Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 91

Related reading and listening

• Paradoxes of “nature” and “culture” — Robert Spaemann, on the destructive consequences of a merely naturalistic understanding of nature
• Christian culture and the myth of the secular — Ken Myers draws on T. S. Eliot to argue that Western civilization has broken down, not into a multiplicity of cultures, but into a “post-culture.” (47 minutes)
• How to make war on nothingness? — David Bentley Hart argues that if it rejects Christ, the only remaining option for a post-Christian culture is conscious or “narcotic” nihilism, which takes the form of absolute, meaningless volition. (66 minutes)
• Machines and misanthropy — Nicholas Carr on how technology has transformed our understanding of progress (and people)
• 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)
• 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)
• Moral reasoning and human flourishing — Tim McIntosh describes moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s intellectual conversion to a synthesis of Aristotelian ethics and Christianity, best embodied in Thomism. (44 minutes)
• Politics and idolatry — FROM VOL. 109 Theologian William Cavanaugh explains how the modern state is a unique kind of political entity, inviting a new kind of idolatry. (26 minutes)
• The modern invention of “religion” — FROM VOL. 101 Theologian William Cavanaugh examines the emptiness of the myth of religious violence. (22 minutes)
• Mystery novels with theological concerns — In these interviews from 1993, mystery author P. D. James speaks about the philosophical and theological issues woven into her novels, and Alan Jacobs discusses James’s novel The Children of Men. (23 minutes)
• Money, status, and satisfaction — FROM VOL. 44 David Myers and Robert Frank discuss the tenuous relationship between wealth and happiness. (22 minutes)
• Secularization and anarchy — Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger on the necessary connection between law, ethics, and worship
• 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)
• Nervousness about the shape of religion in America — Thomas Albert Howard discusses European perspectives of eighteenth-century American religious life. (21 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
• It takes a character (and a village) — Herbert McCabe, O.P. on the Aristotelian, Thomistic, and MacIntyrean account of the moral life
• Politics and the good — FROM VOL. 160 D. C. Schindler argues that political order cannot be disentangled from the social, and that fundamental questions of what humans are and what the good is cannot be bracketed from politics. (30 minutes)
• 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)
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 164 — FEATURED GUESTS: Dana Gioia, Brady Stiller, Robert Royal, Richard DeClue, Tiffany Schubert, and Joonas Sildre
• A brief for “prophetic Thomism” — David Decosimo on assuming a charitable posture toward pagan virtue
• Cultures of chance, cultures of control — Historian Jackson Lears explains how gambling springs from a longing for an experience of “unbidden beneficence,” a repudiation of the idea of control that marks modernity. (49 minutes)
• Lex Rex, or Vox Populi Lex, or Rex Lex? — Law professor Li-ann Thio on the theological roots of belief in the rule of law
• Liberalism’s self-destructive dynamic — T. S. Eliot on the social need to move toward something and not just away
• A richer, deeper view of human dignity — FROM VOL. 98 Moral philosopher Gilbert Meilaender examines the question of human dignity and its place within political discourse. (25 minutes)
• Metaphysical impulses beneath techno-utopianism — FROM VOL. 38 Erik Davis describes his research on how humans’ fascination with technology is permeated with “mythic energy” and gnostic aspirations. (11 minutes)
• What hath “manifest destiny” wrought? — Daniel Walker Howe on the eschatological imagination that encouraged American expansion
• Post-Christian America and the “unlimited technological future” — George Parkin Grant on technology and the Puritan legacy of “unflinching wills”
• Recognizing the Puritan flavor of “America” — George McKenna on the originally theocentric vision for the American vocation
• Progress and God’s providence in American history — Historians Daniel Walker Howe and George McKenna explain religious understandings of God’s purpose for America in the 19th century and colonial era, respectively. (34 minutes)
• 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)
• 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)
• Alchemy, astrology, energy, and gnosticism — FROM VOL. 85 Catherine Albanese describes the varieties of “metaphysical religion” popular in early American history and draws connections with the more recent New Age movement. (14 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)
• Laity as the “muscle” behind world-building — Andrew Willard Jones calls for the renewal of a robust understanding of the role of the laity in actively shaping the world. (39 minutes)
• Privacy and a right to kill — FROM VOL. 60 Russell Hittinger explains the legal history behind the “right to privacy” and how it was used in landmark cases involving abortion and physician-assisted suicide. (33 minutes)
• Nature’s intelligibility — In this lecture, Christopher Blum argues that scientists need to regain a full appreciation of nature’s intelligibility, as they are apt to lose sight of reality due to the reductionism produced by their theories. (31 minutes)
• The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art — FROM VOL. 88 Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
• The Bully Pulpit: Presidential Rhetoric and True Leadership — Elvin Lim talks about the decline of the content of presidential rhetoric and its consequences to democracy. (49 minutes)
• Is American culture now story-less? — From our archives, Michael Kammen compares popular and mass culture, and Philip Fisher analyzes the idea that new cultural forms inevitably dissolve old ones. (26 minutes)
• Touch’d with a coal from heav’n — Daniel Ritchie finds in the poetry of William Cowper (1731–1800) an anticipation of Michael Polanyi’s epistemology
• How we know the world — Daniel Ritchie argues that poet and hymnodist William Cowper was ahead of his time in critiquing the Enlightenment’s reductionist view of knowledge. (16 minutes)