Journals (CD)
Our flagship product, the MARS HILL AUDIO Journal, is an “audio magazine” featuring over two hours of conversation with perceptive and engaging thinkers on each quarterly digital volume. Guests on the Journal examine the ideas, institutions, preoccupations, and fashionable assumptions that shape our cultural lives. They include scholars from a wide range of disciplines, most of whom are authors of recent books investigating some aspect of our cultural experience and the interaction of ideas, practices, and institutions that have created the conditions in which we now live.
Select back issues of the Journal are available on CD.
Guests on Volume 148
• STEVEN D. SMITH on how a modern “religion without God” characterizes what alleges to be secular neutrality
• WILLEM VANDERBURG on the costs of forgetting the unity and interdependence of Creation
• JEFFREY BILBRO on lessons from Wendell Berry’s poetry, fiction, and essays about the virtues that characterize people who foster sustainable cultures
• EMMA MASON on the theological concerns evident in the poetry of Christina Rossetti
• ALISON MILBANK on how the Gothic literary genre in England expressed ambivalence about the effects of the Reformation
• TIMOTHY LARSEN on George MacDonald and Victorian earnestness about faith and anxieties about doubt
A digital edition of this Volume is also available
Click here to download a pdf file with the contents listing and bibliographic information about this Volume.
Steven D. Smith
“Paganism is a label you can use to refer to a kind of immanent religiosity or a view that there is something that’s sacred and holy, but it’s not transcendent — it’s not part of a different sphere of being or another world. It is immanent in this world. And I suggest that that in a sense is the natural condition of humanity. Unless there’s something that comes along to lift us out of that, that is sort of our natural assumption.”
— Steven D. Smith, author of Pagans and Christians in the City: Culture Wars from the Tiber to the Potomac (Eerdmans, 2018)
Law professor Steven D. Smith discusses the relationship between the sacred and the civic in his newest book Pagans and Christians in the City: Culture Wars from the Tiber to the Potomac. Setting out to track the profound changes apparent in the modern world, Smith compares the paganism of the Roman Empire to the rise of a contemporary paganism which takes the form of a “religion without God.” For Smith, this differs radically from a transcendent religion which acknowledges an ultimate good beyond this universe. Right now, we are not witnessing so much a destruction of “the sacred” as such, but instead the rise of new orthodoxies, often centered on individual or national identity. Without the recognition that humans are inescapably religious creatures, the struggle to confront or solve our current public disputes will continue. ⇧
• • •
Willem Vanderburg
“About 100 years ago . . . we began to rearrange all human knowing and doing by means of disciplines. From the perspective of human history, that’s an extraordinarily strange way of arranging our knowing and doing. What we do with the discipline-based organization is, we say to the physicist, ‘Here, you study physical phenomena,’ . . . and to the sociologist, ‘Here, you study social phenomena,’ . . . In other words, we study human life and the world one category of phenomena at a time. And that has enormous limitation.”
— Willem Vanderburg, author of Secular Nations Under New Gods: Christianity's Subversion by Technology and Politics (University of Toronto Press, 2018)
Willem H. Vanderburg, a former student of philosopher Jacques Ellul, argues for a vision of the world that better accounts for the complexity of life — both its individuality and its wholeness — than our current mechanistic, anti-human approach. Unlike machines, which can be quantified and mathematically represented, human life operates with an interconnectedness that cannot be so easily measured. Vanderburg emphasizes that we have rearranged human knowledge and action into narrow disciplines which purport to study life, but do so using single categories, an ordering which can work only in those fields where the focus on one category is useful, such as physics, biology, or chemistry. By reorganizing complex human methods of operation and communication into discipline-based silos which depend on the mechanical or technical domains, we have created a world of confusion where we understand life in the same terms as non-life. Vanderburg concludes that this subversion of a traditional Christian vision by modern technology poses a grave threat to our humanity. ⇧
• • •
Jeffrey Bilbro
“So much of the cult of the artist today is about originality and making things new and coming up with the latest and greatest, but that’s really a symptom of a technological society — that we always have to have a new iteration of the gadget . . . Berry’s emphasis [is] on fidelity and sticking with things that might seem old and obsolete and worn out, and trying to be creative about how they might be renewed and made useful and new again. A renewal presupposes that something good has come earlier and that our task is not to create ‘ex nihilo’ — that’s God’s task — but to renew that which has been broken.”
— Jeffrey Bilbro, author of Virtues of Renewal: Wendell Berry's Sustainable Forms (University Press of Kentucky, 2019)
Jeffrey Bilbro explores the importance of sustainability through the essays, poetry and fiction of Wendell Berry. He argues that Berry fosters a sense of propriety or fittingness, a manner in which we act in connection with the world around us. This theme is demonstrated by the example of a farmer who works with the land and within its limits, allowing the nature of the place to help form and correct the farmer’s initial vision. In opposition to this reciprocal way of farming, Berry describes much of contemporary agriculture, where the only value is how much can be produced, with no concern for the complexity of the relation of farmer to farm, leading inevitably to violent control of the relationship. Our current society has shifted into an economy that values an industrial mindset, focusing heavily on productivity. Bilbro defines this as the industrial grammar versus the agrarian grammar. He points out that the grammar of technology cannot heal, but only amplify the misdirected vision already in place. Bilbro hopes that we can, seeing through the eyes of Berry, come to recognize this reciprocity and, using a healthy imagination, make whole again those aspects of our lives that have been damaged. ⇧
• • •
Emma Mason
“What poetry does is almost push us into a position where we have to pay really close attention to words. It’s very difficult to read a poem quickly, and I think when we try to that’s often when people just get frustrated with it and say, ‘Oh, I don’t understand this,’ or ‘It feels inaccessible.’ Obviously, Rossetti works very hard to make her poetry quite accessible by using a very strong form, by using rhythm and by using rhyme. And it’s quite enjoyable to read. But I think underneath those rhymes and really in the poem are these very deep and profound meanings and reflections that are both philosophical and theological. Poetry enables this layering of ideas and layering of our feelings about those ideas.”
— Emma Mason, author of Christina Rossetti: Poetry, Ecology, Faith (Oxford University Press, 2018)
Professor Emma Mason explains how the Anglo-Catholic theological movement was integral to the faith of Christina Rossetti and helped shape her theological and philosophical convictions. The Oxford Movement within the Church of England, Mason explains, sought to return to a form that embraced the “supernatural” element then held in suspicion by many. Mason argues that important figures in this movement such as John Keble and John Henry Newman, drawing on a contemporary reclamation of the early Church fathers, turned to Romantic writers such as William Wordsworth and William Blake to find a way to rediscover the mystical in Anglicanism. Rossetti’s poetry reflects this attitude, exploring a deep connection to God through forms of rituals and practices that break free from a more rational, dualistic vision, drawing all things together through grace. ⇧
• • •
Alison Milbank
“I really do think that the ‘explained supernatural’ plays the 18th-century game of saying, ‘Yes, we have gotten beyond the past. We now live in an enlightened world.’ But then it begins to question that enlightenment. And I think that’s the point of the way that it works in Ann Radcliffe. And it’s also a Protestant mode which is partly about idolatry. I do think that there is a very Protestant form of Gothic whereby you show the deadness of the idol in order to point to the livingness of the true God.”
— Alison Milbank, author of God and the Gothic: Religion, Romance, and Reality in the English Literary Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2018)
Theologian Alison Milbank argues that nineteenth-century English Gothic literature grew out of the intuition of an uneasy relationship between the natural and supernatural following the English Reformation. The extreme rationalism of the nineteenth century led to a cultural ambivalence; belief in the narrative of historical progress conflicted with nostalgia for a past when structures and practices dealt with matters ghostly and divine. “The Catholic past is a site of desire as well as revulsion,” Milbank explains. “The Gothic seeks both to escape and harness its signifying power.” Haunted by that history, authors such as Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, and Bram Stoker explored the limits of materialism and grappled with the loss of a religious imaginary which could mediate the supernatural. ⇧
• • •
Timothy Larsen
“Questioning is natural and inevitable. It’s how you get to a more mature Christian view. To not doubt something is to not think about it. So, MacDonald can see that this is just a maturation process. You were told about the Virgin Birth when you were 11, and now you’re 18 and you’re thinking about it again in a new way, and to think about it is to doubt it. That questioning, not in the kind of scoffing, accusatory way but just in the processing way, is part of life. It’s part of the Christian life.”
— Timothy Larsen, author of George MacDonald in the Age of Miracles: Incarnation, Doubt, and Reenchantment (IVP Academic, 2018)
Historian Timothy Larsen situates George MacDonald within a Victorian understanding of faith and doubt. Faith, defined as “what you believe in your heart,” rose to an unprecedented value in the Victorian era, corresponding with a tendency toward unhealthy introspection and preoccupation with the problem of doubt. MacDonald held that these problems hinged upon understanding faith only in cerebral terms. He rejected a narrow Enlightenment view of faith, focusing instead upon trust in the person of Christ — specifically, the self-authenticating revelation of Christ in the Gospels. Larsen discusses how, like many Romantics, MacDonald worked toward the reenchantment of the world through the imagination, writing fairy tales as a medium to explore the meaning of reality. ⇧
Guests on Volume 147
• R. JARED STAUDT on the tradition of brewing beer in monastic and Christian culture
• JASON PETERS on defining localism, dealing with discontent and imperfection, and appreciating nostalgia
• D. C. SCHINDLER on the classical and Christian understanding of the Transcendentals and why they matter now
• CRAIG GAY on why we need a theology of personhood in response to challenges posed by technology
• MARY HIRSCHFELD on comparing contemporary economics with economics as understood by Thomas Aquinas
• PATRICK SAMWAY on the publishing relationship between Flannery O’Connor and Robert Giroux
A digital edition of this Volume is also available
Click here to download a pdf file with the contents listing and bibliographic information about this Volume.
R. Jared Staudt
“What I’m trying to do in the book is to call people to rethink their lives. How does everything fit together? Is our faith really the center that integrates everything else?”
— R. Jared Staudt, author of The Beer Option: Brewing a Catholic Culture Yesterday and Today (Angelico Press, 2018)
Dominican oblate R. Jared Staudt wants to call attention to the cultural influence of the monastic tradition of brewing beer. Benedictine monasteries have themselves been recovering a lost tradition of craft brewing and Staudt’s book reminds Christians that brewing beer, among other practices, is part of what has shaped a way of life for Christians through many centuries. Beer traditionally served as part of one’s subsistence and now encourages local virtues such as building community, providing employment, and participating in local economies. Closely linked not only with festivities, but with the Benedictine theme of hospitality, sharing local beers with one’s friends and neighbors is just one way of integrating all of life into Christian faith and practice. ⇧
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Jason Peters
“We are habituated to the world long before we’re conscious of it. And then we find that we’re implicated in things that we would rather not be implicated in. And that’s a fact of existence; that’s a fact of the world as we find it. I think the honest thing is to own up to that and then to go about the modest but difficult task of shaking what has to be shaken.”
— Jason Peters, editor of Localism in the Mass Age: A Front Porch Republic Manifesto (Cascade Books, 2018)
English professor Jason Peters discusses the challenges of thinking about localism. While “localism” is a concept that has gained much ground in recent years, there is still the danger of it being a movement united around discontent over the current states of affairs, rather than around constructive or substantive principles. One way of overcoming this hurdle is by recognizing the various ways in which we are all implicated in “things as they are” whether we like it or not. A commitment to localism, says Peters, requires both honesty and modesty with regards to life as we find it. But such a recognition does not open the door to cynicism. Rather, it is a call to “get busy.” To be honest about our own embeddedness in the imperfections of life also protects a sense of home and even nostalgia for a lost home. ⇧
• • •
D. C. Schindler
“The idea in this book in a way is to try to bring back a sense of the ontological depth of love. It’s certainly not a mere chemical reaction in the brain, but nor is it a mere emotion. It’s not even simply wishing others well, a kind of good will. It includes all those kinds of things in their proper place, but it’s ultimately I think the meaning of reality.”
— D. C. Schindler, author of Love and the Postmodern Predicament: Rediscovering the Real in Beauty, Goodness, and Truth (Cascade Books, 2018)
Philosopher D. C. Schindler examines how postmodernism poses a unique threat to our sense of an interior self. Schindler argues that the postmodern predicament requires a recovery of reality, which would be more easily achieved through a recovery of the classical and Christian understanding of the Transcendentals: Truth, Goodness, Beauty. Of key importance to this task is a renewed understanding of how Love and Beauty are connected and their capacity to unite us to what is really real. ⇧
• • •
Craig Gay
“What we need is a robust theology of personhood. And what I’m trying to remind people of is that ‘hey, if we’re Christians, we have one! And we need to remember it.’ It’s there and it’s rich and it’s full and it’s been developed over many centuries by all kinds of really interesting, intelligent people. And this is something that we for a variety of reasons seem to have forgotten, but now it’s time to remember it, because it’s only as we remember this theology of personhood that we stand any chance of answering the kinds of questions that are being put to us today about technology and our use of it.”
— Craig Gay, author of Modern Technology and the Human Future: A Christian Appraisal (InterVarsity Press, 2018)
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. Advocates for technological progress often point out how adaptable humans are, but Gay wants to push back, asking why it is that humans need to adapt to technology rather than the other way around. Simply having the ability to adapt does not mean that it is in our best interests to do so or that we ought to do so. Without asking the basic questions about the kinds of people we are or what we ought to become, we will be powerless to address the pressures imposed upon us by technological opportunities. ⇧
• • •
Mary Hirschfeld
“My ‘self-concern,’ among other things, includes other people for Aquinas much more naturally than would an economist’s conception of it. But also my self-concern is about developing community, supporting my family, and developing my character, right, developing virtue. And if those are my ultimate concerns, however that looks in my particular life, [then] the material goods that are used to sustain that life are instrumental goods and because they’re instrumental goods, for Aquinas, our desire for them is finite.”
— Mary Hirschfeld, author of Aquinas and the Market: Toward a Human Economy (Harvard University Press, 2018)
Economist and theologian Mary Hirschfeld compares how modern economists think about the human person compared to Thomas Aquinas’s understanding of personhood with regards to property and material wealth. While it may be unintentional, Hirschfeld argues that modern economics makes some fundamental assumptions about personhood, material goods, and God that prevent the discipline from developing a truly human understanding of economic life. To correct this error takes some honest rethinking of the discipline (with many clarifications along the way). ⇧
• • •
Patrick Samway
“We tend to think of a writer writing somehow in a cabin in the woods and it’s so beautiful. But as a matter of fact, these writers all have a lot of problems. And I thought it would be interesting to write about Flannery and her relationship with her editor. What I’m really writing about is the interstices. You know, the in-between times. What she was doing and what he was doing and how they collaborated.”
— Patrick Samway, author of Flannery O'Connor and Robert Giroux: A Publishing Partnership (University of Notre Dame Press, 2018)
Biographer and priest Patrick Samway talks about the relationship between fiction writer Flannery O’Connor and the legendary editor Robert Giroux. Samway’s direct link with Robert Giroux through their lasting friendship brings to the conversation several intimate accounts about the relationship between these two literary figures as well as their personal stories. ⇧
Guests on Volume 134
• CHRIS ARMSTRONG on what C. S. Lewis knew (and we need to know) about the culture and faith of medieval Christianity
• GREVEL LINDOP on the unique poetic imagination of poet, novelist, and theologian Charles Williams, “the third Inkling”
• MICHAEL MARTIN on how the experience of Beauty in Creation and art can enable an encounter with divine Wisdom
• WILLIAM T. CAVANAUGH on why Christians should think about economics theologically, not just as a science or an ethical discipline
• PHILIP TURNER on why Christian ethics has the health of the Church at its center, not just personal obedience or social justice
• GISELA KREGLINGER on wine, the culture of wine, and the superabundant goodness of God made manifest in the gift of wine
A digital edition of this Volume is also available
Click here to download a pdf file with the contents listing and bibliographic information about this Volume.
Chris Armstrong
“[Readers hear C. S. Lewis] say something that deeply affects them or that strikes them as being deeply true and they assume . . . that he’s simply telling them in a clearer way what Scripture already says and ‘isn’t it good that he’s such a good rhetorician . . .’ What they don’t know is that what he’s doing is actually channeling the Tradition to them.”
— Chris Armstrong, author of Medieval Wisdom for Modern Christians: Finding Authentic Faith in a Forgotten Age with C. S. Lewis (Brazos Press, 2016)
Church history professor Chris Armstrong talks about the “cultural nestorianism” of modern evangelical Christianity. In the same way that Nestorius thought that the two natures of Christ went on and off, but never existed simultaneously, so likewise do many modern Christians separate their spiritual lives and God’s influence from their ordinary lives and the material world. Armstrong argues that one means of correcting this error is to “contemplate” and “enjoy” the theological and cultural mindset of medieval Christianity. For evangelical Christians, says Armstrong, there is no better guide for this task than C. S. Lewis. ⇧
• • •
Grevel Lindop
“For Williams there was no boundary between the natural and the supernatural. Williams had a living consciousness of the spiritual world all the time and he didn’t see this as being separate from what we would think of as the natural or the material world. And so his challenge in his writings is to try and make us also see our everyday world as being penetrated by spiritual energies.”
— Grevel Lindop, author of Charles Williams: The Third Inkling (Oxford University Press, 2016)
Poet and writer Grevel Lindop discusses the life and imagination of third Inkling member, Charles Williams. Though Williams is one of the more esoteric and theologically contestable of the Inklings, Williams’s literary output and spiritual pursuits reveal a person grappling for an adequate articulation of a reality that is — to quote Gerard Manley Hopkins — “charged with the grandeur of God.” ⇧
• • •
Michael Martin
“One of the repercussions of modernity is that nature is not something we have a relationship to. . . . [Before the modern period,] you had that kind of intuition or assumption about the sacramental nature of ‘what is’ and to reject that is a big paradigm shift. And I think it’s an impoverishing paradigm shift, because then you have to make your sacredness.”
— Michael Martin, author of The Submerged Reality: Sophiology and the Turn to a Poetic Metaphysics (Angelico Press, 2015)
Poet and professor Michael Martin explains how the pursuit of Wisdom, or Sophia, in scripture and in the Christian tradition is not merely the pursuit of prudence. In his book, The Submerged Reality (2015), Martin examines how the Wisdom of God is a figure embedded and discovered in Creation. In this sense, Wisdom is an aspect of reality that we are often blind to, but which during occasions of loving attention, we stumble upon in flashes of insight or moments of transcendence. But are we right to call these illuminations “transcendent,” suggesting that we somehow depart from or rise above the stuff of this world? What would it mean to consider them “moments of immanence”? ⇧
• • •
William T. Cavanaugh
“The irony of course is that in the whole discussion around this move [in the economics department], the language of orthodoxy and heterodoxy kept getting used, which I thought was a really interesting indicator that what was actually at stake is not just science, but what is at stake is in some ways belief. . . . And so, there is a right belief and a wrong belief and what masquerades as science might not be on the same level as physics or math.”
— William T. Cavanaugh, author of Field Hospital: The Church's Engagement with a Wounded World (Eerdmans, 2016)
In this conversation, theologian William Cavanaugh criticizes the belief that economics functions scientifically the same way that physics or math functions. Far from being a “neutral science,” — a phrase that is itself problematic — economics carries with it ethical and theological presuppositions that are not value-free, but which significantly determine our definitions of economic behavior as well as how we imagine the purposes and ends of that behavior. ⇧
• • •
Philip Turner
“I worry about once you begin to say, first of all, “How am I doing? Am I getting more and more holy?” All sorts of things begin to go wrong. But if you say, "What are my relationships like? How am I contributing? . . . Why am I in this conflict, how do I get out of this conflict?" — that changes the location of one’s struggle to become Christlike.”
— Philip Turner, author of Christian Ethics and the Church: Ecclesial Foundations for Moral Thought and Practice (Baker Academic, 2015)
Ethicist and priest Philip Turner reflects on how Christian ethics is misplaced if it has as its central concern individual moral behavior or social justice. While individual sanctification and service to society are inseparable relationships in Christian ethics, they are more appropriately understood as subordinate to the primary social relationship for the Christian, which is the Body of Christ. Using St. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians as his central text, Turner argues that the purpose of the Church is to become a community in which Christ is taking form. Paul’s governing metaphor that members of the Church are members of Christ’s body requires that our questions of obedience and moral behavior must always re-member this central identity. ⇧
• • •
Gisela Kreglinger
“Wine became a very important symbol for the Kingdom of God and God’s redemption. So when Jesus transforms water into choice wine at the Wedding of Cana, it’s not ordinary wine, it’s beautiful wine that has an abundance, a surplus of meaning, because the Kingdom and God’s life is a life of abundance. His redemption is so beautiful that we cannot comprehend it. It’s so hard to put it into words and so to capture it in the beauty and richness of a wine is a way of saying ‘Look what God’s done!’ . . . I think we have to just come to terms with the fact that God uses beauty to reveal himself.”
— Gisela Kreglinger, author of The Spirituality of Wine (Eerdmans, 2016)
Theologian and vintner Gisela Kreglinger who joins us to discuss the spiritual and cultural significance of wine. Over the centuries, the craft of winemaking has fostered a tradition that connects people to the land, encourages practices of contemplation and attentiveness, and celebrates shared table festivities. But these cultural achievements are endangered by today’s industrial and economic habits and we run the risk of missing the rich theological significance of craft wine and what it can reveal to us about Creation. ⇧
Guests on Volume 146
• MARK MITCHELL on liberalism’s false metaphysical claims about purpose, human nature, and tradition
• HANS BOERSMA on the cultural implications of the beatific vision
• HENRY T. EDMONDSON, III on Flannery O’Connor’s understanding of political life
• BRIAN CLAYTON and DOUGLAS KRIES on the common and faulty assumption that faith and reason cannot be reconciled
• CONOR SWEENEY on wrestling with the ‘death of God’ with the help of hobbit wisdom, religious experience, and sacramental theology
• CAROLE VANDERHOOF on the creative, intelligent, and demanding integrity of Dorothy L. Sayers
A digital edition of this Volume is also available
Click here to download a pdf file with the contents listing and bibliographic information about this Volume.
Mark Mitchell
“What we have is a kind of competitor to that view: the idea that there is no normative human nature; there is no teleological structure to human life; and what human beings are at core is Will. That human beings are creatures of various and competing desires and to impose from the outside a kind of constraint on those desires, or a structure upon those desires that says ‘this is what human beings ought to do by virtue of their nature,’ is perceived as a constraint on one’s individual freedom.”
— Mark Mitchell, author of The Limits of Liberalism: Tradition, Individualism, and the Crisis of Freedom (University of Notre Dame Press, 2019)
In the midst of so much turmoil surrounding the sustainability of political liberalism, professor of government Mark Mitchell asks whether there is anything that truly binds Americans together beyond their commitment to self-creation. Because liberalism presents an impoverished anthropology, which denies both a normative nature and a given social context to human beings, the result is that human beings are nothing more than uninhibited wills and a combination of various competing desires. In his book, The Limits of Liberalism, Mitchell examines the threat that liberalism poses to tradition especially and looks at three prominent thinkers who placed a high value upon tradition: Michael Oakeshott, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Michael Polanyi. ⇧
• • •
Hans Boersma
“In an important sense, all of the world is a theater of God’s glory. It makes present God himself, so that . . . to the extent that we have spiritual eyes, we see God there. And when we see God there, that’s when we’re going to act, talk, think differently.”
— Hans Boersma, author of Seeing God: The Beatific Vision in Christian Tradition (Eerdmans, 2018)
Theologian Hans Boersma argues that the beatific vision described throughout scripture is foreshadowed in “this-worldy experiences,” and that, particularly because of the Incarnation, eschatological experience is not only something in the future somewhere else, but is in fact connected with historical experience. Through this world, our purpose is to both perceive God’s glory and to be formed more and more like Christ, so that in the fullness of time we will be able to see God. This end, or telos, is built into all of creation and forms the horizon within which we engage with creation. ⇧
• • •
Henry T. Edmondson, III
“Rather than God being some component of history, I think she would say that history was a component of God. That we are interacting, whether we know it or not, with a transcendent order.”
— Henry T. Edmondson, III, editor of A Political Companion to Flannery O'Connor (University Press of Kentucky, 2017)
Political science professor Henry T. Edmondson, III talks about Flannery O’Connor’s understanding of political life, which was influenced by a range of thinkers including Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Eric Voegelin, and Russell Kirk. She shared with Kirk a suspicion of a “politics of tenderness” that focused on sentimentality over charity and his proposal for a prudential application of principles in favor of firm adherence to an ideology. Nonetheless, like Voegelin, O’Connor’s confidence in natural law and the supernatural allowed her to conceive of God as intrinsically acting within history. ⇧
• • •
Brian Clayton and Douglas Kries
“With the Enlightenment, suddenly there was this restriction of the scope of reason . . . It could tell us principally about natural science or it could be a calculative kind of thing . . . but it doesn’t have anything to say about the big questions anymore . . . This narrowing of the scope of reason means ([Pope Benedict] went on to argue) that theology or faith doesn’t have anybody to talk to anymore. And that was his point about how in order for the dialogue between faith and reason to move forward, reason has got to expand. It has to have a little confidence in its ability to say what’s true.”
— Douglas Kries, author of Two Wings: Integrating Faith and Reason (Ignatius Press, 2018)
Philosophers Brian Clayton and Douglas Kries discuss how their students often approach the relationship between faith and reason, noting that faith is frequently reduced to a set of affirmed propositions and reason to a scientific and calculative faculty. The two categories are usually either opposed or simply assumed to be separate. But in lived experience, faith and reason inform each other quite often and are often mutually reinforcing. A more expansive understanding of faith involves trust as well as an element of desire or love, which motivates our reasoning towards practical, material, moral, or spiritual ends. Likewise, a more expansive understanding of reason is able to think compellingly about questions of being, goodness, truth, and even beauty. ⇧
• • •
Conor Sweeney
“For me, it’s about wrestling with the ‘death of God.’ Confronting the forces of Sauron, if you will, for us really requires going back to the sources. And to do that, I think, baptism is like the ultimate template: this adoption into God’s inner life through the Son. [Baptism] for me is one of the primary Christian things that probably I think many of us have forgotten just how radical it is and just how constitutive it is for the Christian life and the Christian difference.”
— Conor Sweeney, author of Abiding the Long Defeat: How to Evangelize Like a Hobbit in a Disenchanted Age (Angelico Press, 2018)
In order to properly respond to the challenges of postmodernity, philosopher and theologian Conor Sweeney argues that Christians need to get back to the sacramental structure of faith, meaning that fundamentally, our faith is a gift. Sweeney observes that within the culture of the Church, love, worship, and beauty have been eclipsed and that our recovery of these three depends a great deal on how we understand baptism — the sacrament that is pure gift and through which we are grafted into the family of God. ⇧
• • •
Carole Vanderhoof
“All the way through, she insists on integrity and this high professional standard. You can hear her saying ‘Buck up! And get it right!’ and that was her attitude.”
— Carole Vanderhoof, author of The Gospel in Dorothy L. Sayers: Selections from Her Novels, Plays, Letters, and Essays (Plough Publishing House, 2018)
Editor Carole Vanderhoof talks about the work and personality of mystery writer and translator of Dante, Dorothy L. Sayers, whom C. S. Lewis fondly dubbed the “gleeful ogre.” Dorothy Sayers’s high standards for creativity as well as moral order and truth showed through in her works and in her actions, despite her “knowing how to have a good time.” ⇧
Guests on Volume 145
• DAVID I. SMITH on Christian teaching as a set of practices that accords with Christian content
• BRUCE HINDMARSH on the rise of the conversion narrative in early Evangelicalism
• JASON BAXTER on the psychological subtlety in Dante’s Divine Comedy
• JOHN FEA on the entanglement of American evangelicals and politics
• LAURIE GAGNE on the spiritual longing of French philosopher Simone Weil
• MATTHEW O'DONOVAN on singing Renaissance polyphony with Stile Antico
A digital edition of this Volume is also available
Click here to download a pdf file with the contents listing and bibliographic information about this Volume.
David I. Smith
“If you start from a paradigm where the main meat of being Christian is getting doctrine straight — and I don’t mean to belittle that in anything I say here; that’s an important and worthy task — but if that’s 95 percent of what we’re writing about and therefore presumably thinking about, then it becomes very difficult to think about how faith relates to teaching in any other way than trying to find opportunities in our teaching to explain our doctrines.”
—David I. Smith, author of On Christian Teaching: Practicing Faith in the Classroom (Eerdmans, 2018)
Language professor David I. Smith talks about how Christian education must involve more than correct doctrine. Because methods of teaching are often taken for granted or assumed to be neutral, many fail to reflect on the ways in which the form of teaching (its pedagogy) can contradict or reinforce Christian doctrine. For Smith, “Christian practices” are not just habits applied to worship or personal devotion, but must be incorporated into all of lived experience, which includes teaching and learning. Christian pedagogy is a way of Christian practice, which requires careful attention to how teachers use their bodies in space and time as well as to how they direct their students to inhabit a shared environment. In the words of David Smith, “I think of it as the rooting of teaching and learning in creation. It’s not just about the contents of my mind, it’s about the contours of the reality around me.” ⇧
• • •
Bruce Hindmarsh
“[Writing one’s own conversion narrative] requires something of a modern consciousness for it to be a truly popular genre for people to feel free to write about themselves without it being an offense against modesty.”
— Bruce Hindmarsh, author of The Spirit of Early Evangelicalism: True Religion in a Modern World (Oxford University Press, 2018)
Church historian Bruce Hindmarsh discusses the rise of the personal conversion narrative that occurred during the spread of early Evangelicalism in England. Hindmarsh observes how the development of the conversion testimony as the preferred “text” coincides with the flourishing of the modern period and a modern understanding of the individual. Hindmarsh also talks about how early Evangelicals navigated church life and church unity within a church culture that placed so much emphasis on the experience of God’s presence. ⇧
• • •
Jason Baxter
“I think Dante would have been heartbroken to know that we get more excited about his mud pit fights in Inferno than we do about his glorious divine dance of Paradiso.”
— Jason Baxter, author of A Beginner's Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy (Baker Academic, 2018)
Humanities professor Jason Baxter discusses the great psychological subtlety in Dante’s Divine Comedy. Throughout the Comedy, Dante provides us a with a vision of hell in which sin is truly sickening and of paradise in which the Body of Christ finally sees the strength of its members as truly indispensable. Through his book, A Beginner’s Guide to Dante’s Divine Comedy, Baxter introduces us to more than “an exciting adventure story” so that we might begin to participate in the soul’s awakening to and pursuit of Divine beauty. ⇧
• • •
John Fea
“You see this entanglement of Evangelicals and American politics all the way back to the coming of the American Revolution, so it’s not as if there was this kind of pure, undefiled type of Evangelicalism that was not influenced by politics.”
— John Fea, author of Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump (Eerdmans, 2018)
Historian John Fea talks about the murky waters of American Evangelicalism and its long history of rallying behind strong leaders. From the beginnings of the American Revolution up until Donald Trump, Evangelicals (and American protestants in general) have been attracted to power, often for the sake of sustaining the ideal of the American nation as a Christian nation. Fea discusses the current ambiguity surrounding the term “Evangelical” when used to describe voting polls in recent past elections. He also discusses the prominent role that fear has played in the relationship between Evangelicals and political life. ⇧
• • •
Laurie Gagne
“She said the true purpose of school studies was to cultivate a kind of attention that ultimately is necessary to encounter God. She said ultimately attention is the essence of prayer.”
— Laurie Gagne, editor of Love in the Void: Where God Finds Us (Plough Publishing House, 2018)
Laurie Gagne discusses the writings and thought of French philosopher Simone Weil. Weil died in 1943 in England at the age of 34 from a combination of malnourishment and tuberculosis. Because of her political idealism and great sympathy for the suffering of others, Weil contributed to her own death by self-rationing her food in order to suffer along with her fellow Frenchmen during German’s occupation of France. Weil was one of the great mystics of the twentieth century and, though agnostic for much of her life, earnestly sought after beauty and contemplative prayer. In this interview, Laurie Gagne describes how Weil’s conversion to Christianity revolved around her experience of the Eucharist, the witness of an Englishman, and a poem by George Herbert. ⇧
• • •
Matthew O’Donovan
“I think, also, what the sixteenth century saw with the advent of printing was a marked increase in the degree to which educated people could sing this music in their own homes, or sing similar things in their own homes, as they bought sets of part books and that sort of thing. I think we would be surprised by the degree to which musical literacy was an expected part of a solid education in the sixteenth century.”
— Matthew O’Donovan
Professional singer and Director of Lower Chapel Music at Eaton College Matthew O'Donovan discusses the challenges of performing Renaissance polyphony — originally intended for a liturgical context — in a modern-day concert setting. As a founding member of the choral ensemble, Stile Antico, Matthew O’Donovan has sung much of the sixteenth century choral repertoire. In this conversation, he talks about the harmonic and structural capacities of the choral music of the Renaissance (as well as the vocal proficiency demanded of its performers). ⇧
Guests on Volume 135
• BOB CUTILLO on the importance of understanding health as a gift
• HANS BOERSMA on recovering the patristic recognition of the sacramental presence of Christ in the Old Testament
• DANA GIOIA on the devout life and distinctive poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins
• MATTHEW LEVERING on the history of proofs of God’s existence, and what we learn about reason when we reason about God
• BRUCE GORDON on his “biography” of John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion
• MARKUS RATHEY on the dramatic and liturgical character of the major vocal works of Johann Sebastian Bach
A digital edition of this Volume is also available
Click here to download a pdf file with the contents listing and bibliographic information about this Volume.
Bob Cutillo
“We live in a culture that tells us over and over again in multiple ways that we are in control. We are getting continual messages that we’re in the driver’s seat, which makes the possibility of sickness and the idea of dying very disturbing.”
— Bob Cutillo, author of Pursuing Health in an Anxious Age (Crossway, 2016)
Perhaps more than ever before — certainly in a way unique to history — modern culture is preoccupied with health. Medical science and care are becoming more complex, more public, and more controversial with each year. Contradictions regarding health and medicine abound. Technology, prosperity, and availability of food and treatments are unprecedented, yet mortality rates, chronic diseases, and anxiety over general health and wellness suggest that we may not be better off than previous generations and that in some instances, we are regressing. As is the case in other areas, the internet has produced an abundance of resources, access, and chatter regarding medicine and health, exposing a growing disenchantment and cynicism towards conventional medicine and yielding a proliferation of alternative approaches to treatment and nutrition. But in the midst of so much information and so many positions, how frequently do we pause to examine our assumptions about what kind of thing health is? Medical doctor Bob Cutillo thinks that our enthusiasm for health hinders us from more honest reflection about basic human realities, such as the vulnerability of our bodies, the reality of death and suffering, and the connection between an individual’s health and the health of communities. ⇧
• • •
Hans Boersma
“The Reality to which the preacher needs to point the audience is the reality of God himself, the triune God. The purpose of the preacher is not simply to expound certain truths, but to discover within the text where Jesus Christ is revealed.”
— Hans Boersma, author of Sacramental Preaching: Sermons on the Hidden Presence of Christ (Baker Academic, 2016)
Theologian Hans Boersma joins us to discuss why we should recover a patristic way of preaching and reading scripture. While the modern tendency of exegesis is to move away from the words of a text to a more abstract summary or principle, the Church Fathers viewed scripture sacramentally as a reality to be entered into more deeply and more directly. Though the Church Fathers were very committed to correct doctrine, their guiding concern with regards to orthodoxy and preaching was to draw the Church into the life of God. We do not read scripture in order to abstract moral principles, but rather, in order that we might be “transformed by the renewing of our minds” and thereby perceive everything anew in light of Christ’s real presence. ⇧
• • •
Dana Gioia
“Hopkins is here and now and he’s giving you exact words to bring you to a precise, physical reality. He’s not about Eternity. He’s about Creation.”
— Dana Gioia, contributor to God's Grandeur (The Trinity Forum, 2016)
Gerard Manley Hopkins is one of the most frequently anthologized poets in the English language because of his rhythmic originality and anomalous place among the Victorian poets. Yet few realize that were it not for the posthumous advocacy of Hopkins’s lifelong friend, Robert Bridges, the poetry of Hopkins may have completely disappeared. In this conversation, California poet-laureate, Dana Gioia, discusses the biographical circumstances that led to Hopkins’s conversion to Roman Catholicism and subsequent decision to stop writing poetry and why people should not confuse the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins with that of religious mystical poets. ⇧
• • •
Matthew Levering
“If you talk to educated people who’ve gone to Ivy League or gone to the great liberal arts colleges, they . . . don’t have even a concept of God. Not even the slightest concept. You can tell them about Jesus Christ our Lord, but they just simply have no background and they can’t think it. [F]or them, it’s like you’re telling them about the ‘Great Pumpkin.’ You’re out there with Linus in the pumpkin patch.”
— Matthew Levering, author of Proofs of God: Classical Arguments from Tertullian to Barth (Baker Academic, 2016)
Theologian Matthew Levering talks about the long tradition of reasoning about God. Modern skepticism often questions the possibility of knowing anything about God, in part, because of the way in which “knowledge” is frequently restricted to statements of scientific or empirical fact and brought to bear on merely utilitarian purposes. The possibility of other modes of knowledge, such as those philosophically or theologically derived, is disparaged and dismissed. But to adopt this stance, argues Levering, is to ignore a rich and nuanced tradition of thinking about what type of being God is, or as the case may be, what being is in relation to God. ⇧
• • •
Bruce Gordon
“[C]alvin was a man who was forever in development; a man who continued to grow throughout his life. And that was reflected in his most famous work, the Institutes of the Christian Religion, which he continued to revise . . . and in those revisions, one sees Calvin’s development as a reformer, as a thinker, as a theologian.”
— Bruce Gordon, author of John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion: A Biography (Princeton University Press, 2016)
When a work is published, it leaves the careful hands of its author and enters into the unpredictable and sometimes turbulent course of history. Some books have an interest that extends far beyond their covers, worthy of its own narrative and commentary. The Reformation work of systematic theology, Institutes of the Christian Religion, written by John Calvin and published in 1536, qualifies as such a book. In this interview, Church historian Bruce Gordon talks about his recent “biography” of the Institutes published by Princeton University Press for a series titled The Lives of Great Religious Books. Gordon recounts the different ways that Calvin’s Institutes have been interpreted since its original publication, and having written his own biography of Calvin the person, Gordon observes the curious ways in which Calvin emerges as a variety of people when he is recovered in subsequent generations. ⇧
• • •
Markus Rathey
“What we forget when we listen to Bach’s music in the concert hall is that Bach’s music was also embedded into a performance, into the liturgy, and that Bach’s works fulfill a very specific function in the context of the liturgy.”
— Markus Rathey, author of Bach's Major Vocal Works: Music, Drama, Liturgy (Yale University Press, 2016)
Musicologist Markus Rathey discusses the particular liturgical context in which J. S. Bach’s major vocal works originally appeared. While not advocating that we return to only encountering Bach’s sacred vocal works within liturgical performances, Rathey does argue that to assume the modern context of a secular concert hall or secular event as normative for Bach’s sacred music detracts from our ability to understand the full meaning and purpose of the music. Unlike Handel, whose sacred choral works were originally experienced in concert halls and as public events, Bach’s sacred music was more strictly limited to the liturgical readings and occasions of any given worship service. Far from being passively entertained, the “audience” of such music were already active participants in a much larger drama. ⇧
Guests on Volume 131
• JOHN DURHAM PETERS on understanding media as agencies of order, not just devices of information
• PAUL HEINTZMAN on how a biblical understanding of human spirituality can inform our concept of “leisure”
• RICHARD LINTS on how the image of God and idolatry are inversely related
• PETER HARRISON on how our current definition of “science” and “religion” represents novel conceptual categories
• FRANCIS J. BECKWITH on the widespread tendency to erect a wall between faith and reason
• DAVID L. SCHINDLER & NICHOLAS J. HEALY, JR., on how the First Amendment is not as sympathetic to religious freedom as is commonly believed
A digital edition of this Volume is also available
Click here to download a pdf file with the contents listing and bibliographic information about this Volume.
John Durham Peters
“What’s most important about a medium is not its supposed content, but the way that it reorganizes the environment, the infrastructure, the presuppositions in which we live and move and have our being.”
— John Durham Peters, author of The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Media (University of Chicago Press, 2015)
Media theorist John Durham Peters wants us to reexamine the purposes of media and how fundamental media are. Every civilization must develop ways of mediating between oneself, between other people, and between people and nature. Media are not simply new information technologies and fine gadgetry, but significant responses to the perennial human questions of how we manage time, space, water, power, and emotions. The difference between a healthy city or a thriving civilization and a poor one is how we use media to order and reveal the world around us. ⇧
• • •
Paul Heintzman
“The Jewish sabbath is in some ways a little bit like the free time view [of leisure] in that there’s this one day when you don’t work, but then it’s not really a good fit or a good match because it’s more than just that — it has this qualitative dimension, this celebratory dimension … as well.”
— Paul Heintzman, author of Leisure and Spirituality: Biblical, Historical, and Contemporary Perspectives (Baker Academic, 2015)
• • •
Richard Lints
“I think we misread [the Genesis] text as a cosmological text, [rather than] a liturgical text fundamentally. God has built [a cosmic temple]. This is the earliest Jewish readings of Genesis, where all of creation is construed as a place in which worship takes central place. So to use inside of that space of worship the language of tselem, the language of image, says that our fundamental identity lies in the act of worship.”
— Richard Lints, author of Identity and Idolatry: The Image of God and Its Inversion (InterVarsity Press, 2015)
Theologian Richard Lints discusses how the Judeo-Christian concept of “image” and imago Dei as it appears in the early chapters of Genesis is intentionally set up as a diatribe against idolatry. Lints argues that while it is possible to have a discussion about the particular attributes that distinguish humans from animals as bearers of the image of God, the Mosaic account is not primarily concerned with this debate. Rather, Lints states, the Genesis narrative is concerned with the Jewish question of who we are to worship. ⇧
• • •
Peter Harrison
“In the public sphere, particularly in the polemical context of the putative conflicts between science and religion, there are reasons that some people may want to police the boundaries of science in particular. . . . It’s important for some people to argue that science actually tells us something about the meaning of the world even if that meaning is paradoxically that there is no meaning, as it were. And for that reason, science has to take over the role that religion once occupied.”
— Peter Harrison, author of The Territories of Science and Religion (University of Chicago Press, 2015)
Science historian Peter Harrison argues that one of the key distinguishing features of modernity that makes us different from our medieval predecessors is how we think about the categories “science” and “religion.” As both terms shifted from concepts concerned with the cultivation of inner virtue to categories that dealt with external propositions about beliefs and facts, so also the possibility of a relationship emerged, in which science and religion were at odds with each other due to the type of “knowledge” each professed to have. ⇧
• • •
Francis J. Beckwith
“How do you justify reason? We usually think that reason is something that we use to justify other things. . . . But if we ask ourselves about our mental powers, our mental powers seem to be ordered towards a certain end. But to say that something’s ordered towards a certain end is to imply what? That it has intrinsic purpose and design to it. But in order to be a kind of run-of-the-mill naturalist or secularist today, you actually have to deny that there’s such a thing as intrinsic ends or purposes. So the paradox here is that it turns out that a very strong, aggressive materialism winds up undermining reason itself.”
— Francis J. Beckwith, author of Taking Rites Seriously: Law, Politics, and the Reasonableness of Faith (Cambridge University Press, 2015)
Philosophy professor Francis J. Beckwith talks about what qualifies as “rational” in the public sphere. The separation between church and state, observes Beckwith, has morphed into a separation between faith and reason such that religious arguments, though they may be compelling, consistent and logical, are deemed unreasonable simply for being religious. This is largely due to the claim that only empirically verifiable arguments can be made in public as rational arguments. But this definition of “rational,” argues Beckwith, is ahistorical as well as a-cultural, and fails, itself, to be a scientifically verifiable claim. ⇧
• • •
David L. Schindler and Nicholas J. Healy, Jr.
“Of course an argument needs to be made in defense of and in support of religious freedom, but at the same time, we have to challenge the assumptions about: what do we conceive religion to be and what is freedom. Underlying both of those questions is a certain vision of the human person. What does it mean to be a human being?”
— Nicholas J. Healy, Jr., co-author of Freedom, Truth, and Human Dignity: The Second Vatican Council's Declaration on Religious Freedom (Eerdmans, 2015)
Theologians David L. Schindler and Nicholas J. Healy, Jr. talk about the historical and intellectual context from which the Second Vatican Council’s declaration on religious freedom, Dignitatis humanae, emerged. As scholars have interpreted this document on religious freedom, the central question has been whether or not a religious philosophy is embedded in the articles of the First Amendment. Does upholding a right to religious freedom have, paradoxically, an inherently secularizing effect? And what might a right to religious freedom imply about the human person? In what sense is the human person religious and in what sense is he free? ⇧
Guests on Volume 100
• JENNIFER BURNS on the life and legacy of Ayn Rand, “goddess of the market” and entrenched enemy of altruism
• CHRISTIAN SMITH on the aimless cultural world of emerging adulthood and on how it makes the idea of objective moral order implausible
• DALLAS WILLARD on why it's important to recover the conviction that religious beliefs involve real knowledge
In honor of the five score milestone, part two of the issue features a look back at the beginnings of the Journal and a few special excerpts of conversations with those early guests:
• PETER KREEFT on Lewis, Huxley, and J.F.K. after death
• P. D. JAMES on good and evil in fiction
• JAMES DAVISON HUNTER on culture wars
• PAUL McHUGH on when psychiatry loses its way
• TED PRESCOTT on nudity in art and advertising
• ED KNIPPERS on the powerful presence of the body
• MARTHA BAYLES on pop and perverse modernism
• DOMINIC AQUILA on Christopher Lasch
• GILBERT MEILAENDER on random kindness
• NEIL POSTMAN on technology and culture
• ALAN JACOBS on being maudlin in Madison County
A digital edition of this Volume is also available
Click here to download a pdf file with the contents listing and bibliographic information about this Volume.
Jennifer Burns
"I found that in a lot of the letters people would write to her: 'I no longer feel I have to be my brother's keeper' or 'I understand that I don’t owe other people anything; I can be myself.' Part of that is, I think, why she's attractive to adolescents who are trying to figure out who they are, break free of bonds to other people, and who aren't comfortable with obligations and are striving to become independent and become unique and her work is a sort of tonic for them."
— Jennifer Burns, author of Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (Oxford University Press, 2009)
Jennifer Burns, assistant professor of history at the University of Virginia, discusses her intellectual biography of Ayn Rand. In her biography, Burns examines the early life of Ayn Rand, born Alisa Rosenbaum, in Russia before the Revolution. She traces the life of Rand through her family’s experiences during the Russian Revolution and her later immigration to the United States, a place that in Rand's imagination was filled with glamour, wealth and beauty. She became jaded by the American intellectual elite's friendliness and acceptance of socialism and communism in the late 1920s and 30s, but grew to believe the wider American population had the right views concerning freedom and economics and sought to make herself a literary champion of capitalist freedom for “their side.” Burns describes how Ayn Rand's relationships mirrored her system of ethics as well; she thought the only valuable relationships were those completely freely chosen, eschewing non-voluntary ties and resting relations on individual perceptions of value devoid of emotional considerations. Such beliefs as well as her atheism had a polarizing effect on conservatives around her; Burns discusses how her person and/or work were received by various figures of conservatism over time — figures including Whittaker Chambers, Friedrich Hayek, and Murray Rothbard — as well as their personal interactions. Finally, Burns comments on her intellectual and imaginative influences including Nietzsche and cinema, both of which, from an early age, she was greatly impressed by. ⇧
• • •
Christian Smith
"The dark side, the Nietszchean side of postmodernism hasn't settled in and it's in large part, in my viewpoint, because the promise of mass consumerism of living a happy life of collecting possessions, and having friends around those possessions, and having a good life and a beautiful spouse and beautiful kids, and parties with alcohol; all of that is extremely appealing to emerging adults, and they haven't failed at that. Those that will eventually fail have not yet failed and so there's a tremendous amount of optimism about where their futures are going, even paradoxically while they have very little optimism about the state of the larger world . . ."
— Christian Smith, author of Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults (Oxford University Press, 2009)
Sociologist Christian Smith discusses his book Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults, the sequel to his earlier book, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers. This study follows up on the same cohort of American young people who were teenagers when described in Soul Searching. Sociologists have come to describe this new life stage occurring after the teenager stage but before young adulthood when the subject is typically between 18-29 years of age as “emerging adulthood." Smith characterizes this period of emerging adulthood as being a time of exploration, opportunity, transience, confusion, openness and experimentation. Developing out of changes in the social, educational and economic structure of society, it is accompanied by new and particular expectations and norms. Emerging adults realize that some time in the future they will have to settle down, but now is the time for doing whatever they want to do and exploring different things, trying to have fun, and managing all the transitions they are facing while keeping their options open. But they face these choices and experiences in life without the aid of concrete and authoritative cultural forms, structures and pathways; instead, they operate out of vague and amorphous scripts largely disconnected from a sense of objective moral reality beyond themselves. With the loss or deep skepticism of belief in objective moral order, the emerging adult tends to lack motivation for anything apart from their subjective interests. Most, though not all, of these cultural forces shaping the emerging adults tend to work against a settled membership and life in a tradition or church community. The interview ends with a discussion of the various subgroups within emerging adults documented in Smith's study. ⇧
• • •
Dallas Willard
"Religion has always presented itself as knowledge of reality based on experience and thought, no matter which religion. And certainly that was true of the Christian religion up through the middle of the 1900s."
— Dallas Willard, author of Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge (HarperOne, 2009)
Dallas Willard discusses the truth of spiritual knowledge and its epistemological validity in this segment of the Journal. His book, Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge, arose in response to interactions he had with a wide range of business, legal and political leaders which revealed their skepticism of the validity of religious, spiritual or ethical knowledge; as opposed to publicly valid knowledge, spiritual claims were seen as mere subjective traditions or opinions divorced from objective reality. He traces this skeptical belief in the U. S. back to the desire of liberal Christian theologians to protect Christianity from what they believed to be threatening developments in science, and the desire of conservative Christian theologians to emphasize the importance of understanding faith as a gift and not rational knowledge — a dichotomy Willard does not see any reason to accept. He describes in detail how this false dichotomy had led to great distortions in the understanding and practice of faith among everyday Christians and in churches, forcing believers to understand themselves as "committing" to essentially irrational claims. This sort of irrationalism leads to damaging consequences, including a loss of authority and the reduction of truth to the imposition of will and desire. ⇧
• • •
Peter Kreeft
November 22, 1963, is certainly best remembered as the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. Philosopher Peter Kreeft of Boston College found it interesting that two other notable figures of the twentieth century died on the same November day: authors C. S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley. Kreeft, who had long been fascinated with the writing of Socratic dialogue, wrote a post-death dialogue among Kennedy, Lewis, and Huxley in his book Between Heaven and Hell. Far from being a difficult task, Kreeft said the writing of the book was the easiest and most pleasurable writing he's done. ⇧
• • •
P. D. James
Mystery writer P.D. James talks about mystery as a genre and the way her own religious leanings influence her fiction. Detective stories remain popular, according to James, because they require that readers use their human reason and ingenuity to solve problems, and because they rest upon a conviction that murder is a great irreversible crime and is always evil. James also reflects on why writing about good and virtuous characters is more difficult than writing about evil and wicked villains. She describes herself as a religious person who is aware that there is more to life than this world; in her novel Innocent Blood she explores what she calls "the great religious questions" of guilt and repentance, sin and redemption. ⇧
• • •
James Davison Hunter
In Culture Wars, sociologist James Davison Hunter argues that public policy debates over issues in law, art, family, and education are more than political battles. Hunter claims that they evidence a struggle for cultural authority between two groups which hold conflicting moral visions. Cultural conservatives believe that moral authority derives from transcendent sources. Cultural progressives reject static ideas about truth in favor of openness, relativism, and pluralism. But progressives are not amoral or secular, according to Hunter. In fact, they are equally zealous about their view of reality and seek the cultural authority to shape the norms and mores of public life according to this view. Hunter also explains how media technologies exacerbate the tension by reducing public discourse to sound bites. ⇧
• • •
Paul McHugh
"Sometimes the sterner virtues of, well, being truthful, being just, have to come along with the kindness and support virtues. Psychotherapists sometimes have to use judgment even when they can be accused of being judgmental, since certain kinds of behavior are — in themselves — destructive to the person, their future, and the people around them."
— Paul McHugh
Psychiatrist Paul McHugh discusses how he is trying to reform psychiatry and why a new system would be helpful for therapists and patients. McHugh is author of The Mind Has Mountains: Reflections on Society and Psychiatry. He states that the current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is akin to Roger Tory Peterson's field guide for birds, which identifies what warblers look like and how to tell them apart but does not address how they came into being or what factors have contributed to their development; the DSM identifies symptoms of diseases without addressing their causes. McHugh explains why psychiatry ought to categorize mental disorders in ways which account for their causes. If psychiatrists know which type of depression their patients have and what is causing it, for example, they will have a better understanding of how to heal the depression and not just its symptoms, and they will also know of which sorts of virtues their patients are in need. ⇧
• • •
Ted Prescott
Professor and sculptor Ted Prescott traces the history of nudity in art from the Greco-Roman period through the Renaissance, and to the current trends in modern advertising. According to Prescott, the difference between the depiction of the body in art and in advertising has to do with the ends the two disciplines hope to achieve. Advertisements, as opposed to art, use nudity to attract potential consumers to products. While advertisements can be artistically and aesthetically pleasing, their primary purpose is to convince people of their need for the product. The body becomes, according to Prescott, "a stylized piece of furniture on which to hang a product." ⇧
• • •
Ed Knippers
Painter Ed Knippers discusses how the Christian doctrines of the Incarnation and the Lord’s Supper influence his painting. In his fleshy portraits of biblical characters, Knippers attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. Knippers insists that physicality is a gift from God that must be appreciated but not worshipped. The artist’s challenge is to strike the balance between these polar interpretations of the flesh. ⇧
• • •
Martha Bayles
Martha Bayles discusses her book on popular music, Hole in Our Soul, in which she examines how modernist notions about science and the nature of truth have led to a loss of beauty and meaning in art. Bayles explains how the increasing emphasis on empirical data as the only measure of truth relegated both religion and art to the purely subjective sphere. This development paved the way for “introverted” modernism, a movement that disconnected art from any accountability to reality, preferring to celebrate art for art's sake. Bayles's book focuses on the reaction against this elitist trend that began with Dadaism after World War I and reached its apex with the music of Janis Joplin in the late 1960s. For “perverse” modernists, art is a means for shocking people, according to Bayles. ⇧
• • •
Dominic Aquila
Social critic Christopher Lasch was deeply concerned about the individual and social consequences of what he dubbed "the culture of narcissism." Professor Dominic Aquila, who studied with Lasch, explains how Lasch’s concern about self-absorption informed his critique of the state of American art and music in America. Lasch argued that art lost its reference point when it became separated from work or craftsmanship. Now that the arts are funded by the government or corporations, artists are no longer artisans, and their work has become increasingly self-referential, according to Lasch. This minimalism represents the loss of an artistic vocabulary. The artist’s inability to articulate anything of substance mirrors the widespread nihilism and faithlessness that troubled Lasch toward the end of his career. ⇧
• • •
Gilbert Meilaender
Ethicist Gilbert Meilaender compares the popular slogan "Practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty” with classical and Christian ideas about virtue. This "bumper sticker morality" emphasizes impulsiveness over against the Aristotelian notion that virtues are habits of behavior that must be intentionally developed through discipline. Whereas Christian charity is grounded in a larger understanding of human beings and their relationship to God and one another, randomness resists connection with a broader ethical theory. Meilander also reminds us that true kindness requires a willingness to discipline and even wound. ⇧
• • •
Neil Postman
In his book Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, New York University communications theorist Neil Postman argues that technologies alter the way we think about the world. Postman asserts that Americans are now living in a "technopoly:" a culture in which technology has become sovereign over traditional modes of human association and social values. Rather than serving as a tool which helps solve specific problems, technology has become an end in itself: invention for the sake of invention. While Postman recognizes that inventions often confer benefits, he warns that they also limit possibilities (for example, one can no longer buy a Honda Accord without power windows). Technologies, according to Postman, are Faustian bargains: they giveth, but they also taketh away. ⇧
• • •
Alan Jacobs
Literary critic Alan Jacobs reviews Robert James Waller's The Bridges of Madison County. This rendition of Erich Segal’s Love Story is predicated on the assumption that one should not think, only feel. Such excessive sentimentality encourages the reader to suspend judgment and reflection in order to indulge deliberately in emotion for its own sake. Jacobs contends that reflection reinforces and strengthens true emotions while exposing those feelings that are shallow and disingenuous. Sentimentalists such as Waller try to avoid this truth by keeping people from asking questions and by calling those who do insist on reflection "cynics." Jacobs counters that Waller's shameless manipulation of his readers' emotions is the ultimate act of cynicism. ⇧
Guests on Volume 99
• MARILYN CHANDLER McENTYRE on how the abuse of language creates distrust in the power of words and on how we can be better stewards of the gift of language
• PAUL A. RAHE on the heresy of progressivism, which abandons vital convictions about human nature and political order and invites the advent of “soft despotism”
• JAMES L. NOLAN, JR. on how European countries have adopted the American model of problem-solving courts (and what they also get in the bargain)
• ANDREW J. CHERLIN on why the twin American commitments to marriage and to expressive individualism hurt families
• DALE KEUHNE on the faulty assumption that intimate relationships demand sexual involvement, and on how the essentially relational nature of the Gospel is ignored
• ALISON MILBANK on how the fantasy writings of G. K. Chesterton and J. R. R. Tolkien are intended to reconnect readers with reality
A digital edition of this Volume is also available
Click here to download a pdf file with the contents listing and bibliographic information about this Volume.
Marilyn Chandler McEntyre
"Part of the church’s call is to be countercultural and right now the word of proclamation and even the word of admonition is a countercultural act. And to assemble people, to see each other face to face instead of through the medium of a screen is becoming countercultural as we have a generation coming up who text each other from across the hall. . . . I think that the gathering and the conversation that can only happen in the Church needs to be a preservation issue."
— Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, author of Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies (Eerdmans, 2009)
Marilyn Chandler McEntyre discusses the complex ecosystem of language — both spoken and written — and how the health of our languages affects our thoughts, our relationships, and our capacities for conversation, prayer, and contemplation. While a well-turned phrase and a facility for eloquent argument may be viewed as a dangerous form of social power, McEntyre argues that anti-intellectualism and anti-elitism are poor defenses against such abuses through language. Instead, McEntyre proposes that we should foster habits of stewardship and preservation which seek to honor language by allowing ourselves to be addressed by it, to pause around it, and to dwell in it, rather than commanding and wielding our words as weapons. ⇧
• • •
Paul A. Rahe
"The problem was: can you have liberty in a large territory, say the size of the United States? And the initial answer that Montesquieu offers is 'No, you cannot' because in a large territory there are a thousand things that have to be dealt with, there are always emergencies. This leads to a concentration of power in the hands of the executive. Montesquieu suggested, however, that there were two ways that you could sustain liberty on an extended territory."
— Paul A. Rahe, author of Soft Despotism, Democracy's Drift: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Tocqueville, and the Modern Prospect (Yale University Press, 2009)
Paul Rahe locates a significant shift in attitudes concerning political governance that developed under the influence of nineteenth-century Hegelian historical progressivism. In contrast to what Rahe calls “the heresy of progressivism,” political philosophers prior to Hegel often recognized that throughout history, despotism had been the normal form of government and that modes of political liberty were rare. For this reason, eighteenth-century political philosophers sought methods for separating powers according to federal and state jurisdictions, various functioning branches, and according to the principles of scale and the character of localized lands. ⇧
• • •
James L. Nolan, Jr.
"In the U. S., the courts are characterized by enthusiasm, boldness and pragmatism; and the other countries' are characterized by deliberation, moderation and restraint."
— James L. Nolan, Jr., author of Legal Accents, Legal Borrowing: The International Problem-Solving Court Movement (Princeton University Press, 2009)
In his book Legal Accents, Legal Borrowing, sociologist James Nolan compares the attitudes of U.S. judicial courts with those from four other English speaking court systems in Canada, England, Scotland, and Australia. Historically, Nolan comments, court systems and their judges have not been concerned with solving the personal problems of offenders, but rather with the role of adjudicating. One factor leading to this shift in judiciary role is a growing sense of futility felt among judges who see offenders cycle through their courts repeatedly. However, Nolan questions the wisdom of redirecting resources to refashion the criminal court systems at the expense of rebuilding institutions that have typically assumed responsibility for solving personal problems. Nolan attributes the American reorientation of the judiciary role to American cultural values such as pragmatism, entrepreneurial skills, charisma, and therapeutic individualism. While the European court systems are much more modest and restrained about their expectations from their judicial branches, they are, nonetheless, sympathetic to the idea of a problem-solving court. Nolan offers the reminder, however, that legal institutions are cultural products as well and that to adopt an institution as radical as the problem-solving courts may be to embrace many more American cultural assumptions than the European courts are comfortable with. ⇧
• • •
Andrew Cherlin
"I think Americans have two conflicting values in their heads about marriage. On the one hand, they really want to be married. We have one of the highest marriage rates of any country. On the other hand, they think of their marriages in a very personal sense. Am I getting what I need? Am I developing enough as a person in my marriage? And if the answer is no, they feel justified in leaving."
— Andrew Cherlin, author of The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today (Knopf, 2009)
Sociologist Andrew Cherlin identifies a surprising disparity between American divorce rates and European divorce rates. Despite widespread religious sentiments among Americans, American marriages and cohabiting partnerships seem to be more fragile than their secular European counterparts. Cherlin locates a correlation between American divorce rates and American religion as taught in the flourishing mega-churches, in which people are encouraged to seek personal growth and fulfillment. Cherlin notes that while some European countries, such as Spain and Italy, are highly religious and other European countries, such as those in Scandinavia, are highly individualistic, the United States is the only country where one finds both a strong value on religion and a strong value on individualistic ways of thinking. ⇧
• • •
Dale Keuhne
"But what I realized was that this idea that sexuality was necessary for human fulfillment was something that comes mostly from the sexual revolution in the 60's, and until then that assumption was not part of Western society, and as a result, not only was same-sex marriage off the table, but the idea of fulfillment and sexuality being connected wasn't part of the equation."
— Dale Kuehne, author of Sex and the iWorld: Rethinking Relationship Beyond an Age of Individualism (Baker, 2009)
Dale Kuehne discusses the relatively recent view that deep personal and relational fulfillment requires sexual intimacy. Though sexual deviancy has existed throughout history, societies that have been defined less by individualism and more by issues of public and communal virtue, viewed sex as an appetite that should be restrained, typically within marriage between a man and a woman. For instance, contrary to contemporary assumptions, in which sexual intimacy is requisite for the deepest form of human fulfillment, the ancient Greeks viewed male to male friendship as the highest form of relationship because it was seen as the most rational and least enslaved to the sexual appetite. Kuehne argues that individualism is detrimental to human relationships and to our capacity to imagine intimacy because it undermines more complex, communal structures for relationships. ⇧
• • •
Alison Milbank
"Chesterton saw that in order to restore the real, you did have to take a journey away from it."
— Alison Milbank, author of Chesterton and Tolkien as Theologians: The Fantasy of the Real (T & T Clark, 2009)
Theologian Alison Milbank discusses the influence that G. K. Chesterton had upon J. R. R. Tolkien. Both writers saw fantasy as an escape from reality, but also a journey that would ultimately restore one’s perception of what was truly real. Tolkien, in particular, wanted his fantasies to enable readers to see the objects of this world as meaningful things apart from ourselves, rather than dead objects subject entirely to our manipulation and control. Milbank comments that Tolkien’s fantasies reflect a desire to return to a medieval view in which objects participate in reality as we participate in reality, with their own kind of form and integrity. For both authors, the things we perceive in the world present themselves as intentional, personal, and given. ⇧
Guests on Volume 98
• STANLEY HAUERWAS on the public witness of Fr. Richard John Neuhaus and on why Neuhaus abandoned his 1960s radicalism to become a leading “theoconservative”
• CLARKE FORSYTHE on why prudence is a lost political virtue and on why and how the pro-life movement needs to broaden its educational efforts
• GILBERT MEILAENDER on the necessity of a concept of human dignity and on why Americans no longer seem able to defend it
• JEANNE MURRAY WALKER on how her students learn to understand poetry and on how metaphors are at the heart of poetic expression
• ROGER LUNDIN on how the disenchantment of the world led to new forms of doubt and self-expression
• DAVID BENTLEY HART on the feeble and confused arguments of the recent crop of outspoken atheists and on how a misunderstanding of the nature of freedom is at the heart of their revulsion at religion
A digital edition of this Volume is also available
Click here to download a pdf file with the contents listing and bibliographic information about this Volume.
Stanley Hauerwas
"People forget that Richard was very prominent in the protests against [the] Vietnam [War]… and he assumed that when the Supreme Court decision about abortion was delivered, that the allies that he had had in the civil rights campaign and the anti-Vietnam campaign… would be allies against abortion. And he was stunned to discover that they thought the Supreme Court's abortion ruling was just fine, and that they supported it. And I think that's when Richard began to decisively shift his politics. That changed. He was no longer on the left. He was clearly on the right. And he was on the right for the same reasons he had been on the left, namely that's where he found the coalitions necessary to be in support of the dignity of life."
—Stanley Hauerwas
Theologian Stanley Hauerwas discusses the late Richard John Neuhaus, who passed away on January 8, 2009. Despite their, at times, deep disagreements, they shared a desire to keep the Church from succumbing to forms of cultural accommodation. Hauerwas comments on Neuhaus's extraordinary faith that gave him hope for the country in which he lived, hope that energized his labors of love in the public sphere. He reminds us that Neuhaus was an anti-war and pro-civil rights activist in the 1960s and 70s, and only came to be known as a conservative when abortion became legalized in 1973. It was a shock to Neuhaus that his allies in the anti-war movement and civil rights movement took the pro-choice side. Hauerwas observes that despite Neuhaus's more visible work in politics, Neuhaus had a fundamentally pastoral heart that showed in his personal relationships, his reflections on Scripture, and his pastoral writings. ⇧
• • •
Clarke Forsythe
"Back in 1973, the Supreme Court assumed that abortion was safer than childbirth. . . . Today . . . we now know of the five best medically documented risks: heightened risk of pre-term birth, heightened risk of placenta previa, heightened incidence of drug and alcohol abuse, heightened incidence of suicide and psychiatric admission, and fifth, the loss of the protective effect of a first full-term pregnancy against breast cancer."
—Clarke Forsythe, author of Politics for the Greatest Good: The Case for Prudence in the Public Square (InverVarsity Press, 2009)
Clarke Forsythe explains the ways the pro-life movement in the United States can more wisely navigate politics in pursuit of its ends. He takes note of the fears and misgivings many people have concerning politics and the possibility of achieving good things without being morally compromising. The idea of compromise, Forsythe believes, is often misunderstood as moral failure in and of itself rather than a mutual concession to reach agreement on a limited good. Prudence, for Forsythe, is key. It requires an understanding of what is good but also the ability to act on that knowledge. He believes that educational efforts concerning pro-life issues should be targeted to the broad swath of "middle America" which is neither consistently pro-life nor pro-choice, but lean towards pro-life beliefs. As with slavery in the days of William Wilberforce, many Americans consider abortion to be a sort of "necessary evil"; Forsythe believes this sense of an evil's necessity is a key obstacle to reform, but that this obstacle can be overcome by bringing new knowledge into the public debate concerning the health problems and risks associated with abortion that medical science has learned over the past few decades. ⇧
• • •
Gilbert Meilaender
"We remain committed to the equal dignity of persons . . . though it's not clear that we have a rationale any longer for that commitment to the equal personal dignity; historically, I think, the rationale was a religious one. And in public we try to get along without that these days, and I'm not altogether sure we can."
—Gilbert Meilaender, author of Neither Beast Nor God: The Dignity of the Human Person (Encounter Books, 2009)
Moral philosopher Gilbert Meilaender examines the question of human dignity and its place within political discourse. Because what we believe about human dignity influences what we believe should be done to and for people in society, Meilaender believes people need to be discussing what human dignity is in politics. Meilaender suggests that those in politics who wish to bracket that discussion because it seems to be concerning a religious or metaphysical question are fundamentally mistaken in their desire, not least because, regardless of whether or not they wish to recognize it, the religious or metaphysical question does influence their decision. This is something he saw repeatedly over the course of his membership on the President's Council on Bioethics. Meilaender goes on to describe two distinct ideas concerning human dignity which he believes are at work whenever people use the term; he then describes some of the reasons for confusion in American society concerning the dignity of the human person, including some developments in biotechnology. ⇧
• • •
Jeanne Murray Walker
"If every age allows poems, goes back to the poems, they find new things in them. I think that we just have to face the fact that there is such a thing as mystery. It's joyful, it's playful, it's full of excitement and you have to rest in that and trust in that rather than trusting in some paraphrase."
—Jeanne Murray Walker, author of New Tracks, Night Falling (Eerdmans, 2009)
Poet Jeanne Murray Walker talks about learning to read poetry. Walker discusses some of the ways 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. The meaning is rooted in the metaphors in the poetry, which resonate in the imagination and eventually resolve as truth. The segment ends with a reading of selected poems from Walker's new book. ⇧
• • •
Roger Lundin
"It pits a woman with a vast, expansive inner life, filled with desire and a sense of possibility and self-discovery, but she lives in a natural world . . . that doesn't care one whit about her hopes, her dreams. Indeed, the doctor tells her that any hope, any dream, any sense of possibility that she has is simply an illusion."
—Roger Lundin, author of Believing Again: Doubt and Faith in a Secular Age (Eerdmans, 2009)
What makes Christian belief so implausible to non-believers? In this segment, Roger Lundin discusses his book Believing Again: Doubt and Faith in a Secular Age. Distinctively modern unbelief is defined as a socially accepted and intellectually viable shift that saw faith in God as optional. Beginning in the seventeenth century, the romanticization of the human imagination resulted from the steady disenchantment of the world as rendered by the physical sciences and later the biological sciences. Lundin explains that this world seems increasingly indifferent to or even hostile to the world that human beings imagine, the world that they dream of and desire to live in. As an example of this in literature, he discusses the understanding of inner life and outward realities present in literature such as Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Lundin praises the imaginative possibilities in poetry and literature, but warns against the assumption that we all possess deep imaginations that are more powerful and meaningful than anything we could find in the natural world. ⇧
• • •
David Bentley Hart
"The sort of atheism you get from the current group is so complacent and so lacking in any deep thought that it's sort of the People magazine approach to atheism, and so it has a certain marketability."
—David Bentley Hart, author of Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies (Yale University Press, 2009)
David Bentley Hart discusses his book Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies. Hart describes these delusions as a sense that the human race has been emancipated by agents of reason and tolerance. This is popularized atheism's founding myth, he says, and it’s captivating and easy to follow. Hart’s book exposes the falseness of this revisionist and self-serving modern myth in vivid detail. He lists these atheists' three basic arguments: 1) Empirical science is better able to explain existence than theology and metaphysics; 2) There are no rational grounds for belief and therefore it is of its nature contrary to reason; and 3) The history of Christianity is shown to be oppressive and cruel. Hart sees the first two arguments as basic category mistakes, and the third as nothing less than bad historical research. He concludes that the irrational moralism of these atheists has no basis in truth and is fundamentally incoherent. ⇧
Guests on Volume 97
• MARK NOLL on how Christian higher education is aided by a commitment to something like Christendom, a commitment to the assumption that the Gospel has consequences for all of life and all of social experience
• STANLEY FISH on how university professors should refrain from bringing their own political, philosophical, and religious commitments into the classroom
• JAMES PETERS on how Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Pascal, and many others had an understanding of the nature and purpose of reason quite different from the common modern understanding
• SCOTT MOORE on cultivating an understanding of politics that goes beyond mere statecraft, and on the limits of the notion of rights
• MAKOTO FUJIMURA on how his work as a painter is enriched by writing, why artists need to cultivate an attentiveness to many things, and how visual language expresses experience
A digital edition of this Volume is also available
Click here to download a pdf file with the contents listing and bibliographic information about this Volume.
Mark Noll
"At its best, the Christendom ideal argued, or took for granted, that everything held together in Christ."
—Mark Noll, author of The Future of Christian Learning: An Evangelical and Catholic Dialogue (Brazos, 2008)
Mark Noll shares his thoughts concerning the future of Christian education. As a historian, Noll sees how Christian education flourished in times of Christendom; he is careful to note he is not suggesting a return to the entirety of the political forms and institutions of that era would be desirable, but merely pointing out that the education of Christians — among other significant cultural institutions and achievements, including that of philosophy and music — flourished greatly during that time in part due to the support of the Christendom civilization. Specifically, Noll believes that those Christian groups and populations that have taken seriously the public implications of the gospel for all of creation and all of life and the continuity of the Church in history have been the populations that have best succeeded in developing social and educational institutions that strengthen the Church. Noll suggests there are signs that evangelicals, who have tended to be suspicious of institutions and relatively uninterested in history, are moving toward a recognition that pursuit of faithfulness requires attentiveness to the history from which we come and the institutions that form us. ⇧
• • •
Stanley Fish
"The next step is the one that I resist, and that says, 'Therefore, you're now a better person than the person who did not undergo that literary training.' That's the step that I don't want to take, and that's the humanist step."
—Stanley Fish, author of Save the World on Your Own Time (Oxford University Press, 2008)
Stanley Fish talks about the boundaries of the classroom. He argues that the academic vocation is rightly limited to conveying truths concerning subject material, rather than including particular implications for social action or individual morality. He insists those types of implications or instrumental uses of academic knowledge are beyond the expertise and responsibility of academics, though they should certainly be taken up by institutions outside the university. Fish points out that this kind of "academicizing" is consistent with liberalism, which separates public behavior and communications from private religious beliefs for the sake of liberal political order. ⇧
• • •
James Peters
"The first principles of ethical reason aren't these self-evident, immediately known, knowable to any rational being, they're not those sorts of foundations. You have to become a person who can esteem and acknowledge those first principles, and that requires a moral community."
—James Peters, author of The Logic of the Heart: Augustine, Pascal, and the Rationality of Faith (Baker Academic, 2009)
James Peters discusses historical understandings of reason and rationality and how they differ from the modern notion of rationality which is imbued with autonomy and impersonal, universal objectivity. Such a modern notion was alien to Plato and Aristotle both, who understood rationality as inextricably tied to the pursuit of the good through the imagination, first and necessarily formed through participation in a moral community. One is not simply born rational, nor does one develop rationality as an autonomous individual such that all individuals, universally, are endowed with rationality merely by virtue of their consciousness. On the contrary, rationality is formed in the context of moral communities that may differ across space and time. Reason, then, is not a-historical and abstract, but situated in history and community. ⇧
• • •
Scott Moore
"It shouldn't surprise us that in a world in which all preferences are designs towards some sort of personal fulfillment, that marriage is a sort of contract for security and prosperity, that all of a sudden we would have people wanting to say that this shouldn't be denied to homosexuals."
—Scott Moore, author of The Limits of Liberal Democracy: Politics and Religion at the End of Modernity (InterVarsity Press, 2009)
Scott Moore talks about "extraordinary" times in history where particular fields of inquiry are shaken at the foundations. He argues that contemporary politics is at that point for American Christians. Increasingly, Christians are questioning the extent to which their American identity is at odds with their Christian identity. According to Moore, the cracks have always been there but have been papered over because the issues have seemed to be marginal. Over 300 years, those cracks have grown. Moore argues that what Christians need to do is to recover a deeper and broader conception of politics that is not restricted to modern statecraft and the enforcement of rights, which tends to lead to dead ends because it ignores other more fundamental considerations appropriate to the nature of the particular communities and situations involved. Such a recovery involves an awareness and consideration of myriad commitments in life in the context of the redemptive language and history of the Church. ⇧
• • •
Makoto Fujimura
"There's a sense in which language and poetry draw us out into the intuitive domains that we're not really aware of until we write or paint."
—Makoto Fujimura, author of Refractions: A Journey of Faith, Art, and Culture (NavPress, 2009)
Artist Makoto Fujimura reflects on the role of writing in his life as a painter. Fujimura observes that artists often write because they're contemplative. The motivations and mental processes involved in creating art are conducive to writing as well, though the visual arts are distinct languages. The kind of language a particular type of painting constitutes depends on the nature of the painting, the materials and methods and media used. The way painting communicates, then, is particular to its form and so makes possible the expression of thoughts and desires and joys that are real though they have no precise verbal articulation. ⇧
Guests on Volume 96
• DAVID A. SMITH on the beginnings of the National Endowment for the Arts and the capacity of the arts in a democracy for combatting atomistic individualism
• KIKU ADATTO on how images, words, and ideas interact in a visually saturated culture and on how the image of a person's face in a photograph has the capacity for intimate representation of inner personhood
• ELVIN T. LIM on how presidential speeches have been dumbed down for decades and why presidents like it
• DAVID NAUGLE on the deeper meaning of happiness, the disordering effects of sin, and the reordering of love made possible in our redemption
• RICHARD STIVERS on the technologizing of all of life
• JOHN BETZ on the critique of the Enlightenment offered by Johann Georg Hamann (1730-1788), and why it still matters to us
A digital edition of this Volume is also available
Click here to download a pdf file with the contents listing and bibliographic information about this Volume.
David A. Smith
"To the extent that art is understood just to be personal expression and therefore, in an egalitarian society, unquestionable in its validity, it seals itself off from playing these broader social roles, which is an irony because these artists who do this kind of provocative art intend for their art to be social, but it doesn't work that way when it becomes so freighted with political identity."
—David A. Smith, author of Money for Art: The Tangled Web of Art and Politics in American Democracy (Ivan R. Dee, 2008)
Professor David A. Smith discusses the role of the arts in American democracy since the 1960's. Smith tells the story of how the American world of art, having lost its artistic direction, was taken over by political agendas of individuals. The legislative founders of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) believed that the art they would fund would play a social role in promoting the unity of the nation. They wanted the artistic world, funded by the NEA, to combat individualism, elevate society above crass materialism, and provide a counterweight to the dominance of science. Artists, however, had a different idea of the role of their art, and showed it in the critical nature of their work. Not realizing that the trajectory of the artistic world was one of political challenge and criticism, politicians were surprised to see how politically divisive art could be. Smith argues that the artistic world neglected to realize that the very politicization of the art rendered it powerless to play a role in bringing about human solidarity for the common good. ⇧
• • •
Kiku Adatto
"We might disagree with the censorship part, but the part [Plato] was right about is how potent culture is, and specifically, how primary our visual sensibility is; that images have meaning and they affect you. They get right inside you."
—Kiku Adatto, author of Picture Perfect: Life in the Age of the Photo Op (Princeton University Press, 2008)
Kiku Adatto talks about the rise of a new kind of image consciousness in modern society. Adatto begins by identifying how images are intelligible only within a larger narrative or context, a frame of reference on which the meaning of an image is more or less contingent. But what happens when images are subject — and known to be subject — to almost ubiquitous manipulation? Adatto explains that it is now necessary to be conscious of an additional layer of meaning that makes the image the beginning of the story rather than its totality. Yet, it is not obvious that such discernment is happening, despite our general awareness of constant image manipulation. It is basic to the human condition to be impacted and influenced by images, which are perhaps more powerful than we would rationally apprehend.
"All over the world there's a sense of saying there isn't simply a self there, there's a soul there. That it isn't a body we're talking about. We'>re talking about the dignity and respect for the person that extends to the treatment of their body, and I would extend that to the photographic image."
—Kiku Adatto
Kiku Adatto continues her conversation with Ken Myers by discussing the intimacy that images can contain. She notes that a picture of a person creates and carries something more than mere color and lines, but a representation of the self that commands a sense of intimacy which is most deeply honored and appreciated by those in relationship to the person and rather not by strangers. Pregnant with the potential for intimate connection, images raise the question of appropriate use in a culture where images are displayed everywhere for everyone to see. From advertisements to Facebook, personal images are being exhibited with little concern as to the power of seeing a representation of a human being. ⇧
• • •
Elvin T. Lim
"Common sense is not enough for us to make the decisions that we do in life, although there are important intuitions that help and guide the intellect."
—Elvin T. Lim, author of The Anti-Intellectual Presidency: The Decline of Presidential Rhetoric from George Washington to George W. Bush (Oxford University Press, 2008)
Elvin Lim talks about the decline of the content of presidential rhetoric. He attributes part of this decline to a rejection of constitutional authority in favor of an electoral mandate. Presidents who derive their agendas and draw their power not from the laws of the land but from popularity are concerned with polls and keeping their approval ratings high. But popularity is not necessarily related to the wisdom necessary to govern well, and the consequences of this presidential focus on popularity manifest in presidential rhetoric, which Lim argues has become increasing driven by emotional appeals to intuitive intelligence; to the exclusion of higher order deliberations of the intellect in order to persuade more people. Lim explains that the problem with persuasion by emotional appeal is twofold. First, because emotional appeals bypass higher order thought which is necessary for the proper analysis of complex and important issues of the day, such appeals rest on reductive and oversimplified reasonings that are often false in significant ways. Persuasion based on such emotional appeals is necessarily shallow and often does not do justice to the issues at stake. The second problem with persuasion by emotional appeal arises when one considers that common sense intuitions are different from person to person. Lim points out that rhetoric that appeals to such common sense intuitions fails when sensibilities are not shared, and only higher order thought and rational disputation can bridge the divisions that exist between people whose gut reactions are different. Abandoning rational content in rhetoric entails the hardening of political divisions that might be bridged by rational argument, especially when such oversimplified rhetoric presents only one side of the story (well). ⇧
• • •
David Naugle
"The concept of happiness more or less lost its backbone; in the past, I think it was refreshingly embracing: a human being's greatest good, the summum bonum."
—David Naugle, author of Reordered Love, Reordered Lives: Learning the Deep Meaning of Happiness (Eerdmans, 2008)
David Naugle reviews the ways in which we understand happiness. Naugle comments on how happiness morphed from a deep and comprehensive theological concept to a political concept we could pursue as a nation to a superficial implication of the modern, sovereign self. Naugle draws on an Augustinian formulation of happiness that roots it in the blessing of God in both delight and human fulfillment. Augustine has in mind not only a subjective feeling of pleasure, but an objective conformation to the created order which loves in properly greater and lesser ways in accordance with the objects of love, God being preeminent. Naugle concludes with a discussion of "The Seven Deadly Sins." ⇧
• • •
Richard Stivers
"Is technology just machines … or are there other types of technologies? … Several of us have talked then about both organizational and psychological techniques such as advertising, public relations, propaganda, and a whole number of other techniques—the self-help books … that [promise] greater effectiveness or efficiency in one's relationships. If one regards these non-material technologies as technology, it's only then that you can see the full implication, the full significance of what is sometimes called 'the technological system.'"
—Richard Stivers, author of The Illusion of Freedom and Equality (State University of New York Press, 2008)
Richard Stivers discusses some insights from Jacques Ellul and Max Weber regarding the dominance of technology in our lives. Technologies, in the sense of "techniques" which may manifest in material forms (machines, computers, etc.) or non-material forms (practices, techniques, procedures, protocols, etc.), have as their goal the increase of power for the sake of efficiency. Technology as technique, then, is a hallmark value of modern society. Stivers comments that even our economic system of capitalism can be understood not as merely using technologies, but being the very economic form of technology. Modern society's technical language of information similarly tends to ignore the morality of practices and beliefs in its pursuit of knowledge and, fundamentally, power. The pursuit of information and power can then take on a self-justifying moral imperative of its own that denies moral limits of the pursuit of power. Under a technological regime, freedom and equality is illusory. ⇧
• • •
John Betz
“It’s somehow the peculiar dialect of God that combines majesty with abasement, glory with this most incredible self-emptying. And [Hamann] sees this in creation, in Christ, and in the Scriptures, and so everywhere when he’s meditating on the Holy Trinity he sees this combination of glory and humility.”
—John Betz, author of After Enlightenment: The Post-Secular Vision of J. G. Hamann (Wiley-Blackwell, 2008)
Theologian John Betz discusses the eighteenth-century philosopher and translator, Johann Georg Hamann, critic and contemporary of Immanuel Kant and other prominent figures of the German Enlightenment. Hamann, even from the early stages of the Enlightenment, saw and argued that the project of modernity would lead to its own destruction. Hamann argued that reason could not, by itself in a pure form, give a complete account of reality, for he saw that the modern ideal of “pure reason” is a fiction. Reason, he argued, is always embedded within an historical culture and language from which one can never fully be detached. In his evaluation, Hamann anticipates the postmodern critics of the twentieth century; however, he avoids the nihilism of postmodernism by observing the revelatory character of language and history. By focusing on the divine kenosis or humility of God, who creates, reveals, and condescends to humanity through His Word, Hamann maintained that man’s pursuit of truth is always contingent on God’s Word in special and general revelation through history and creation. Throughout the interview, Professor Betz describes the centrality of God’s condescension in Hamann’s understanding of knowledge and reason. It is through the humility of God in his condescension to communicate to man that Hamann recognizes the Promethean project of modernity to attain enlightenment from man’s resources alone. ⇧
Guests on Volume 95
• STEWART DAVENPORT on how nineteenth-century Christians separated the moral and practical aspects of economic life
• WILLIAM T. CAVANAUGH on how theology and economics are necessarily intertwined and on how a larger understanding of the meaning of freedom would change our economic actions
• J. MATTHEW BONZO and MICHAEL R. STEVENS on Wendell Berry's concern for the dislocating and fragmenting forces in modern life
• CRAIG GAY on how language — specifically the spoken word — is central to our human experience
• EUGENE PETERSON on how Jesus’s use of ambiguous language encouraged active spiritual engagement
• BARRY HANKINS on how the late Francis Schaeffer moved from being a defensive fundamentalist to a prophet of cultural engagement
A digital edition of this Volume is also available
Click here to download a pdf file with the contents listing and bibliographic information about this Volume.
Stewart Davenport
"What is first and foremost for these clerical economists is that they simply wanted stability. They love order . . . They didn’t want [the U.S.] to go the way of France: poverty-stricken and potentially revolutionary."
—Stewart Davenport, author of Friends of the Unrighteous Mammon: Northern Christians and Market Capitalism, 1815-1860 (University of Chicago Press, 2008)
Stewart Davenport identifies the beginnings of a transformation in economic understanding with the birth of modern capitalism. The nineteenth century saw the publication of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, and Davenport wanted to understand the response of Christians during this transformative period. He found that clergy and laymen had a number of responses to the new economic thinking and social structures that developed in that time. Some of these responses resonated the popular Enlightenment notions of autonomy and scientific objectivity to the exclusion or marginalization of moral concerns. The roots of contemporary dualism between economics and morality and ethics among Christians can be traced in part to this separation of facts and values in discussing Smith's theories. Many Christian contemporaries of Smith believed that if Smith's economics rested on purely objective observations about natural laws and scientific principles, they need not bother with thinking about ethical and moral concerns when discussing economics. Indeed, opposing this new science could render God and religion irrelevant in the face of changing times. Others saw in capitalism a stabilizing force that would ensure social health and promote the strength of America and, in so far as America promoted the kingdom of God, the reign of the kingdom of God as well. ⇧
• • •
William T. Cavanaugh
"Professors are constantly admonishing [students] to stick to the subject and to separate these things. But I think they have a very good and real sense that in real life things are not separated: that the way you buy has a lot to do with the way you worship and who you worship and what you worship."
—William Cavanaugh, author of Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire (Eerdmans, 2008)
William T. Cavanaugh explains how theology shapes how we understand and evaluate economics. Cavanaugh discusses the particular temptation that Christians face to compartmentalize parts of their lives so that finance or business or economics or politics is separate from religion and theology. In many ways, such compartmentalization makes it easier to cope in contemporary society. One example of compartmentalization is how greed is good in economics though it is evil in the religious aspect of our lives. Another is the way freedom is understood as different concepts when we're being religious compared to when we're being political. The "freedom" that autonomous individuals have in modern democratic societies contrasts with the Christian understanding of freedom as rightly attached to our God and neighbor in love.
"Churches ought to have a role in creating local economics spaces where discernment about what the human good is can go on in a real concrete way. So it's not a matter of churches making monetary policy or whatever; it's really much more a matter of scaling the economy down and trying to make these kinds of face-to-face interactions."
—William Cavanaugh
William Cavanaugh continues his conversation with Ken Myers on economics by questioning some of the typical assumptions underlying contemporary economics. He questions whether freedom is best understood without reference to the ends one can desire and wonders whether the two options of a individualistic economic free-for-all on the one hand or statist collectivism on the other exhaust the possibilities for economies. Might there be a substantive place for churches and other non-government groups in our economics? He also talks about Thomas Aquinas's view of property, advertising's cultivation of perpetual dissatisfaction, and the need for communities to embrace interdependence as part of human flourishing. ⇧
• • •
J. Matthew Bonzo and Michael R. Stevens
"One thing that Berry stresses over and over again that really resonated with students was this idea of 'How do you create a home not as a retreat from work, but as a place where you can do meaningful work?'"
—J. Matthew Bonzo, co-author of Wendell Berry and the Cultivation of Life: A Reader's Guide (Brazos Press, 2008)
J. Matthew Bonzo and Michael Stevens discuss themes from their recent book on the life and thought of Wendell Berry. Berry's main concerns are related to the ways in which community is undermined and destroyed by the ways modern people live in and treat the land and the rest of creation. Because community is tied to the creation as the realm in which we live our lives, the exploitation of creation by rationalistic approaches to controlling and dominating nature in our work and life serves to fragment relationships and dislocate men and women from community. In divorcing our humanity from creation, the relational reality of created humanity itself is denied in the breaking of relationships and the reduction of the world to mere raw material that must be antagonistically mastered for profit. ⇧
• • •
Craig Gay
"Where we are and who we are and what it means to live and how we ought to live . . . these are not questions that can be answered simply by making careful observations of our circumstances, but there are rather questions that can only be answered by listening . . . to what God has said."
—Craig Gay, author of Dialogue, Catalogue & Monologue: Personal, Impersonal & Depersonalizing Ways to Use Words (Regent College Publishing, 2008)
Craig Gay reflects on the essential linguistic nature of humanity: how our growth (or decline) in life is tied to words. Language is not merely a tool for humans to use, but it is a part of our very being as creatures made in the image of the God who is the living Word. Because of this, words are essential to our life. Gay further discusses the distinction between "seeing" and "hearing" as metaphors of knowledge and understanding. Gay stresses that our culture does not encourage us to know by receiving words from a person or a personal God, but by making impersonal observations. For Gay, this mode of understanding, while extraordinarily valuable and necessary, is nevertheless partial and insufficient for life. ⇧
• • •
Eugene Peterson
"Poets don't make things plain. They makes things more complex. But as they become more complex, they start to resonate all over the place."
—Eugene Peterson, author of Tell It Slant: A Conversation on the Language of Jesus in His Stories and Prayers (Eerdmans, 2008)
Pastor Eugene Peterson talks about the kinds of language Jesus used when talking to people. He points out that Jesus rarely gave sermons in the gospels, but spent most of his time speaking normally and conversationally, and the Spirit infused this normal speech. He observes that many Christians generally do not understand their everyday language to be a participation in spirituality; for them, spiritual language is a contrived, churchy kind of language. For Jesus, Peterson reflects, there was no such division or distinction: his normal, everyday speech was always seasoned by the Spirit without artificiality. Moreover, Jesus's language was often ambiguous, radiating meaning on different levels and encouraging listeners to pursue and participate in multi-dimensional, personal truth, rather than one-dimensional, impersonal data. In this way, Jesus's language conformed to the nature of truth as personal and complex as reality itself. ⇧
• • •
Barry Hankins
""[W]hereas in America the intellectual stuff of fundamentalism was used primarily to defend the faith [against theological liberalism], in Europe Schaffer could use the intellectual stuff of fundamentalism to evangelize. In other words when he would sit down with European young people from universities, he had to intellectually make a case for the veracity of the Christian faith, not with regard to defending it against liberalism, but with regard to making it coherent to people who were intellectually searching for a philosophy that made sense."
—Barry Hankins, author of Francis Schaeffer and the Shaping of Evangelical America (Eerdmans, 2007)
Professor Barry Hankins talks about the American missionary Francis Schaeffer. Hankins describes Schaeffer as, after Billy Graham, the second greatest influence on evangelicalism in the twentieth century. He started off a disciple of Carl MacIntyre and saw himself as a general for fundamentalist orthodoxy whose war front would be in Europe. As a leader of fundamentalism, he advocated separation from secular culture and the positive, militant defense of the faith against theological liberalism. But when Schaeffer arrived in Europe, he found that there wasn't much Christianity, orthodox or not, to defend; consequently, his mission of defending the purity of the faith was replaced by a mission to re-evangelize a post-Christian Europe. Schaeffer channeled his intellect to understanding the cultural moment in Europe, and his efforts led him to engage the existentialist philosophies and cultural institutions expressing those philosophies in order to provide answers to the questions plaguing the young Europeans he encountered. ⇧
Guests on Volume 94
• MAGGIE JACKSON on how multitasking exalts efficiency and promises the overcoming of bodily limitations as time is restructured, and on the importance of attentiveness in sustaining personal and social order
• MARK BAUERLEIN on how technologies have rearranged the social lives of teens (and their expectations of education)
• TIM CLYDESDALE on what the first year in college means for teens
• ANDY CROUCH on the physical basis of cultural life and how “culture making” is done
• JEREMY BEGBIE on how music is a way of engaging with the order in Creation and on how writing and hearing music involves a recognition of likenesses in Creation and the exercise of “hyper-hearing"
A digital edition of this Volume is also available
Click here to download a pdf file with the contents listing and bibliographic information about this Volume.
Maggie Jackson
"Multitasking is just a way of layering the moment and . . . overcoming our bodily limitations and cognitive limitations."
—Maggie Jackson, author of Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age (Prometheus Books, 2008)
Author Maggie Jackson talks about our society's predilection towards multitasking and what that means for our culture. She reflects on how contemporary success corresponds to a kind of control over time that enhances efficiency through speed and the fracturing of attention. A number of factors contribute to how people have developed these kinds of sensibilities, and they can lead to profound social and relational strain. Jackson comments that even as humans are primed for novelty and for freedom and space, their flourishing also requires ritual, repetition, and pause to create depth of thought and relationship. She fears we've gone too far in one direction at the expense of our attentive faculties.
"All of this we're wrestling with didn't come in with the Blackberry, the cell phone, the iPod; we really have to look deeper to see where our neo-nomadic, mobile, split-focused world came from."
—Maggie Jackson
Maggie Jackson continues her discussion about the importance of attention. Jackson argues that attention is essential to the highest relational and intellectual capacities of human beings, functions that bond people together at the deepest levels. And this attention needs to be sustained by more than just individual effort. It needs to be sustained and cultivated in the public spaces of our lives by public communities because we live and give attention in communities. Young people feel this need even as they are inundated with distractions and accept them, and this need should be acknowledged by people willing to give thought to the social impact of new (and old) cultural artifacts and technologies. ⇧
• • •
Mark Bauerlein
"One of their [the stewards of culture] jobs was to stand for the passage of knowledge and understanding, better tastes. And they had a duty. It was their responsibility as the elders to induct seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds into better things, into more serious endeavors."
—Mark Bauerlein, auther of The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Tarcher/Penguin, 2008)
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. Bauerlein is concerned that the level of immediate and continual connection between youths made possible and reinforced by modern technologies so absorbs and entrenches them in the minutiae of their peers that it is difficult to present and address aspects of life missing from their adolescent experience. Because of the ubiquity of this environment, how it pervades their existence in all the places where mobile communications reach, the particular nature and qualities of teen experience and the effects of this continual experience is greatly magnified to the exclusion of steadfast attentiveness, focused reading of literature, and personal and social maturation over time. Institutions and authorities which cultivate the latter fall by the wayside in the face of cultural forces that cater to, reinforce, and exploit natural adolescent inclinations. ⇧
• • •
Tim Clydesdale
"Hanging over the top of every professor's lectern are two questions. The one is 'So what?' and the other is 'Who cares?' And if you don't realize that those are there from Day 1 in a classroom and you don’t address those consistently and regularly with your students, you're not likely to get through."
—Tim Clydesdale, author of The First Year Out: Understanding American Teens After High School (University of Chicago Press, 2007)
Tim Clydesdale discusses the experience of freshmen year at college. He reflects on his own experience of leaving home and coming to Wheaton and joining a community of scholars of the wider world, and he contrasts his experience with the research he collected over a year of study contemporary freshmen. For many students through primary and secondary schools, the dominant paradigm of learning is bulimic: studying and gaining knowledge is for the sake of checking off boxes on the way to getting somewhere, as opposed to enjoying studies and being nourished in their minds as part of a process of maturation. After taking in the minimum amount of information necessary, students then regurgitate the information back at teachers. By the time they enter college, Clydesdale suggests they've been effectively inoculated against a love of knowledge, and professors face an uphill battle to teach them to learn. He connects this mode of learning with a particular American moral culture that is skeptical and antagonistic of authority. In this culture, students are the autonomous arbiters of moral knowledge, deciding what is good or evil without regard to moral authorities, if they are even recognized as such. Similarly, students are the autonomous arbiters of their education, the final judge of what ought to be learned or not, and authorities are distrusted in comparison to the self. Clydesdale connects this moral culture to a suspicion of history and a bias toward the new, as well as to the centrality of niceness in college society. Instead of cultivating reflection on the deep questions of meaning and life, students are overwhelmed with developing and using techniques to manage their lives without reference to the ends or purposes toward which their lives should be oriented. ⇧
• • •
Andy Crouch
"To be a farmer is different from having a theory of agriculture."
—Andy Crouch, author of Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling (InterVarsity Press, 2008)
Andy Crouch reflects on what is missing in contemporary discourse on culture. Crouch argues that talk of culture often portrays it as an abstract, monolithic entity 'out there' separate from us. Seen in this way, it is difficult to grasp how we are embedded in culture and how the Lord might be calling his people to engage it. Crouch suggests that we see culture as made of cultural goods which Christians are called not merely to critique, but also to create and cultivate, and that the creation of physical goods and artifacts is part of what God created humans to do and part of the trajectory of our redemption. ⇧
• • •
Jeremy Begbie
"[Music] is a way of engaging with the integrities of the created order."
—Jeremy Begbie, author of Resounding Truth: Christian Wisdom in the World of Music (Baker Academic, 2007)
Theologian Jeremy Begbie on explains how music as more than simply pleasant or less pleasant collections of sounds, but as a way to engaging with the integrities of the created order, from our bodies to the rest of the world. This latter sense has in some ways been lost in the modern age in favor of a view of music that sees transcendent humans as simply imposing their designs upon a meaningless, unordered creation. Instead, Begbie argues that because God created all of Creation —including ourselves, attuning ourselves to the structures and order within Creation is key to discovering the joy and beauty and meaning God meant the Creation to provide and display.
"Love achieves its creativity by being perceptive."
—Jeremy Begbie
Jeremy Begbie continues his discussion on music and its essential relationship with Creation. He talks of artists and composers who are able to see incredible possibilities latent within the materials of Creation. In their attentiveness and perception, they creatively love that which they are given. Begbie also discusses the difference between seeing and hearing, and implications of and lessons from the metaphor of hearing on theology and knowledge and freedom. ⇧
Guests on Volume 93
• ALAN JACOBS on practical consequences of belief in original sin (and the five distinct components of that belief)
• JAMES A. HERRICK on redemptive myths advanced by science fiction and speculative science and on evolution as a religion
• ROBERT C. ROBERTS on the role of emotions in ethical and spiritual life
• J. DARYL CHARLES on the commitment by the magisterial Reformers to the idea of natural law
• ALLAN C. CARLSON on how the industrial revolution changed the shape of households (including their floor plans) and the understanding of marriage
• SHEILA O'CONNOR-AMBROSE on the work of Elizabeth Fox-Genovese in defending marriage against the various claims of individualism
A digital edition of this Volume is also available
Click here to download a pdf file with the contents listing and bibliographic information about this Volume.
Alan Jacobs
"The key challenge [for Rousseau's educational philosophy] is how do I protect an innocent, noble child from the perversions and corruptions of this world . . . Wesley says okay the first thing you have to understand about children is that they come here tainted by original sin, they're selfish, they're cruel . . . and so what you have to do is to break the spirit of these rebellious children if you're going to have any hope of instructing them in anything."
—Alan Jacobs, author of Original Sin: A Cultural History (HarperCollins, 2008)
Alan Jacobs, professor of English at Wheaton College, discusses the divergent views of the nature of humanity implicit in various educational philosophies and policies. Regardless of how aware or unaware teachers and administrators are of the implicit assumptions embedded in kinds of educational practices, those assumptions dictate the approach teachers take in educating children. Jacobs uses this example to elaborate on how thinkers in the pre-modern and modern eras understood the evil that arises in daily human life, evil that transpires across the ages and distances between human cultures. Original sin, in the Christian conception, has five distinct components that have been shared in part or in whole by a number of philosophers in history, and what people believe about this has had radical influences on the course of Western civilization. ⇧
• • •
James A. Herrick
""[There is a kind of] redemptive mythology: we will redeem ourselves through technologies, through enhancement of the human body and brain, and through various blendings of technology and an enhanced humanity, and so this is an effort to realize some of the visions that have been in the forefront of science fiction writing… of a kind of coming human race."
—James A. Herrick, author of Scientific Mythologies: How Science and Science Fiction Forge New Religious Beliefs (InverVarsity Press, 2008)
James Herrick talks about the myriad ideas and mythologies in popular consciousness that find their origins in science fiction. These ideas range from science as the only source of knowledge, to the beginning of human civilizations, to the destiny and salvation of mankind. Just as the line between science and science fiction is often blurry, the line between science fiction and religious belief is often porous as well. One of the reasons for this overlap is the tremendous motivating power of religions and mythologies which many science fiction writers recognize and utilize.
To Herrick, much of the language of proponents of scientific progress is not strictly scientific, but resembles animistic or pantheistic expressions of an over-arching vision that gives history meaning and a sense of purpose necessarily absent from strictly materialistic conceptions of reality. Herrick gives examples of ways that some popularizers of science have rhetorically treated the concept of evolution as a pseudo-deity that, in some sense, guides and directs history as it unfolds. Others create or adapt modern mythologies of space and extra-terrestrials, linking them to progressive development in power and human self-understanding. ⇧
• • •
Robert C. Roberts
"So I think it is healthier for psychologists really to study the positive traits, rather than just having some vague conception in the background of what it is to function properly and then concentrating on all the dysfunction."
—Robert C. Roberts, author of Spiritual Emotions: A Psychology of Christian Virtues (Eerdmans, 2007)
Robert C. Roberts, Distinguished Professor of Ethics at Baylor University, discusses the importance of emotions in the Christian life. He points out that through history, the Church has had to engage various psychologies, from that of the Stoics to current academic skepticism, and to seek to properly place emotions within the context of biblical obedience. Roberts describes the relationship between character virtues and emotions and the place of both in ethical life that is about more than simply following rules. Academic interest in the place of virtues in ethics received a boost from the publication of Alastair McIntyre's After Virtue, and Roberts explains how the influence of the virtue tradition has seeped into positive systems of contemporary psychology, as opposed to simply documenting and treating negative disorders. ⇧
• • •
J. Daryl Charles
"The worry was that natural law does not take sin seriously enough. Now that is a legitimate concern, that there is an overly sanguine or optimistic view of reason and human nature that then undermines the issue of human depravity…. But I would say that's not the case, and if that were the case, then the magisterial Reformers would have denied and renounced natural law on explicit grounds."
—J. Daryl Charles, author of Retrieving the Natural Law: A Return to Moral First Things (Eerdmans, 2008)
J. Daryl Charles examines the recent resurgence of natural law thinking among some conservative Protestants who had been generally disposed to suspicion concerning the idea. In Charles's research, he found that the magisterial Reformers, while having deep theological discontinuities with the Roman Catholic magisterium, nonetheless shared the basic ethical bedrock of a natural law rooted in God's creation of the world. Post-magisterial Reformers likewise shared a common conception of the basis for moral order. Since then, Protestants grew opposed to the natural law tradition because of fears that natural law does not take original sin and man's depravity into account. But Charles traces the idea back through history and argues that John Calvin himself affirmed the reality of a natural law while holding to human depravity, and that the stereotype of anti-natural law Reformed thinking was a later development aided by thinkers like Jacques Ellul, who believed that the Fall had not broken the image of God, but completed eradicated it. ⇧
• • •
Allan Carlson
"The separation of workplace and home was a fundamental social consequence of industrialization. Central power sources, be it steam or water power, drew adults and children away, and now you lived and you worked in different places."
—Allan Carlson, author of Conjugal America (Transaction Publishers, 2007)
From natural law, we turn to the natural family. Dr. Allan Carlson talks about the substance of what natural means and cites historical Christian uses as well as United Nations documents in contrast to Rousseau. Carlson argues that the Industrial Revolution changed the shape not simply of the economy at large, but of family life, in so far as the economic life that was once tightly bound to the home was gradually sourced out of the home. The de-functionalization of the home rendered the home increasing void of the substance of what people did in life. Governments were complicit in this transformation of the home through housing policy and regulations that incentivized structural changes in the home corresponding to the loss of economic functionality. As family and home life was reduced to places of mere emotional bonding, the public understanding of marriage followed suit. Consequently, acceptance of sexual relations based solely on emotional fulfillment (as well as of the breaking of those relations when emotional needs were not being met) became socially normative. ⇧
• • •
Sheila O'Connor-Ambrose
"The separation of workplace and home was a fundamental social consequence of industrialization. Central power sources, be it steam or water power, drew adults and children away, and now you lived and you worked in different places."
—Sheila O'Connor-Ambrose
Sheila O'Connor-Ambrose shares her thoughts about her mentor Elizabeth Fox-Genovese. After describing her first encounter with Dr. Fox-Genovese, O'Connor-Ambrose talks about the how the organic web of social relationships uniting human beings is marginalized by the way our society even discusses issues relating to life and family. One culprit is the rampant assumption of individualistic autonomy that elevates individual pleasure and subjective right to the extent that the legitimacy of non-individualistic social entities and communities is called into question and sometimes denied. The very concept of authority, whether natural or divine, is implicated as illegitimate in the face of the moral and social autonomy of the self. The irony is that the loss of communal authority does not actually free individuals, but simply opens up the individual to the dominance of political and economic forces writ large. ⇧
Guests on Volume 92
• JAKE HALPERN on the ecosystem of celebrity and the complicated reasons why people seek to become famous
• STEPHEN J. NICHOLS on how the dynamics of American culture have shaped our understanding of who Jesus is
• RICHARD M. GAMBLE on resources for and the outlines of a theology of education
• PETER J. LEITHART on how concerns from some postmodern thinkers echo the eschatological perspective of Solomon (as presented in the book of Ecclesiastes)
• BILL VITEK on how wise living on the Earth requires the humble recognition of our ignorance as well as the application of knowledge
• CRAIG HOLDREGE on lessons from Goethe about how we understand the rest of Creation as participants, not detached and potentially omniscient observers, and also on the “conversational” quality of our engagement with Creation
A digital edition of this Volume is also available
Click here to download a pdf file with the contents listing and bibliographic information about this Volume.
Jake Halpern
"At some point you're going to get tired or . . . unenthused with the accolades that you're getting simply from your teacher, who again and again is telling you how special you are — or your parents — and the next logical step is the embrace, the applause, the adulation of the world at large."
—Jake Halpern, author of Fame Junkies: The Hidden Truths Behind America's Favorite Addiction (Houghton Mifflin, 2007)
Jake Halpern, a journalist whose first-hand investigations into the system of celebrity creation, brought him to convention centers and talent searches across the United States. His findings on the road, as well as psychological and sociological research, illustrate a wide-spread cultural fixation among the youth for the kind of fame and importance that celebrity brings. He links this fixation to an increase in a therapeutic ethic for building self-esteem that is prevalent in public schools, unintentionally resulting in adolescents infused with self-importance and narcissism. Parents, in Halpern's experience, are often guilty of facilitating their children's narcissism in the name of success and well-being. ⇧
• • •
Stephen J. Nichols
"Theology, confessions help us see the whole picture of Scripture…. But when we're just a biblicist and we just take 'Scripture only' to what can be a negative extreme, then we end up getting awash in a sea of texts, and what happens is people just sort of land on a text they like, so they see Jesus as a friend or Jesus as loving with children, and they don't pay attention to Jesus as judge…. That's far from what the Reformers meant when they said sola Scriptura."
—Stephen J. Nichols, author of Jesus Made in America: A Cultural History from the Puritans to The Passion of the Christ (InterVarsity Press, 2008)
Stephen Nichols talks about the tendency for American culture to shape who we understand Jesus to be. All cultures tend to affect theology and Christology, but Nichols suggests that in an American culture that is always shifting at a fast pace, and biased toward the new and against the old traditions, we stand particularly vulnerable to new movements and moods in Christianity. He adds that evangelical Christianity's Reformation sola Scriptura heritage can be misinterpreted and abused in a way that allows evangelicals to pick and choose which biblical passages to emphasize for their conception of Jesus. "The Bible alone" can also facilitate negligence to the cultural baggage evangelicals bring into their study rooms along with their Bibles. Nichols then surveys a number of manifestations Jesus has taken over the course of American history. ⇧
• • •
Richard Gamble
"We are not brains in a vat. We are certainly not just bodies. But we are a complex [that includes] emotion, will, imagination . . . we are multi-dimensional human beings."
—Richard Gamble, author of The Great Tradition: Classic Readings on What It Means to Be an Educated Human Being (ISI Books, 2007)
Richard Gamble discusses what makes for a good education. Gamble explains how Christian thinkers such as Augustine understood classical knowledge and education as a kind of Egyptian gold that ought to be appropriated and turned to its proper use. In this way, educators ought to take the good that God has created wherever it may be found and put it to God-honoring use. Gamble discusses the coherence of oratory and logic, when they are at their best, in contrast to the opposition that many would put them in. He relates this to the tendency to divorce and then diminish the importance of either the mind or body to our humanity. ⇧
• • •
Peter J. Leithart
“Ecclesiastes is the book of the Bible that seems to me to speak most elaborately in what could be seen as a Postmodern kind of idiom. And yet it also departs in significant ways from that.”
—Peter J. Leithart, author of Solomon Among the Postmoderns (Brazos Press, 2008)
Peter J. Leithart discusses his book Solomon Among the Postmoderns, addressing both those who are suspicious and those who are unreservedly enthusiastic about Postmodernity, Leithart discusses how the Enlightenment and modernity regards the objective world as though we have arrived at the “beatific vision of the object.” Postmodernity rightly protests this, yet tends to have no eschatological consciousness whatsoever. Leithart maintains that New Testament eschatology contains a healthy sense of ‘already-not yet’ balance that avoids both extremes. Although its primary inspiration is not in being counter-cultural, Leithart concludes that the church will end up being counter-cultural if it maintains the truth. ⇧
• • •
Bill Vitek
“Knowledge is something that rarely is any more used for its own sake. It is something that must have a purpose. That purpose is almost always about control.”
—Bill Vitek, editor of The Virtues of Ignorance: Complexity, Sustainability, and the Limits of Knowledge (University of Kentucky Press, 2008)
Bill Vitek discusses the provocatively titled book, The Virtues of Ignorance: Complexity, Sustainability, and the Limits of Knowledge. Vitek explains his definition of the terms “knowledge” and “ignorance.” Our human knowledge, he argues, is always dwarfed by what we cannot (or should not) know. And in our culture, the purpose of knowledge is almost always about control. Vitek admits that knowledge is a useful tool, yet insists that it is not sufficient to run the world because of the great deal of harm it can cause. He concludes that ignorance describes a philosophical perspective that can wisely inform our lives. ⇧
• • •
Craig Holdrege
“After [the 1960s] it became clearer and clearer that all of this is a complete oversimplification of biological reality, so that genes are interwoven within the living context of the cell and the whole organism . . . they are contextual.”
—Craig Holdrege, co-author of Beyond Biotechnology: The Barren Promise of Genetic Engineering (University of Kentucky Press, 2008)
Scientist Craig Holdrege talks about Beyond Biotechnology: The Barren Promise of Genetic Engineering, which he co-authored with Steve Talbott. The book has been praised by critics such as Michael Pollan for its insightful critique of the assumptions and unintended consequences of genetic engineering. The gene, Holdrege argues, is an abstract concept rather than a concrete thing — a common misunderstanding. Addressing philosophical questions, Holdrege and Myers discuss whether the world should be seen as a problem to be solved by mathematical means, or rather as a gift apprehended by reverent engagement. Turning then toward science’s approach to genetics, Holdrege argues that the reductionism of reality to the gene drives the technology of genetic engineering. This false picture of what the gene actually is leads to unintended consequences of genetic engineering, and Holdrege explains that the organism as a whole is affected in unintended ways.
“We can’t live without participating in nature: we draw from the rest of the world in order to live like every organism does....Some people would argue: you’re going to kill the cow. Is that respectful? I’m not saying there’s no tension in these things. There is no easy answer, and all you can do is to engage in the conversation and realize we’ve got to take the other seriously.”
—Craig Holdrege
Craig Holdrege cites as a central problem in our culture the reduction of human experience to the realm of plants and beasts. In this segment, he argues that the same conversational engagement we know is healthy in human relationships should be a picture of how we engage with the natural order of creation. Holdrege explains what he means by a healthy balance between the extremes of either mechanistic or overly humanistic view of animals and plants. Man is part of creation, yet transcendent over other creatures — a gardener over his garden. Only by fully engaging with nature can we be encouraged to take our own nature seriously. Holdrege concludes that a healthy development of technologies is possible: it should be defined by a sense of ongoing conversation that is engaged in and responsible for everything we do with and think about creation. ⇧
Guests on Volume 91
• JOHN WITTE, JR. on the life and work of legal historian Harold Berman and on the revolutionary changes throughout the history of law in the West
• HUGH BROGAN on Alexis de Tocqueville’s understanding of democracy, equality, liberty, free association, social status, and the dangers of centralized government
• DANIEL RITCHIE on Tocqueville’s analysis of the dangers of individualism (and how they might be avoided)
• DANIEL WALKER HOWE on the confidence in progress and Providence in early nineteenth-century America
• GEORGE MCKENNA on how the Puritan understanding of God’s purposes in history shaped American political culture
• PATRICK DENEEN on the differences between Aristotelian and modern political philosophy and on how Wendell Berry’s thought demonstrates his identity as a “Kentucky Aristotelian.”
A digital edition of this Volume is also available
Click here to download a pdf file with the contents listing and bibliographic information about this Volume.
John Witte, Jr.
"What we are in now is in many ways a negotiation about the legitimacy of the Western project altogether and a seeking to gain wisdom from our increasing understanding of the world and its globalized polity, what really are the enduring lessons of the West and what are the insights of non-Western traditions that need to be brought to bear on law today."
—John Witte, Jr., author of God's Joust, God's Justice: Law and Religion in the Western Tradition (Eerdmans, 2006)
Professor and legal historian John Witte, Jr. talks about the legal mind and scholarship of famed law and religion scholar, the late Harold J. Berman. John Witte, Jr. worked for years with Dr. Berman at Emory University Law School and during that time became familiar with the development of Berman's legal thought. Witte then discusses the framework of legal history involving bursts of development or watersheds in the development of the tradition of Western law from Greek and Roman times to the present day crisis of the Western tradition. ⇧
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Hugh Brogan
"Tocqueville was a strong French nationalist in many respects, but at the same time he could see this argument between centralization and localism ran right through French history."
—Hugh Brogan, author of Alexis de Tocqueville: A Life (Yale University Press, 2006)
Hugh Brogan, Research Professor of History at the University of Essex and author of a recent biography of Alexis de Tocqueville, discusses the insightful Frenchman who visited the United States in the nineteenth century and went on to write a penetrating review of American society. In this interview, Brogan explains what Tocqueville thought of liberty and equality in America, and especially what these ideas meant to Tocqueville with respect to French political and cultural history. He also describes Tocqueville's observations concerning a free society's relationship to a central government. ⇧
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Daniel Ritchie
"The solution to the problem of individualism really is in the right use of liberty, and Americans use their liberty in four or five different ways, according to Tocqueville."
— Daniel Ritchie
English professor Daniel Ritchie reflects on the relationship between individualism and equality as the democratic displacement of social place. The link that Tocqueville saw between democracy and a kind of self-indulgent abandonment of communal public life concerned him, for Tocqueville greatly admired the ability of Americans to associate with each other to accomplish shared goals. Ritchie highlights a number of Tocqueville's observations of the ways in which Americans accomplished this kind of association. ⇧
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Daniel Walker Howe
"Morse himself and certainly many, many other people expected that the telegraph would not only make for greater commercial efficiency and report the news more rapidly and accurately, but it would be a force for good. It would promote social reform, Christian missions, and facilitate America's role as a model democracy."
—Daniel Walker Howe, author of What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (Oxford University Press, 2007)
Daniel Walker Howe examines about the dynamic forces at work in nineteenth-century America that undergirded American faith in progress. He highlights the role of transportation and communications technologies and biblical religion and calling. Many Americans, whether Whig or Democrat, understood the nation as one with a divine mission to the world, differing only in what constituted this mission. The impetus to social and religious progress and the spread of cultural and material wealth was driven partially by such a mission, which institutions of higher education encouraged in the elite populations of students they served. ⇧
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George McKenna
"It's the Exodus story. It's been a powerful myth in our history."
—George McKenna, author of The Puritan Origins of American Patriotism (Yale University Press, 2007)
Professor George McKenna gives an overview of religious paradigms during the American colonial era. McKenna describes how the Puritans saw their own faithfulness and national flourishing as bound up in God's providence and plans for the people of America. This sense of God's providence was as an immanent presence that would respond to faithfulness and lack of faithfulness with favor and punishment, and this concern for the divine response undergirded their sense of mission. This mission was, in fact, not a mission to build a new nation per se, but instead to renew and reform the church community. During the American Revolution, this mission was reconstructed to tell a myth of pilgrims escaping from England to create a new nation founded on democratic freedoms. But this myth would have been strange to the Puritans, who instead understood themselves to be enacting a vision of the faithful church, and many of whom were simply waiting for England to be reformed, at which point they would return to their homeland. ⇧
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Patrick Deneen
"We cannot become naturally what we are, except through the avenues of culture, through the avenues of a kind of collective life lived through and with other people."
—Patrick Deneen, author of "Wendell Berry and the Alternative Tradition in Political Thought," an essay in Wendell Berry: Life and Work (Kentucky University Press, 2007)
Political theorist Patrick Deneen converses about the implicit assumptions undergirding modern Western political sensibilities, assumptions regarding the nature of humans stemming from Enlightenment thinkers such as John Locke and Thomas Hobbes. In contrast to their view of human beings as essentially isolated and independent individuals using the natural environment for subjective chosen ends, Aristotelian political thinkers understood the end or finality of human beings as being inextricably natural and cultural, in accord with and dependent on nature, including other human beings. The modern divorce of human beings from the rest of the creation — the natural world — has implications for how we treat the natural world and understand our own independence.
"It's the extraordinary productivity of our economy as a result of high degrees of specialization that our workplaces are defined by, and even governed by...that's the hallmark of the modern economic system."
—Patrick Deneen
Patrick Deneen continues his conversation with Ken Myers and focuses on Wendell Berry's observations of the consequences of democratic individualism and specialization. Berry and Deneen worry about the modern tendency to elevate specialization in many spheres of life to the point where the general whole suffers from fragmentation and incoherence; divisions of labor, people, and academic disciplines, while allowing a kind of tremendous mechanical efficiency, tend to harm the enterprises of building community, knowledge and economies, enterprises which require a coherent, organic vision to flourish. When the parts lose sight of the whole, the whole suffers and the parts lose meaning. ⇧
Guests on Volume 90
• J. MARK BERTRAND on how the language of worldviews can mean something richer than it often does
• MICHAEL P. SCHUTT on how the day-to-day practice of Christian lawyers can reflect a Christian view of the nature of law
• MICHAEL WARD on how C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia were shaped by medieval cosmological beliefs about the seven planets
• DANA GIOIA on the disturbing trends in the reading (non)habits of Americans
• MAKOTO FUJIMURA on reading, painting, and attending to the world
• GREGORY EDWARD REYNOLDS on lessons about reading from the study of media ecology
• CATHERINE PRESCOTT on why portrait painters often depict their subjects with books in their hands
• EUGENE PETERSON on the place of reading in the spiritual lives of Christians.
A digital edition of this Volume is also available
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J. Mark Bertrand
"I was guilty myself of instilling an overweening confidence in students and giving them the false idea that being equipped with a few bullet points would give them the ability to hold their own in an argument against anyone on any topic on any day of the week."
—J. Mark Bertrand, author of (Re)thinking Worldview: Learning to Think, Live, and Speak in This World (Crossway Books, 2007)
Author and teacher J. Mark Bertrand talks about the concept of a "worldview." He reflects on a kind of mental fatigue that develops when worldview becomes a shorthand for dissecting and deconstructing how people think for narrowly apologetic purposes. Bertrand believes the reduction of the idea of worldview can prevent us from having an openness to gaining wisdom and learning to witness in our worl