An impoverished anthropology

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”
• Modernity’s crisis of place — Craig Bartholomew reflects on the importance of place to our humanity. (58 minutes)
• The inward eye, cosmic truth, and making well — Andrew Kern takes his listeners along an “interlinear” reading of a portion of St. Augustine’s Confessions that explores the differences between how God makes and how we create. (38 minutes)
• The cost of “killing” God — In this October 2023 lecture, Carl Trueman explores the concept of “desecration” as a frame for understanding the nature of modernity in our time. (42 minutes)
• How music blesses and teaches — FROM VOL. 64 Theologian and musician Jeremy Begbie explores what we learn about time, theology, and the structure of Creation from the experience of music. (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)
• 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)
• Harbinger of disorder — Mark Mitchell on Michael Polanyi’s recognition of the dangerous dead-end of materialistic reductionism
• 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)
• 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)
• Setting the liberal arts free — In addressing the state of liberal arts education in the U.S., Gilbert Meilaender raises some core questions and makes some surprising proposals. (28 minutes)
• Still connected to the land — Nadya Williams on the inescapably earthy character of human flourishing
• A Christian understanding of human nature — FROM VOL. 35 Robert C. Roberts and Mark R. Talbot discuss the need for Christian psychologists to draw from Christianity’s deep tradition of understanding human nature. (15 minutes)
• Postmodern culture and the gospel — FROM VOL. 6 Roger Lundin discusses the ethical and theological consequences of our postmodern culture. (9 minutes)
• The Protestant project and indifference concerning God — Stanley Hauerwas on Alasdair MacIntyre’s critique of Protestant liberals
• A life well lived — In this essay, Stanley Hauerwas explains the breadth and depth of  Alasdair MacIntyre’s thought, the goal of which was to help people to act intelligibly and live morally worthy lives. (40 minutes)
• The roots of “the indignant self-righteousness of protest” in modern politics — Alasdair MacIntyre on why unmasking nefarious motives became “one of the most characteristically modern of activities”
• How the Enlightenment blinded us — Alasdair MacIntyre on the dependence of rationality on a lived tradition
• It takes a character (and a village) — Herbert McCabe, O.P. on the Aristotelian, Thomistic, and MacIntyrean account of the moral life
• 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)
• A more robust account of political life — FROM VOL. 138 John Milbank and Adrian Pabst on why politics needs to recognize the human soul in its depth (and what happens when it doesn’t). (51 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)
• 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)
• 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)
• To see people as people — Anthony Bradley argues that a recovery of Christian personalism is needed to counter the dehumanization, polarization, and tribalism of our day. (45 minutes)
• Ethical issues in neurobiological interventions — William Hurlbut explores current neurobiological advancements and the ethics and dangers of biotechnology interventions that go beyond therapy. (62 minutes)
• Excluding cranks and dabblers — Drusilla Scott on Michael Polanyi’s insistence that the “community of science” required authority
• How discovery happens — Esther Lightcap Meek on Michael Polanyi’s account of scientific discovery
• The personal element in all knowing — Mark Mitchell connects key aspects of Michael Polanyi’s conception of knowledge with Matthew Crawford’s insistence that real knowing involves more than technique. (34 minutes)
• 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)
• Making contact with reality — FROM VOL. 139 Esther Lightcap Meek discusses the realism of philosopher and chemist Michael Polanyi. (23 minutes)
• Knowing the world through the body — FROM VOL. 76 Professor Martin X. Moleski explains why Michael Polanyi (1891-1976) left his career in science to become a philosopher. (16 minutes)
• Steward of knowledge vs. autonomous knower — FROM VOL. 66 Esther Lightcap Meek challenges the modernist view of knowledge, which prefers the figure of the autonomous knower to the figure of a steward of knowledge acquired in part from others. (15 minutes)
• St. Thomas the anthropologist — G. K. Chesterton on Aquinas’s complete Science of Man
• 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)
• 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)
• Liberalism’s self-destructive dynamic — T. S. Eliot on the social need to move toward something and not just away
• 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)
• 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)
• Voluntarily silencing ourselves — FROM VOL. 39 John L. Locke discusses the value of personal communication and how technology is displacing it. (12 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)
• Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud — FROM VOL. 7 Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
• The fatal polytheism of late liberalism — Oliver O’Donovan on the failure that leads to social collapse, marked by conflict, suspicion, and violence
• 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)
• “Gender” as ultimate separation — In this November 2018 lecture, Margaret McCarthy explains how the predictions of Pope Paul VI’s Humanae vitae regarding the consequences of separating sex from procreation have proven true. (38 minutes)
• How words are central to the human experience — FROM VOL. 95 Craig Gay reflects on the essential linguistic nature of humanity: how our growth (or decline) in life is tied to words. (18 minutes)
• Bearing well the burdens of the past, present, and future — Louis Markos shows how great literature like the Iliad links us to the human story and strengthens us to live fully and well. (65 minutes)