Joy & sorrow, destitution & abundance

Related reading and listening

• 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)
• “If there is no God, all is permitted” — Gary Saul Morson explores the consequences of belief and disbelief in God through Russian literature. (51 minutes)
• The implausibility of belief — FROM VOL. 123 James K. A. Smith discusses the evangelical and ecclesial ramifications for Christians living within Charles Taylor’s third wave of secularism. (25 minutes)
• The pathos of sin — FROM VOL. 15 Poet Robert Pinsky discusses his translation of Dante’s Inferno. (9 minutes)
• Existential preparation for reading literature — FROM VOL. 128 Rod Dreher recounts how he thought he was reading Dante’s Commedia, when in reality the poem was reading him. (18 minutes)
• An icon of the whole world — Jason Baxter explains how Dante includes a panoply of characters and creatures in his Comedia, offering a prismatic view of all of Creation in its glory. (20 minutes)
• Beyond a reasonable doubt — From a 1980 interview with Ken Myers, Mortimer J. Adler discusses his argument that belief in the existence of God is rational. (14 minutes)
• An invitation to a feast — Christina Bieber Lake explains how poetry is an invitation to experience the beauty and goodness of Creation as gift. (44 minutes)
• A false dichotomy — In this conversation from 2009, Dallas Willard (1934–2013) discusses the truth of spiritual knowledge and its epistemological validity. (63 minutes)
• Christian belief as real knowledge — Dallas Willard on the modern divorce between faith and knowledge
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 165 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jeffrey Bilbro, Daniel McInerny, Joseph Minich, Carl Elliott, Nadya Williams, and Don W. King
• The law of faith and of love — Oliver O’Donovan compares St. Augustine’s interpretation of Psalm 119 with that of others, revealing Augustine’s more nuanced understanding of the complexities of the life of faith that the psalmist explores. (64 minutes)
• Poetry and Liturgy — Karen Dieleman explores the influence of liturgical practices on shaping the imaginations and poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, and Adelaide Proctor. (49 minutes)
• Sacramental Poetics — Poet and Eastern Orthodox believer Scott Cairns explains how a good poem functions like an icon: it assists the process of our becoming aware of what is real, and it is generative in the ways it keeps opening up new understandings. (56 minutes)
• Poetry and piety — FROM VOL. 48 James Trott discusses insights he learned while editing A Sacrifice of Praise: An Anthology of Christian Poetry in English from Caedman to the Mid-Twentieth Century. (7 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)
• 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 essence of a moment, clearly perceived” — Haiku poet Gary Hotham reads his poetry and discusses how the form of haiku reveals the connection between creatures and creation. (45 minutes)
• The joy and mystery of poetry — FROM VOL. 98 Jeanne Murray Walker discusses how she helps students approach and appreciate poetry as the mysteriously meaningful literature it is, rather than as a linguistic cage containing static meaning to be abstracted from the words of the poem. (23 minutes)
• The primacy of imagination — FROM VOL. 51 Literary critic Roger Lundin situates William Blake as a descendant of the radical Protestant movement of the 17th century and as a forerunner of the late 19th and early 20th century movements that put theology and the human spirit in opposition to the natural, fragmented, fallen world. (11 minutes)
• Dickinson and modern malaise — FROM VOL. 36 Roger Lundin explains how Emily Dickinson’s understanding of love, nature, religion, and mortality are modern in content. (11 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
• John Donne’s Passion in Life, Faith, & Verse — Poet Dana Gioia discusses the remarkable life of poet John Donne and how his spiritual and intellectual struggles created the conditions for his unique poetic voice. (53 minutes)
• Longfellow’s appeal — FROM VOL. 53 Poet and critic Dana Gioia explains why Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) is one of the three great American poets. (30 minutes)
• Sacramental correspondence — FROM VOL. 51 Poet Dana Gioia discusses the state of contemporary poetry and the sacramental relationship between language and reality. (15 minutes)
• “A sign of contradiction” — In this lecture, Daniel Gibbons compares and contrasts understandings of sacramental poetics proposed by Augustine, Aquinas, and Sydney. (36 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)
• Victorian ideas about belief and doubt — FROM VOL. 148 Timothy Larsen situates George MacDonald within a Victorian understanding of faith and doubt. (17 minutes)
• “Prophet of holiness” — Timothy Larsen discusses a new edition of George MacDonald‘s Diary of An Old Soul, a slim book of poem-prayers to be read daily as a devotional aid. (30 minutes)
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 163 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Youngblood, R. J. Snell, Nicholas Denysenko, Nigel Biggar, Robert McNamara, and David Cayley
• Worldliness vs. otherworldliness — FROM VOL. 38 Sociologist Craig Gay speaks of the charge that Christianity is an otherworldly religion. (12 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)
• William Cowper: Reconciling the Heart with the Head — Daniel E. Ritchie discusses the life and work of poet William Cowper (1731–1800), comparing his commitment to understanding reality through personal knowledge, intuition, and rigorous contemplation with the thought of Michael Polanyi. (43 minutes)
• Bearing witness through poetry — Roger Lundin discusses the incarnational witness of poet Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004), exploring his service to truth and to his native tongue, Polish. (16 minutes)
• Czesław Miłosz: A Poet of Luminous Things — Roger Lundin discusses the themes, breadth, and depth of poet Czesław Miłosz‘s work, explaining how Milosz incarnated in his life and work a sense of exile and alienation so common to modern man. (43 minutes)
• Soundings of the human soul — Professor John H. Timmerman discusses the poetry of the late Jane Kenyon (1947-1995) and his visit to her home, Eagle Pond Farm. (16 minutes)
• Jane Kenyon: Living and Dying at Eagle Pond Farm — Biographer John H. Timmerman discusses the life and work of poet Jane Kenyon (1947–1995). (53 minutes)
• The formative power of hymns and hymnbooks — FROM VOL. 149 Christopher Phillips discusses the cultural and spiritual effects of hymns and the “thingness” of hymnals. (18 minutes)
• Faith and unbelief — FROM VOL. 98 This Archive Feature revisits two conversations, one with Roger Lundin and one with David Bentley Hart, on what makes Christian belief so implausible to non-believers. (39 minutes)
• The rediscovery of meaning — Poet and theologian Malcolm Guite explains Owen Barfield’s idea of the development of consciousness over time, an evolution made evident through language that reveals an earlier, pre-modern way of seeing the world. (63 minutes)
• The rich significance of everyday life — In this interview from 2000, Roger Lundin — a frequent guest on our Journal — explains how the poetry of Richer Wilbur connects with the verse of other New England poets. (24 minutes)
• The desires of the heart, the constraints of creation — Roger Lundin describes how Richard Wilbur’s poetry connects aesthetic experience to life in the world.
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 159 — FEATURED GUESTS: Kirk Farney, Andrew Willard Jones, James L. Nolan, Jr., Andrew Kaethler, Peter Ramey, and Kathryn Wehr
• Is religious belief really true? — Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger asks if Christian faith is just lovely subjective consolation, a kind of make-believe world side by side with the real world
• All manner of thing shall be well — T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets is regarded by many as his greatest accomplishment. Today’s Feature presents a lecture about this monumental work, a talk given in 2019 by Dr. Janice Brown. (58 minutes)
• Insights into reality itself — Malcolm Guite on the philosophical concerns underlying Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
• The story of the demotion of stories — Malcolm Guite on the Enlightenment’s rash dismissal of poetic knowledge