Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 160

Related reading and listening

• 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)
• A sampling of newly published lectures — Ken Myers introduces listeners to four recently released lectures, courtesy of our Partners. The lecturers are Jennifer Frey, Gary Saul Morson, N. T. Wright, and Andrew Kern. (27 minutes)
• Grace and Christian realism — Jennifer Frey explores Thomist elements in Flannery O’Connor’s theology and writing, with a particular emphasis on a Thomist understanding of art. (39 minutes)
• Divine love and human sexuality — Paul Tyson argues that views about sexuality are downstream from theological — or at least metaphysical — assumptions about human nature. (16 minutes)
• Cultural superiority and Medieval romance literature — FROM VOL. 164 Tiffany Schubert argues that Jane Austen’s novels subtly incorporate some medieval literary conventions in ways that enable modern readers to experience a sense of wonder, romance, and the benevolence of Providence. (30 minutes)
• To be at home in the world — D. C. Schindler examines how rituals enable us to experience time in a meaningful way — how they actually make time habitable for us. (41 minutes)
• 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)
• Mordor versus the Shire — In this lecture, Heidi White explains how the modern project is a diabolical inversion of Christendom and calls for Christians to build lives and a culture that can counter it. (53 minutes)
• Alert to the magic in the world — Junius Johnson discusses the importance of teaching stories, particularly fairy stories, in classical education. (25 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)
• Students as arbiters of knowledge — FROM VOL. 94 Tim Clydesdale discusses the experience of freshmen year at college, suggesting that by that time students have been effectively inoculated against a love of knowledge. (21 minutes)
• Helping boys become virtuous men — Teacher and chaplain Mark Perkins describes forms of formation that take the body seriously 50 minutes
• Showing as meaning — Daniel McInerny on how the arts convey meaning
• What is beyond our choosing? — D. C. Schindler on our nihilistic quest for freedom
• 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)
• The hatred of logos — D. C. Schindler draws on Plato to argue that in its very form, social media evidences a general contempt for logos — reason and language — which defines man. (26 minutes)
• 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)
• Truth, goodness, and beauty (and why they matter) — FROM VOL. 147 Philosopher D. C. Schindler examines how postmodernism poses a unique threat to our sense of an interior self. (28 minutes)
• The interiority of reality — FROM VOL. 132 D. C. Schindler discusses the thought of contemporary German philosopher Robert Spaemann, and his defense of a purposeful structure in nature. (28 minutes))
• The dramatic ecstasy of reason — FROM VOL. 120 D. C. Schindler argues that the Enlightenment was not wrong for giving too much to reason; it was wrong in endorsing an impoverished conception of reason. (19 minutes)
• Speaking the word in love — In this lecture, D. C. Schindler examines core insights from Ferdinand Ulrich on the central vocation of man and the meaning of being. (32 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)
• Personhood and the gift of the self — In this lecture, D. C. Schindler examines the concept of self-gift which was central to Karol Wojtyła’s thought. (39 minutes)
• Governments officially committed to ignorance — In this lecture, D. C. Schindler explains why authority, properly understood, is essential to genuinely human life. (39 minutes)
• Learning from experience — Flannery O’Connor on belief and experience
• Hillbilly Augustinian — Ralph Wood on Flannery O’Connor’s refusal to adapt her fiction to the national temper
• The grotesque and the transcendent — Christina Bieber Lake on why Flannery O’Connor’s readers have to work
• 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)
• Insights into O’Connor’s development as a writer — FROM VOL. 160 Jessica Hooten Wilson discusses her experience studying and organizing Flannery O’Connor’s unfinished third novel, Why Do the Heathen Rage? (27 minutes)
• Metaphysics and sub-creation — FROM VOL. 144 Jonathan McIntosh claims that scholarship has tended to ignore the depth of St. Thomas Aquinas’s influence on J. R. R. Tolkien’s work. (28 minutes)
• 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)
• 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)
• 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)
• 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)
• Education vs. conditioning — Education necessarily involves metaphysical and theological preconditions, and Michael Hanby argues that our current education crisis is a result of society rejecting these preconditions. (41 minutes)
• Knowing by heart — D. C. Schindler reflects on Plato’s idea of “conversion” in education, assuming the symbol of the heart as the center of man. (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)
• Education as a pilgrimage and a mystery — In this lecture, James Matthew Wilson gives a compelling argument for understanding the role of a literary or poetic education as an immersion of the whole being in truth and beauty. (43 minutes)
• Submission to mathematical truth — In this lecture, Carlo Lancellotti argues that integration of the moral, cognitive, and aesthetic aspects of mathematics is needed in a robust liberal arts mathematics curriculum. (25 minutes)
• How fantasy restores the world — In this 2019 lecture, Alison Milbank shows how fantasy can help restore to us a vision of human flourishing that counters the atomization and meaninglessness of modern life. (43 minutes)
• The gift of meaningful work — In this lecture, D. C. Schindler argues that genuine work is inherently meaningful and facilitates an encounter with reality and therefore, ultimately, with God. (36 minutes)
• The political wisdom of Edmund Burke — FROM VOL. 28 Daniel Ritchie discusses the enduring political wisdom of British statesman and political thinker Edmund Burke (1729–1797). (13 minutes)
• Sacramental preaching — FROM VOL. 135 Hans Boersma discusses the need to recover a patristic way of preaching and reading scripture. (23 minutes)
• What higher education forgot — FROM VOL. 84 Harry L. Lewis discusses higher education’s amnesia about its purposes, and how that shortchanges students. (19 minutes)
• The formation of affections — FROM VOL. 101 James K. A. Smith explains how education always involves the formation of affections and how the form of Christian education should imitate patterns of formation evident in historic Christian liturgy. (15 minutes)
• A Christian philosophy of integrated education — FROM VOL. 61 Michael L. Peterson discusses how Christianity could inform society’s understandings of education and human nature. (8 minutes)
• Education for human flourishing — Co-authors Paul Spears and Steven Loomis argue that Christians should foster education that does justice to humans in our fullness of being. (23 minutes)
• The social irrelevance of secular higher education — FROM VOL. 85 Professor C. John Sommerville describes the increasingly marginal influence of universities in our society, and why they seem to be of no substantive relevance to people outside the school. (13 minutes)