Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 75

Related reading and listening

• Knowing and living our metaphysical totality — Clyde Kilby on the power of myth to bring together “the slender hints of the knowable”
• Savoring the taste of Reality — C. S. Lewis on the transporting, illuminating capacity of Myth
• When myth becomes fact — In this 1976 interview, Clyde Kilby (1902–1986) discusses C. S. Lewis’s critique of scientism and rationalism, his belief in the primacy of the imagination, and his mythic vision. (37 minutes)
• The destructive perils of speech without a real partner — Josef Pieper and Marc Barnes on how chatbots pervert the nature of conversation
• Machines and misanthropy — Nicholas Carr on how technology has transformed our understanding of progress (and people)
• Alienation and autoamputation: the price of power — Nicholas Carr on the numbing effect of technology
• Disengagement from the world — Nicholas Carr encourages us to consider how automation technologies impact our ability to engage with the world and whether — like a good tool — they present a more inviting world or close us off from that world. (30 minutes)
• The Bride of Christ — John Cavadini explores the different views of Origen and Augustine as to the nature and mission of the Church, and he calls for a recovery of the identity of the Church as the Bride of Christ. (38 minutes)
• 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)
• Early ambivalence toward anti-Nazi resistance — FROM VOL.107 Biographer Ferdinand Schlingensiepen talks about the memory of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in the post-war period of Germany, and how his popularity changed over the years. (15 minutes)
• A “cosmological omnibus” — George Grant recounts the fascinating history of Hernando Colón’s attempt in the 16th century to curate a universal library of the world’s knowledge. (41 minutes)
• Silence at the end of history — Alan Jacobs examines several literary imaginings of “the last days” and argues that such narration is profoundly inadequate and perhaps even presumptuous. (51 minutes)
• Theology and the imagination — Jeffrey Barbeau explains what made C. S. Lewis an effective “translator” of theology for non-theologians. (21 minutes)
• Peterson, Eugene — FROM THE GUEST PAGE: Eugene Peterson (1932–2018) was a Presbyterian pastor and the author of more than 30 books.
• Life more abundantly — Jeanne Schindler advocates for a return to an understanding and prioritizing of sensory experience — real engagement with the real world — as foundational to learning and living. (35 minutes)
• Technophiliac obsessions — FROM VOL. 141 Literary and media scholar Grant Wythoff talks about the “father of science fiction,” Hugo Gernsback. (26 minutes)
• Sacred and Profane Love: Graham Greene and the Catholic Imagination — Katy Carl discusses novelist Graham Greene’s fiction and spiritual struggles in light of the concept of the Catholic imagination. (49 minutes)
• “Emerging adulthood” — FROM VOL. 100 Christian Smith discusses the aimless cultural world of emerging adulthood and on how it makes the idea of objective moral order implausible. (17 minutes)
• The de(con)struction of the humanities (and of truth) — Historian Gertrude Himmelfarb on the skeptical tendencies of the postmodern academy
• Utopian dreams and cynicism — John Durham Peters discusses the history of the idea of communication, saying that our hopes are too high when we believe that the solution to social discord is just better communication. (49 minutes)
• The “scandal” of theology in the university — Edward T. Oakes, S.J. explains why John Henry Newman’s eloquent defense of the nature of university education, The Idea of a University, continues to inspire, challenge, and even frustrate its sympathizers. (24 minutes)
• What adolescence misses — FROM VOL. 94 Mark Bauerlein talks about the ways of learning and living practiced by contemporary youth, how they impact the acquisition and use of knowledge and form intellectual habits, and what this means for the future of our society. (16 minutes)
• Helping boys become virtuous men — Teacher and chaplain Mark Perkins describes forms of formation that take the body seriously 50 minutes
• The temptations of talismanic technologies — Jeffrey Bilbro on the persistence of techno-utopianism
• Living in a tool-i-fied world — Joseph Minich on how the ubiquity of technology makes atheism entirely plausible
• Christ-animated learning — FROM VOL. 142 Perry L. Glanzer and Nathan F. Alleman discuss the fragmentation of modern higher education and why we need theology to unify universities. 26 minutes)
• In the Image of Our Devices — Nicholas Carr considers how automation technologies impact our ability to engage with the world. (66 minutes)
• “A man after reality” — FROM VOL. 30 Clyde Kilby discusses C. S. Lewis‘s critique of scientism and rationalism, and his belief in the primacy of the imagination. (15 minutes)
• We were created for this — Joshua Jipp explores St. Paul’s theology to propose that doctrine ought to be intimately concerned with the way one lives one’s life. (31 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)
• The recovery of an integrated ecology — In this essay, Michael Hanby unpacks the summons of Laudato si’ to an ecological way of life based on a proper understanding of creation in its fullness and integrity. (57 minutes)
• The Transformed Vision of Samuel Taylor Coleridge — Poet Malcolm Guite explores the dramatic and even prophetic parallels between the life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and that of the titular character in his famous poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” (59 minutes)
• The life of the city in poetry — FROM VOL. 1 Ken Myers talks with W. H. Auden’s biographer and literary executor, Edward Mendelson, about political and social themes in Auden’s poetry. (7 minutes)
• 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)
• The downward spiral of all technocracies — Andrew Willard Jones explains the two paths that exist with the development of new technologies: one which leads to an expansion of the humane world and one which exploits and truncates both Creation and humanity. (65 minutes)
• The idiom for the revelation of mystery — Dana Gioia on the foundational place of poetry in Christian faith
• Breaking the frozen sea — Dana Gioia on how poetry enchants
• Flannery at 100 — In honor of Flannery O’Connor’s 100th birthday, we have gathered here an aural feast of interviews with O’Connor scholars and aficionados discussing her life, work, and faith. (3 hours, 28 minutes)
• Ideas made incarnate — In this lecture, Karen Swallow Prior examines the power of great literature to shape lives, nourish imaginations, and develop a vision of the good life. (43 minutes)
• How social media truncates relationships — In this lecture, Felicia Wu Song explains how social media industrializes and monetizes our relationships, forming us in modes of relationships and identity that are detrimental to ourselves and to society. (41 minutes)
• In technology, we live and move and have our knowing — George Parkin Grant on technology’s establishment of a framework for thinking about technology
• On the Degeneration of Attentiveness — Critic Nicholas Carr talks about how technology-driven trends affect our cultural and personal lives. (56 minutes)
• Gratitude, vitalism, and the timid rationalist — In this lecture, Matthew Crawford draws a distinction between an orientation toward receiving life as gift and a timid and cramped rationalism that views man as an object to be synthetically remade. (52 minutes)
• Humans as biological hardware — In this essay, Brad Littlejohn and Clare Morell decry how modern technology tends to hack the human person in pursuit of profit. (55 minutes)
• “The system will be first” — FROM VOL. 27 Robert Kanigel describes the transformation of work due to Frederick Winslow Taylor’s concept of scientific management. (11 minutes)
• Choices about the uses of technology — This Feature presents interviews with David Nye and Brian Brock related to how we evaluate adoption of new technology and how technology influences our thinking. (31 minutes)
• What it means to be a person — FROM VOL. 147 Sociologist Craig Gay argues that in order to address the challenges of a technological approach to the world, we need to recover the Christian tradition’s robust theology of personhood. (24 minutes)
• The problem with dynamism without direction — Paulina Borsook on the biological paradigm of technolibertarianism’s love of spontaneous dynamism, whatever the costs
• The libertarian spawning-ground of tech bros — Paulina Borsook on high tech’s long-standing animosity toward government and regulation
• Tech bros and public power — Paulina Borsook discusses the “bizarrely narcissistic” and ultra-libertarian culture of Silicon Valley. (22 minutes)