control, in white magic and The Green Book
Alan Jacobs on C. S. Lewis’s critique of the modern pursuit of god-like control - The Narnian as Jeremiah
Michael Ward on the bleak prognosis in C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man - What hath Hobbiton to do with Jerusalem?
Holly Ordway on the pre-Christian religion in Middle-earth - Irrigating deserts
C. S. Lewis on why teachers must train the sentiments - The hospitality of the cross (and empty tomb)
Hans Boersma on the divine transcendent warrant for our human responsibility to be hospitable
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Related Features
How fairy tales form imagination
Apprehending the enduring things
On the corruption of fairy tales
Lenten meditations on gardening
Meet one of our Partners
The Valor Institute for Studies in Person and Community exists to promote a capacious vision of the human person flourishing in community. Its work is a creative response to the defining crises of our time — spiritual and intellectual pathologies rooted in impoverished and reductive understandings of what it means to be human, of what constitutes authentic community, and of our proper relationship to the created world. The work of the Valor Institute is a concrete manifestation of John Paul II’s affirmation of the “inviolable mystery and dignity of the human person.”
Through academic retreats, symposia, and public lectures, the Valor Institute seeks to deepen understanding of the human person as a unity of body and soul, capable of truth, love, and moral transformation — opposed to ideologies that see human beings as consumers, workers, or biological machines. Further, the Valor Institute endeavors to promote a vision for authentic community rooted in a broad vision of the common good and shared loves — beyond a view of transactional community that exists only to serve individual preference and desire. Finally, the Valor Institute cultivates a metaphysics of gift, which approaches all of creation first with wonder and gratitude — against the technological ontology that sees the material world as something merely to be used. In the words of Eric Voegelin, “Philosophy springs from the love of being; it is man’s loving endeavor to perceive the order of being and attune himself to it.”
On this page, you can browse a listing of lectures that the Valor Institute has made available as Features for Mars Hill Audio members.
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A recent Bonus Feature
What is sacramentality and what does it have to do with education? Peter Crawford tackles these questions in this October 2021 lecture, beginning with a brief history of how the idea of symbols and sacraments came to be understood in modernity not as visible signs of invisible realities, but simply as words we imbue with whatever meaning we give them. In other words, a symbolic view is impoverished now compared to the premodern perspective that recognized its potency and relation to reality. Crawford says that the Incarnation reveals how linked visible and invisible realities are. Thus, a sacramental education involves more than a good curriculum; it involves helping students to see — to behold a world saturated with signs that point to Christ. Once students’ eyes have been opened to the world as it truly is, they may be called to act in loving response as stewards of creation, helped by the mercy of God.
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 167
- NICHOLAS CARR, author of Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart, on how social media affects our brains and our relationships
- THOMAS WARD, author of After Stoicism: Last Words of the Last Roman Philosopher, on Boethius — the Christian — and Stoicism
- JOSEPH STUART, author of Christopher Dawson: A Cultural Mind in the Age of the Great War, on Dawson’s forgotten legacy
- STEVEN KNEPPER & ROBERT WYLLIE, authors of Byung-Chul Han: A Critical Introduction, on key themes in the contemporary philosopher’s work
- EPHRAIM RADNER, author of Mortal Goods: Reimagining Christian Political Duty, on the flawed modern narrative of ‘‘betterment”
- ANDREW WILLARD JONES, author of The Church Against the State: On Subsidiarity and Sovereignty, on reality, friendship, and analogical participation