
released 4/16/2021
One of the guests on the forthcoming Volume 150 of the Journal is the Rev. Eric Jacobsen, talking about his book, Three Pieces of Glass: Why We Feel Lonely in a World Mediated by Screens. In 2004 (on Volume 67), Jacobsen talked with Ken Myers about his first book, Sidewalks in the Kingdom: New Urbanism and the Christian Faith. That interview is re-presented today, along with a preview of other conversations to be heard soon on Volume 150.
26 minutes
PREVIEW
The player for the full version of this Feature is only available to current members. If you have an active membership, log in here. If you’d like to become a member — with access to all our audio programs — sign up here.
Related reading and listening
- Paradoxes of “nature” and “culture” — Robert Spaemann, on the destructive consequences of a merely naturalistic understanding of nature
- Modernity’s crisis of place — Craig Bartholomew reflects on the importance of place to our humanity. (58 minutes)
- A humanist urban vision for Chicago — Philip Bess imagines what metropolitan Chicago might look like in one hundred years if it were designed according to classical humanist principles and with an overt acknowledgement of sacred order. (93 minutes)
- The primacy of the Body of Christ —
FROM VOL. 134 Philip Turner reflects on how Christian ethics is misplaced if it has as its central concern individual moral behavior or social justice. (28 minutes) - Cosmic realities in the built world — Christopher and Christine Perrin discuss the implications of architect Christopher Alexander’s (1936–2022) discovery of patterns of building that cohere with the the created cosmos and with ourselves as human creatures. (59 minutes)
- Money, status, and satisfaction —
FROM VOL. 44 David Myers and Robert Frank discuss the tenuous relationship between wealth and happiness. (22 minutes) - Landscape and living memory —
FROM VOL. 44 Gayle Brandow Samuels examines the ways in which trees have served as anchor-points for memory and identity in American culture. (9 minutes) - City of God, City of Man — Architect Philip Bess discusses how our modern-day confusion and moral illiteracy are worked out visibly in the cities and buildings our architects create. (57 minutes)
- Man as “both mystic and hobbit” — D. C. Schindler explores how building is a quintessential human activity and an expression of our view of the meaning of reality. (47 minutes)
- The reciprocity of all things —
FROM VOL. 148 Jeffrey Bilbro explores the importance of sustainability through the essays, poetry and fiction of Wendell Berry. (13 minutes) - What are students for? —
FROM VOL. 140 Drawing from Wendell Berry’s works, Jack Baker and Jeffrey Bilbro discuss a vision of higher education that respects a multidimensional notion of place. (23 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)
- How the Church promotes the cause of freedom — Oliver O’Donovan: “We discover we are free when we are commanded by that authority which commands us according to the law of our being, disclosing the secrets of the heart.”
- What is beyond our choosing? — D. C. Schindler on our nihilistic quest for freedom
- The danger of not defining “freedom” — Richard Bauckham insists that an adequate understanding of freedom requires recognition of God as the ground of true human freedom
- Power to the people — Nathan O. Hatch on the DIY spirit of early American Christianity
- Free for obedience — Glenn W. Olsen on Augustine’s understanding of freedom
- What Ockham severed — Jean-Charles Nault on the advent of sheer freedom
- The collapse of public life —
FROM VOL. 154 D. C. Schindler explains how liberalism sought to make way for individuals to function together without any orientation to an explicit common good. (37 minutes) - The profound drama of human sexuality — In this lecture, D. C. Schindler explains the cosmological significance of human sexuality and why it is paradigmatic of the relationship between nature and freedom. (32 minutes)
- A poet’s relationship to time —
FROM VOL. 57 Poet Wilmer Mills (1969–2011) discusses how his agricultural and cross-cultural childhood in Brazil shaped his imagination and his relationship with modernity. (11 minutes) - Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 164 — FEATURED GUESTS: Dana Gioia, Brady Stiller, Robert Royal, Richard DeClue, Tiffany Schubert, and Joonas Sildre
- Gratitude and stewardship as political postures —
FROM VOL. 118 Mark Mitchell explores the consequences of four concepts that are sadly missing from most political debates today: creatureliness, gratitude, human scale, and place. (18 minutes) - An embedded life — Following a move from one state to another, Gilbert Meilaender explores the tension between being simultaneously a sojourner and a body located in place and time. (30 minutes)
- Countering American apathy toward history —
FROM VOL. 124 Historian John Fea discusses how American and Protestant individualism continues to influence our orientation toward the past. (22 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) - The fraught marriage of liberty and equality — In this essay, Patrick Deneen examines Alexis de Tocqueville’s complex and insightful portrait of “democratic man” living in the context of perpetual societal tension between the excesses of liberty and equality. (39 minutes)
- Alexis de Tocqueville’s penetrating review of America —
FROM VOL. 91 Hugh Brogan and Daniel Ritchie discuss Alexis de Tocqueville’s insights into American society, government, and character. (26 minutes) - Why liberalism tends toward absolutism — In this lecture, Michael Hanby examines what causes liberalism to become dictatorial in thought and practice. (49 minutes)
- When is a market “free”? — William T. Cavanaugh argues for a richer conception of freedom than the reductionist one promoted by economist Milton Friedman. (44 minutes)
- The gift of objective reality — Moral philosopher Oliver O’Donovan makes an argument for the consistency of the idea of law when it is conceived in a theological context. (40 minutes)
- Freedom as conformity to reality — W. Bradford Littlejohn summarizes the definitions of liberty offered by Richard Bauckham and Oliver O’Donovan
- The Life was the Light of men — In a lecture from 2018, Ken Myers contrasts the Enlightenment’s understanding of reason with the Christocentric conception of reason. (57 minutes)
- The dance of law and freedom — Calvin Stapert on the experience of joyous order in Bach’s music
- Rejecting “two-tiered” Thomism —
FROM VOL. 155 David Bentley Hart on how “two-tier Thomism” deviates from historic Christian understanding of the relationship between God and Creation. (42 minutes) - Jacobsen, Eric O. — FROM THE GUEST PAGE: Rev. Eric O Jacobsen is the pastor of the First Presbyterian Church (ECO) in Tacoma, WA. He is the author of numerous books and articles on the relationship between the built environment and the Christian faith.
- 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
- Where mortals dwell —
FROM VOL. 113 Theologian Craig Bartholomew provides a biblically rich critique of the contemporary “crisis of place,” a disorienting condition caused by neglect of the meaning of our embodiment. (21 minutes) - Light from Neither the East nor the West — John Betz distinguishes a Christian understanding of freedom from the conventional modern definitions. (41 minutes; Part 3 of 3)
- Place and imagination — Matthew Stewart on Wallace Stegner’s moral laboratories
- Freedom on Holiday: The Genealogy of a Cultural Revolution — John Betz argues that freedom for the sake of conforming to the Good has been replaced by freedom as the space to choose whatever we want. (52 minutes; Part 2 of 3)
- Is irrational freedom truly freedom? — Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger argues that freedom must be understood in the context of interplay of reason and the will
- Freedom, real and counterfeit — D. C. Schindler contrasts the classical and Christian understanding of freedom with the modern understanding of freedom, and explains how true freedom is a condition of harmony with reality. (59 minutes)
- We Hold These Freedoms: Modern, Postmodern, Christian — John Betz explores the theological grounding of real freedom and argues that human freedom cannot be understood apart from divine freedom. (36 minutes; Part 1 of 3)
- God is not Zeus; you are not Prometheus — Ron Highfield addresses those who doubt Christianity’s goodness, especially as regards modern assumptions about identity, freedom, and dignity. (24 minutes)
- Remembering the networks of giving and receiving — O. Carter Snead on the disabling assumptions of expressive individualism in public bioethics
- Unreason destroys freedom — Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger on the relationship between freedom and truth
- Conventional “charismatic” speech, in service of the Zeitgeist — Richard Stivers on how the rhetoric of democracy invites tyranny
- Equality and the (modern) dilemma of authority — Sociologist Richard Stivers explains the confused understanding in modern culture about equality, individualism, and authority. (16 minutes)
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 150 — FEATURED GUESTS: David I. Smith, Eric O. Jacobsen, Matthew Crawford, Andrew Davison, Joseph E. Davis, and Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung