Getting outside of our heads

Related reading and listening

• 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)
• Buying and selling holidays, identities, and ourselves — We present four interviews on American consumerism, with Leigh Eric Schmidt, David Lyon, Thomas Frank, and Sam Van Eman. (46 minutes)
• The “book” of Creation — Alan Noble explains why the modern world makes it profoundly difficult to experience Creation as revelation, and he encourages unmediated encounters with Creation that lead to meditation. (52 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)
• Teen consumers and influencers — FROM VOL. 62 Alissa Quart explains how advertisers exploit the normal developmental characteristics of preteens and teens in order to sell them products. (12 minutes)
• The amplification of distraction — FROM VOL. 152 Jeffrey Bilbro advocates a Christian posture toward our contemporary digital media ecosystem that addresses its disorienting and disintegrating effects. (23 minutes)
• Pathways of the Mind: The Joy of the Essay — Alan Jacobs thinks Christians should embrace the potential in the literary form of the essay, because of the way it corresponds to the navigation and journey of a Christian life. (48 minutes)
• Knowing and doing the good — Oliver O’Donovan raises several key questions and complications involved in the task of taking concrete and practical action toward a recognized moral good. (Lecture 3 of 3; 63 minutes)
• Moral knowledge of reality — Oliver O’Donovan argues that admiration is the fundamental form of knowing the world, as we cannot know fully those elements of reality (“bare facts”) that contain no significance for us. (Lecture 2 of 3; 55 minutes)
• Attentiveness to the world, the self, and time — Oliver O’Donovan uses the metaphor of waking to discuss the concept of moral sensibility as attention to the world, the self, and time. (Lecture 1 of 3; 60 minutes)
• The moral complicity of movie audiences — Film critic David Thomson explains why Alfred Hitchcock’s film Psycho achieves a kind of unique synergy with American culture, raising unsettling questions about alienation and identity. (33 minutes)
• “The Emersonian elixir” — FROM VOL. 20 Robert Richardson and Roger Lundin discuss how Ralph Waldo Emerson’s legacy lingers in American culture. (18 minutes)
• 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)
• Defined by what we buy — FROM VOL. 48 Gary Cross argues that Americans are uniquely susceptible to the temptation to define ourselves by what we buy. (10 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)
• “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)
• “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)
• Cosmetic surgery and human perfectibility — Elizabeth Haiken examines the shift that occurred in 20th century America from a focus on developing character to a focus on developing “personality” and achieving physical perfection. (19 minutes)
• Embodied knowledge — FROM VOL. 121 James K. A. Smith advocates for a return to some pre-modern conceptualizations of the human body. (18 minutes)
• Chameleon karma: the fate of plasticity — Cultural historian Jeffrey L. Meikle on how the ubiquity of plastic affected the moral imagination of 20th-century Americans
• Self-knowledge versus “selfism” — FROM VOL.10 Psychologist Paul Vitz argues that the modern focus on self-actualization makes the self the highest good in the cosmos. (7 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)
• Automation and human agency — FROM VOL. 150 Philosopher and mechanic Matthew Crawford laments the losses of human skill that correspond with gains in mechanical automation. (21 minutes)
• Medical tools and the shaping of identity — C. Ben Mitchell and Carl Elliott examine how we form judgments about bioethical questions, and how various medical capabilities form us. (27 minutes)
• Crawford, Matthew B. — FROM THE GUEST PAGE: Matthew B. Crawford is a Senior Fellow at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture and a New York Times bestselling author.
• Praise my soul: the king of Heaven — Robert C. Roberts on Jung’s theology of self-exploration
• Our commerce, our selves — Thomas Frank argues that the anti-establishment ethos of the counterculture was not a new phenomenon in the 1960s but was already present in corporate America long before the Beatles showed up. (23 minutes)
• “. . . improvising a raft after shipwreck . . . ” — Gil Bailie on symptoms and sources of the postmodern self adrift
• The existence of the “self” — Joseph E. Davis talks about the concept of identities and why some social theorists have questioned the very existence of selves. (14 minutes)
• What is at stake for us in a self-driving future? — Matthew Crawford vividly details the “personal knowledge” acquired in interaction with physical things, their mecho-systems, and the people who care for them. (16 minutes)
• Craftsmanship and the infallible judgment of reality — Matthew B. Crawford on the psychic satisfactions of manual work
• Dialectic of reverence and rebellion — Matthew B. Crawford on the personal knowledge acquired in apprenticeship
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 150 — FEATURED GUESTS: David I. Smith, Eric O. Jacobsen, Matthew Crawford, Andrew Davison, Joseph E. Davis, and Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung
• Reading reflectively during Lent — As Lent is a time of more deliberate reflection and renewal, Marilyn McEntyre talks about the kind of attentiveness to words that can refresh and enable readers. (21 minutes)
• Perceiving the common good during a pandemic — D. C. Schindler reflects on the shape of our way of life in wake of a killer virus, seeing signs both encouraging and sinister. (35 minutes)
• Six recent books worthy of note — Ken Myers shares a summary of six recent books that we want our listeners to know about but whose authors we won’t be interviewing. (15 minutes)
• The priority of paying attention — Maggie Jackson talks about the increased relevance of her 2008 book Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age (15 minutes)
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 118 — FEATURED GUESTS: Gilbert Meilaender, Ron Highfield, Mark Mitchell, Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Helen Rhee, and Peter Brown
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 115 — FEATURED GUESTS: Arlie Russell Hochschild, Andrew Davison, Adrian Pabst, Gary Colledge, Linda Lewis, and Thomas Bergler
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
• Digital equality and the untuning of the world — Lee Siegel analyzes how web-based pursuits of unique identity is so unbounded that personal definition becomes impossible.
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
• Christine Rosen: “Virtual Friendship and the New Narcissism” — Christine Rosen examines how social networking is changing the shape of relationships for millions of Americans, and affecting our understanding and experience of friendship. (50 minutes)
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 87 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Witte, Jr., Steven Keillor, Philip Bess, Scott Cairns, and Anthony Esolen
• Matthew B. Crawford: “Shop Class as Soulcraft” — Matthew B. Crawford makes the case for the manual trades as an expression of human flourishing. (55 minutes)
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 74 — FEATURED GUESTS: Russell Moore, W. Bradford Wilcox, Joseph E. Davis, Barrett Fisher, Jeanne Murray Walker, Darryl Tippens, and Paul Walker
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 70 — FEATURED GUESTS: W. Wesley McDonald, C. Ben Mitchell, Carl Elliott, Richard Weikart, Christine Rosen, and Dana Gioia
• Free trade zone for preferences — Philip Turner examines “the subversion of Christian belief and practice by the logic of autonomous individualism”