Welcoming one another

Related reading and listening

• Reason and the love of truth — FROM VOL. 97 James Peters discusses historical understandings of reason and rationality and how they differ from the modern notion of rationality. (21 minutes)
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• How common loves shape communities — Oliver O’Donovan discusses how communities mediate love and knowledge to their members and what challenges arise as a community’s traditions are confronted by sin, error, and plurality. (Lecture 2 of 3; 49 minutes)
• Heaven and earth are full of His glory — Gerald R. McDermott examines the typological tradition of the Church, particularly through Jonathan Edwards’s thought, and he argues for a recovery of the Christian understanding of the universe as an “immense Trinitarian symbol.” (61 minutes)
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• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 165 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jeffrey Bilbro, Daniel McInerny, Joseph Minich, Carl Elliott, Nadya Williams, and Don W. King
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• Real Food, Real Communities — Corby Kummer extols the virtues of the Slow Food movement, which seeks to honor, protect, and sustain traditional foods and ingredients from specific cultures and regions. (48 minutes)
• Cross my heart — Christine Pohl on cultivating the practice of promise-keeping
• Clips from five extended interviews — We are pleased to share clips from five interviews that we’ve recently produced as full-length Conversations. (30 minutes)
• Shared Practices, Strong Communities — Christine Pohl reflects on why a deliberate commitment to certain shared practices is necessary for the sustaining of community. (57 minutes)
• “The search for shared ends” — Oliver O’Donovan examines whether and to what extent there might be the possibility of a unifying Christian perspective on political doctrine or policy. (59 minutes)
• What we can know about God’s nature — Bruce McCormack outlines the history of the development of the doctrine of the Trinity. He shows how early Christians’ understanding of the nature of God moved from a focus on His oneness to a more full apprehension of His Triune nature. (66 minutes)
• Christian unity and civil society — Oliver O’Donovan introduces listeners to Dutch lay theologian Hugo Grotius, arguing that the questions he tackled relate to perennial concerns about the relationship between divine and human agency, and between civil and ecclesiastical authority. (Lecture 2 of 3; 57 minutes)
• How the Enlightenment blinded us — Alasdair MacIntyre on the dependence of rationality on a lived tradition
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• Seeing Creation Anew: The Life & Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins — Dana Gioia examines Gerard Manley Hopkins‘s poetic genius and dedication to Christ in spite of his personal trials and difficult cultural context. (55 minutes)
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• Impact of “infotainment” on community — Neil Gabler and C. John Sommerville discuss how the mentalities conveyed by our experience with communications media work against the nurturing of community. (36 minutes)
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• The theological significance of current events — FROM VOL. 65 George Marsden discusses how Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) understood world history and the American experience. (14 minutes)
• “Detachment as a whole way of life” — FROM VOL. 85 Professor Christopher Shannon discusses how early twentieth-century social scientists encouraged the American idea that individual identity works against communal membership. (17 minutes)
• Education that counters alienation — In this lecture, Jeanne Schindler explores how digital technologies warp not only education but our experience of being human. (30 minutes)
• Were Christian martyrs considered suicides? — FROM VOL. 36 Darrel Amundsen counters the modern myth that the early Church up until St. Augustine was accepting and even favorable of suicide. (12 minutes)
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 163 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Youngblood, R. J. Snell, Nicholas Denysenko, Nigel Biggar, Robert McNamara, and David Cayley
• Courtesy as a theological issue — FROM VOL. 37 Donald McCullough discusses his insights into the increasingly coarse nature of society and the theological foundations for courtesy. (12 minutes)
• Recovering the primacy of contemplation — Augusto Del Noce finds in St. Augustine resources to diagnose the fatal flaw in progressivism
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• Friendship and life together — In a lecture at Providence College, Ken Myers explores how the concept of friendship, which used to be central to political philosophy, was banished from considerations of public life as the state was exalted over society. (53 minutes)
• Cleansing sea breezes — Thomas C. Oden argues that rather than being conformed to contemporary ideological trends, we should be informed by 2000 years of the Church’s wisdom. And Darrell Amundsen corrects some false claims about the early Church’s views on suicide. (27 minutes)
• The early Church on asceticism and almsgiving — FROM VOL. 118Historian Peter Brown explains that in spite of having had access for centuries to the Church fathers’ numerous writings, only recently have we come to understand the social and material context within which they lived. (18 minutes)
• Blest be the ties of language that bind us — Marion Montgomery on the precious gift of words
• 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”
• Community, the giver of freedom — Thomas H. Naylor and William H. Willimon on why suspicion about big government shouldn’t take the form of autonomous individualism
• We feebly struggle, they in glory shine — Church historian Robert Wilken describes how the early Church’s witness about the nature of truth challenged the assumptions of the surrounding culture. (15 minutes)
• Convivial is beautiful — Ivan Illich on “the opposite of industrial productivity”
• Loving relationships in community — In conversation with moral philosopher Oliver O’Donovan, and with readings from his book, Entering into Rest, Ken Myers explores a central theme in O’Donovan’s work: that we are created to enjoy loving relationships in community. (27 minutes)
• Freed from the burden of choice — Writing in the mid-1990s, Alan Ehrenhalt reflects on the relationship between authority and community
• Why communities need authority — Alan Ehrenhalt argues that real community can only be sustained when three things are assumed: the goodness of limits, the necessity of authority, and the reality of personal sin. (13 minutes)
• Religious pluralism & the calling of Christian intellectuals — From our archives, Robert Wilken talks about religious pluralism in Christian history, and Robert Jenson discusses his essay on the calling of Christian intellectuals. (25 minutes)
• The Bruderhof’s Christ-centered community — Clare Stober discusses the book she edited of stories of the Bruderhof, a network of 26 community settlements around the world. (30 minutes)
• Lessons from quarantine: Making do with tinned fruit — In this audio reprint of “Wendell Berry and Zoom,” Front Porch Republic editor Jeffrey Bilbro reflects on two metaphors that can help put our new-found “dependency” on web-based video conferencing into perspective: tinned fruit and a prosthetic limb. (17 minutes)
• The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)