Journals

Guests on Volume 158

• DAVID SETRAN on how American Christians thought about being good parents in the colonial period and in the nineteenth century
• VIGEN GUROIAN on how fairy stories serve to nurture healthy moral imaginations in children
• MICHAEL DOMINIC TAYLOR on developing an adequate metaphysical framework for understanding the natural world
• THOMAS PFAU on how images reveal to us invisible, numinous realities
• JASON PAONE on the unknown body of biblical commentary by Thomas Aquinas
• MATTHEW LEVERING on why the virtues rather than conscience should be recognized as the heart of Christian moral life

Click here to download a pdf file with the contents listing and bibliographic information about this Volume.

David Setran

“And by the nineteenth century . . . [the home] is the private place of the family. The home is the place in which I find my identity, in which I build a legacy — in which I see the importance of my children and my grandchildren in that way — and certainly lose a little bit of a sense of even the larger Church being a significant player in the raising of children. . . . It is our family blood, you know, not the blood of Christ, that becomes the most central identifying factor . . . which can also lead to a kind of idolatry of the family.”

David P. Setran, author of Christian Parenting: Wisdom and Perspectives from American History (Eerdmans, 2022)

David Setran traces changes in thinking by American parents about nurturing their children in the faith. He looks specifically at the shift between American Colonial households and mid-nineteenth century families. In the Colonial period, parents saw themselves as evangelists and priests, disciplining their children for salvation through worship and catechism. By the mid-nineteenth century, the family became much more focused on creating a nurturing environment, hoping to raise children in the faith by providing a loving home. As a consequence of this shift in emphasis, the home becomes a self-contained private space, the Church begins to lose its role in the formation of children, and household devotional activities become more about establishing close family ties and less about the worship of God. Ultimately, Setran argues, this shift works towards an idolization of the family, where familial blood usurps the blood of Christ.      ⇧

Vigen Guroian

“I think the reason why [children] enjoy fairy tales and certain kinds of fantasy literature is not just because they’re interested in the protagonist, the hero or heroine — and how that hero or heroine overcomes dark forces and evil — but because these stories tend to be very concrete. And they seem to have an instinct built in us by the Lord, I think, that it is in the concrete that you find symbols and signs, and they are looking for that.”

Vigen Guroian, author of Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child’s Moral Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2023)

Vigen Guroian discusses the nature and narrative value of classic fairy tales. Guroian reflects on the power of fairy tales as creators of identity for young children. He claims that children have a great narrative sense and want to enter the stories for themselves by hearing them over and over again. Guroian critiques many modern adaptations of fairy tales for destroying their narrative coherence and power, reducing the stories to a detachable idea or moral. Guroian lists examples of fairy tales that embody both great virtue and narrative value, such as John Ruskin’s “The King of the Golden River,” the Grimm Brothers’ original “Cinderella,” and the theologically sacramental tales of George MacDonald.      ⇧

Michael Dominic Taylor

“Metaphysics is a difficult term. On the one hand, you’ve got all sorts of eclectic and obscurantist ideas about what metaphysics is . . . but I still insist on using the term metaphysics because I do think it deserves a retrieval of its original meaning which is simply a reference to our Greek heritage and the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle. . . . And metaphysics as part of philosophy has always been a question of how to live well. So that idea that metaphysics is somehow abstract or obtuse or gets away from what’s most real couldn’t be further from the truth.”

Michael Dominc Taylor, author of The Foundations of Nature: Metaphysics of Gift for an Integral Ecological Ethic (Cascade Books, 2020)

Michael Dominic Taylor argues that we can only orient ourselves within and toward the natural world by recovering the classical understanding of metaphysics, which, far from being obscure and abstract, is a pursuit of wisdom about how to live well. He explains that every person holds their own metaphysical presuppositions about reality and its functions. In modernity, what is regarded as “real”reality is the pure product of empirical, quantitative science, and thus functions mechanistically. Humans, as a part of nature, are similarly atomically structured and are therefore isolated and self-serving, with personal autonomy as their highest goal. Taylor challenges this selfish, purposeless metaphysics with the sacrificial, self-giving love of Christ. He asserts that this is aided by reclaiming wonder as a positive disposition, one that orients us towards the transcendent reality that lies beyond our own empirical faculties, the reality that gives us purpose and life.      ⇧

Thomas Pfau

“Plato ultimately realizes, especially in the Sophist, that the idea of truth that is utterly self-contained — a kind of kernel or cocoon that is in no way susceptible [to] any kind of interpretation — would ultimately cause philosophy to grind to a halt. In the end, all truth must be . . . mediated in some form. And this is where images actually become quite crucial.”

Thomas Pfau, author of Incomprehensible Certainty: Metaphysics and Hermeneutics of the Image (University of Notre Dame Press, 2022) 

Thomas Pfau asserts that images are a necessary and uniquely gifted means of realizing truth in creation. Plato’s awareness that all truth must be realized through mediation provides the foundation for refuting iconoclasm: while not coinciding with the prototype it depicts, an image nonetheless fulfills it, after the model of Christ's incarnation. In this way, the visible image must be an anticipation of the divine; otherwise visible creation becomes the antithesis of divine truth, putting creation at odds with God. Pfau describes how images do not merely factually render their meaning, but instead, like truth, always reveal more than could have been predicted — a new facet of the reality of the prototype. Images, then, are harbingers of truth, sacramentally calling us to participate in their beauty and to know, differently now than before, what it is they manifest.      ⇧

Jason Paone

“[Aquinas] thought that, of all the gospels, John’s gospel peers deepest into the mysteries of Christ’s divine nature. And that’s sort of at the center of his understanding of what scripture does and what scripture reveals. It reveals God and God’s saving work in the world. And Christ is sort of the epicenter of God and God’s saving work in the world. And specifically, Christ as the son of God — Christ as divine. [Aquinas] says the gospel of John is most attentive to Christ’s divine nature. Whereas the other three gospels are symbolized by terrestrial animals — a man, a bull calf, and a lion — John is symbolized by an eagle because he flies highest in peering into the divine nature of Christ.”

Jason Paone, editor of Thomas Aquinas, Selected Commentaries on the New Testament (Word on Fire Academic, 2022)

Jason Paone discusses the insights readers can obtain from reading St. Thomas’s biblical commentaries. Paone explains how many scholars overlook St. Thomas's commentaries as they study his philosophical and theological works and appropriate his wisdom in the interest of confronting aspects of modern thought. But Paone argues that St. Thomas’s Summae are best understood in light of his spiritually rich biblical exegesis. Paone focuses especially on St. Thomas’s love of the Gospel of John, which he views as a microcosm of all the Gospels — portraying Christ as the source of grace (as in the New Testament collectively), the power of Christ’s grace (emphasized in Paul’s epistles), and the effect of that grace (summarized in Revelation). Paone explains how reading St. Thomas’s commentaries can give readers a feel for the saint’s personality, rhetorical flair, and Christocentric vision that underlie all his work.      ⇧

Matthew Levering

“Over the past decade, I’ve noticed that, in the popular sphere, at least, there seems to be less and less appeal to conscience. Conscience itself seems to be fading itself a little bit. Even in the theological realm . . . sometimes you find people avoiding the word conscience and it’s just kind of like, ‘do your own thing.’ . . . It’s really becoming ‘do your own thing’ in an open way, whereas before they could camouflage it a little bit with the word conscience, but now they might just talk about discernment, or experience, or the arc of history, or something else.”

Matthew Levering, author of The Abuse of Conscience: A Century of Catholic Moral Theology (Eerdmans, 2021)

Matthew Levering describes how pre-Vatican II moral manuals resulted in readers pushing their freedoms to the limit of law, fostering a minimalist morality. Levering explains that this approach to the moral life ignores the glorious, charitable life in Christ, and does so largely because it has lost a proper view of the conscience. For Levering, the conscience delivers Divine Law, which must subsequently be enacted by a charitable prudence. In this way, conscience is not mere individual discernment, but is the Law to be followed in order to grow in virtue. This view of conscience also rebuffs the Existentialist movement toward personal authenticity. Levering argues that conscience centers the individual on Christ, not one’s own personal desires or feelings, and drives humans towards their proper end, rather than sanction their worldly whims.      ⇧

Guests on Volume 157

• ALLAN C. CARLSON on early 20th-century American political projects that supported strong family life
• MATTHEW STEWART on how the novels of Wallace Stegner explored the dilemmas of community in modern America
• STEVEN KNEPPER on how philosopher William Desmond's thought recovers a metaphysics of wonder
• HOLLY ORDWAY on the "meaning-making" power of great literature and its role in evangelism
• NORM KLASSEN on the challenges to belief in rationality in modern literary theory
• NORMAN WIRZBA on how a recognition of our "meshwork" lives encourages spiritual practices with an agrarian slant

Click here to download a pdf file with the contents listing and bibliographic information about this Volume.

Allan C. Carlson

When I was doing the work on this book, I went . . . to do a chapter on family policy and the New Deal. And, the first thing that struck me –astonishingly – was how uniformly the new feminist historians of the 1970s, the 1980s, and the 1990s despised the New Deal, despised Eleanor Roosevelt, despised Franklin Roosevelt, despised the maternalist campaign. Not what I would have expected because again, ‘The New Deal is the great project of a liberal, left wing America. It’s socialism and so on.’ Aren’t feminists in favor of the New Deal? Well, they were not. And it was because the maternalists, their foes, had gained control of the levers of power. . . and virtually every domestic policy adopted by the Franklin Roosevelt administration in the 1930s and early 1940s, every one assumed the maternalist family vision.

Allan C. Carlson, author of The American Way: Family and Community in the Shaping of the American Identity (Second edition, Canon Press, 2022)

Historian Allan Carlson discusses how pigeonholing pro-family policy as left or right is counterproductive, both historically and in the present. In his recently reissued book, The American Way: Family and Community in the Shaping of the American Identity, Carlson relates the history of the maternalist movement, a prime example to muddle “left” or “right.” This movement grew out of the vision and work of social reform pioneer Jane Addams. In her work to help the immigrants of Chicago, Addams nurtured deep suspicion of industrial policy, setting up various efforts in order to “preserve ancestral ties within the new industrial order.” She advocated for public policy (such as a family wage) to support women specifically in their unique roles as wives and mothers, and the maternalists followed in Addams’s steps.The feminists of that time set themselves up as foes to the maternalists. In fact, the feminist National Women’s Party was funded by industrial capitalists who abhorred the idea of a family wage. Surprisingly — given today’s political climate — the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt was hated by the “liberals” of that day and entirely indebted to the lobbying of the maternalist movement.      ⇧

•     •     •

Matthew Stewart

“One of the things that was interesting to me, too, about his California novels is that he has these kind of jokes about the rebels always actually being pretty conformist in their rebellion. Their rebellions kind of have their own shared paths. . . But, [Stegner] wanted to be part of something bigger than himself. It struck me as I was working on the book, the idea of the rolling stone… that gathers no moss: that three major icons of the 20th century – Rolling Stone magazine, Rolling Stones band, and the Bob Dylan song – it’s just really central to our whole mythology in the 20th century. He actually said, you know, ‘I wanted some attics in my life.’ He didn’t know the names of three of his grandparents, so he had no past whatsoever and he recognized that that’s what so many Americans were chasing after, it’s ‘what I have,’ but it’s not at all satisfying to have no past and no ancestry.”

Matthew Stewart, author of The Most Beautiful Place on Earth: Wallace Stegner in California (The University of Utah Press, 2022)

Author Matthew D. Stewart discusses the placemaking tragedy of regionalist writer Wallace Stegner in his book The Most Beautiful Place on Earth: Wallace Stegner in California. Stegner described two American character types: the “boomer” and the “sticker.” The boomer creates American boomtowns and never sets down roots, while the “sticker” loves the place that they have made and stays there. Stewart explains that Stegner writes wistfully of these types because his own father was a “boomer” and Stegner longed to be of a family of “stickers,” a family who had attics of multigenerational accumulation. Stegner ultimately set down his roots in Palo Alto, California – a profoundly ironic choice because the place where he chose to stick became the ultimate boomtown: Silicon Valley. Stewart analyzes Stegner’s ambivalence to his chosen place in his California novels (All the Little Live Things, The Spectator Bird, and Angle of Repose). Tragically, as Stewart states, “homemaking was no easy task. . . . What Stegner wanted from his place was not possible to recreate on his own.”      ⇧

•     •     •

Steven Knepper

“In experiences of wonder, you’re struck by wonder. . . It’s not something you decide to do. It’s not something that you can force even. You know, you can cultivate openness to wonder, but in the end, wonder depends on being receptive to something that strikes you, being open to it. So, Desmond doesn’t discount willing. He says that humans are both receptive, porous creatures (He likes the word porous to describe this sense of receptivity), but we’re also willing creatures as well. And there’s a way in which those two things shouldn’t be just sort of posed against each other. They work together . . . To overemphasize just the willing, is not to be able to understand many many things in just our daily existence, broadly: from a great athlete, or the work of a craftsman, to the experience of wonder or the experience of beauty, even just sort of navigating your daily life. You have to have a combination of receptivity and openness and action.”

— Steven Knepper, author of Wonder Strikes: Approaching Aesthetics and Literature with William Desmond (State University of New York Press, 2022)

Professor Steven Knepper describes why the work of philosopher William Desmond has dramatically formed his understanding of aesthetics and theology. In his book Wonder Strikes: Approaching Aesthetics and Literature with William Desmond, Knepper gives both an orientation to the demanding philosophy of Desmond as well as an application in literature. As Knepper explains, four themes are especially prominent in Desmond’s work: wonder, receptivity, abundance, and affirmation. Knepper centers on the theme of wonder, explaining how in Desmond’s account, there are modes of wonder: astonishment (which is primarily affirmative), perplexity (which can be unsettling and even negative), and curiosity (which is not existential, but primarily looks at how things work). Desmond doesn’t see these modes as oppositional. Even curiosity, while it can become just a preoccupation on a surface level, is fundamentally an openness to the intelligibility of existence which leads back to wonder at the deeper mystery of being.      ⇧

•     •     •

Holly Ordway

“[There is a] distrust of stories in general in some sense,  because stories are incarnations of ideas. You have particular characters in a particular place and setting. It’s not pure abstract idea. And so that’s why you care about them . . . And, in one sense there is a sense of the power of narrative, but also, I think, a fear or distrust of it, because it gets us involved with this messy business of givenness and that makes us uncomfortable. But of course, that is a discomfort that comes from rubbing up against the fundamental, incarnate, created,  given nature of reality. And so, that’s a good reason, I think, to grab onto storytelling and say, ‘Well, let’s use this.”

— Holly Ordway, author of Tales of Truth: A Guide to Sharing the Gospel through Literature (Word on Fire Institute, 2022)

Professor Holly Ordway is convinced that discussing literature is an exemplary way for modern secular people to learn how to attach meaning to Christian concepts.. In her book, Tales of Truth: A Guide to Sharing the Gospel through Literature, Ordway explains that too often we can talk of abstract ideas like “truth, goodness, and beauty” and unbelievers have no way of connecting those concepts to reality. The way to make meaning of those concepts is through imagination, as Ordway argues (following C. S. Lewis). Until the imagination can supply an image for a concept, the reason has no materials with which to work. As Ordway observes, since stories are fundamentally the incarnation of ideas, they offer the imagination the materials it needs to make meaning and can therefore, make the Gospel meaningful to modern people.      ⇧

•     •     •

Norm Klassen

“I want to give them a sense . . . [that] we have to respect the deep critique of what passes for rationality, especially since the Enlightenment, especially in the way that we embrace science and economic thinking. There’s something really important going on here. Really valuable. But, can we affirm rationality as one of God’s gifts to us? Not the only gift, and not to be unaccompanied by faith, or love (in the way that Augustine especially will talk about love) but can we acknowledge that there is something more here that needs to be accessed and talked about and thought about. . . . I see this as kind of a work of pre-evangelism.”

— Norm Klassen, author of Rationality Is . . . The Essence of Literary Theory (Cascade Books, 2022)

English professor Norm Klassen argues that while literary theory makes a necessary and important critique of Enlightenment rationality, it means to undercut the validity of reason itself. In his book, Rationality Is . . . The Essence of Literary Theory, Klassen unpacks the goals of Feminist theory, Critical Race theory, and Freudian Psychoanalysis. Klassen believes that many English professors who are teaching theory do not really know the philosophy and metaphysics behind it; they do not understand the radical relativization of meaning. Klassen is not defending a modernist rationality; instead, he believes that a theology of participation, following especially after the insights of Paul Ricoeur, can account both for theory’s valid critiques of rationality, but also the reality that rationality participates in the Logos. Klassen ultimately believes that Christ is the “Word behind the inner word” that “underwrites the the confidence we have that we can understand reality.”      ⇧

•     •     •

Norman Wirzba

“Apart from an understanding and appreciation for soil, for the land, we will be at odds with everything else that we touch. And this is important to stress because when we talk about nurturing the soil that then nurtures the plants that nurture the animals that nurture us and so forth, nurturing the soil is bedrock insofar as it helps us appreciate how we are soil-birthed, soil-nurtured kinds of beings. That we can’t think about our world as just a production platform or a stage upon which we do the varying and highly interesting things that human beings might do. No, we have to make our decisions about social practices, economic practices, political priorities with the health of the land first. Because when the land is neglected, everything that depends upon it will also suffer.”

— Norman Wirzba, author of Agrarian Spirit: Cultivating Faith, Community, and the Land (University of Notre Dame Press, 2022)

Theologian Norman Wirzba argues that God is an agrarian and that therefore, Christian ascetic practices must be deeply agrarian. In his book, Agrarian Spirit: Cultivating Faith, Community, and the Land, Wirzba explains that his argument is not a back-to-the-land enterprise or a nostalgic ode to the way things used to be. To be an agrarian is not a matter of being rural or urban, instead, he defines, it’s “for people to understand that we have to nurture the land that nurtures us.” The skills that are implicit to nurturing and cultivating must shape our spiritual practices. Christian spirituality is not merely about getting our cognitive affairs in order, but it’s about being formed by the kind of bodily practices that we understand through the life of our embodied Lord.      ⇧

Guests on Volume 156

• KIMBELL KORNU on how and why theological concerns should not be prohibited within the practice of medicine
• PAUL TYSON on how the conventional definition of “science” makes metaphysical claims in the name of excluding metaphysical claims
• MARK NOLL on how the Bible shaped American history, and how American ideologies shaped the reading of the Bible
• DAVID NEY on how reading the Bible “figurally” opens us to its layers of meaning and to the transforming work it effects
• WILLIAM C. HACKETT on the relationships between philosophy and theology, and of both to the meaning embedded in myth
• MARIAN SCHWARTZ on the challenges and rewards of translating Eugene Vodolazkin, Leo Tolstoy, Alexsandr Solzshentsiyn, and others

Click here to download a pdf file with the contents listing and bibliographic information about this Volume.

Kimbell Kornu

“[Maurice Merleau-Ponty] talks about lived experience being the base foundation upon which then scientific reflection can even occur, but modernity has inverted that. You know, the advent of early modern science and thereafter that science, somehow, is the standard by which we have to make sense of our lived experience (which is bonkers to me). But if you see that played out in medicine: where patients feel like they’re not being heard, they’re not understood, doctors don’t want to deal with suffering, they don’t want to deal with death. Because these are the actually deep animating questions that drive medicine in the first place. And yet medicine has forgotten its first love — because of its own epistemology.”

— Kimbell Kornu, MD, PhD, on the formation of a new school of medicine at Belmont University in Nashville, and on two published papers

While modern medical orthodoxy considers suffering the ultimate evil, physician and philosopher Kimbell Kornu, MD, PhD, argues that suffering has the potential to be generative. Though he doesn’t exalt suffering and believes that there is a need for pain relief, Kornu does hold that modern medicine has “forgotten its first love” by losing touch with its animating questions of suffering, death, and ultimate meaning. If the goal of modern medicine is a transhumanistic transcendence of suffering, Kornu states, the most efficient way to do this is to get rid of the sufferer. Those physicians who are not willing to go the route of euthanasia or eugenics need a metanarrative to ground the reality of suffering. For Christians, suffering has intrinsic meaning because Christ has suffered and “learned obedience through suffering” (Hebrews 5:8). Kornu argues that this is the metanarrative which enables the physician to provide truly compassionate care.      ⇧

•     •     •

Paul Tyson

“The idea that science is not natural philosophy, it's just knowledge, is really an impossible fiction. And this is what [Michael] Polanyi is so good at: okay, it’s always personal knowledge. we always know in communities of knowers. The inner pole of understanding and the outer pole of reality always connect through the mediation of discourses of meaning. So, actually, there is no such thing as just knowledge. It’s all very well to sort of say that knowledge is only interested in facts and applications, but what you apply your knowledge for is always a philosophical or moral concern and a fact is only a fact as meaningful. So, the ways in which we persuade ourselves [that] we have boxes that separate science from religion and knowledge from philosophy are really disingenuous.”

— Paul Tyson, author of A Christian Theology of Science: Reimagining a Theological Vision of Natural Knowledge (Baker Academic, 2022)

As senior research fellow and co-coordinator of the After Science and Religion project at the University of Queensland, Paul Tyson objects to the categorization of science and religion as completely distinct entities in his book A Christian Theology of Science: Reimagining a Theological Vision of Natural Knowledge. The modern discrete categories are only a late invention, Tyson explains, resulting from coordinated effort by 19th-century scientific naturalists to secularize the universities and free scientific inquiry from any stultifying religious limitations. But, as Tyson argues, this causes all sorts of problems and is actually “disingenuous.” In the end, Tyson relates, the disciplines are intertwined: the theologian must be asking how to connect the natural world with theology, while the scientist must be asking about the meaning of the natural world and the morality of technologies.      ⇧

•     •     •

Mark Noll

“The Methodist emphasis upon the Bible, the need to protect the Bible because it opens the doors of eternity for all and sundry, for ‘red and yellow, black and white,’ that message is really significant. And in my reading of the history, the Protestant groups that said, ‘Yes, we defend the Bible, but we’ve got to have the Bible if we’re going to have a social order,’ or ‘Yes, we defend the Bible, but we have to have the same liberty of interpreting the Bible as we won against the British,’ those voices are just simply not as influential. The Methodists multiply and multiply and multiply again. . . . There’s nothing in the 19th-century world like the rapid expanse of Methodism between 1790 and 1830 or 1840 in the United States, and that expanse is on the back of an allegiance to the Bible — it’s not entirely non-political — but an allegiance to the Bible that is primarily spiritual, without too many political trappings.”

— Mark Noll, author of America’s Book: The Rise and Decline of a Bible Civilization, 1794–1911 (Oxford University Press, 2022)

In America’s Book: The Rise and Decline of a Bible Civilization, 1794–1911, historian Mark Noll argues that the Bible held a unique preeminence in the years after the Revolutionary War into the 1830s and 40s. While the Bible was frequently invoked in the Colonial era as a rhetorical prop, it was really only a “reservoir of tropes;” it was not used as a foundation for reason. By contrast, in the early years of the 18th century, specifically as Americans responded to Thomas Paine’s devastating critique of the Bible in The Age of Reason, the Bible became the wellspring for argument and reason. This unique authority of the Scriptures held until the 1830s and 40s when the issue of slavery came to the forefront, and those both for and against passionately argued from the Scriptures for their position. While Noll doesn’t necessarily see this “rise and decline” of the Scriptures as a terrible thing for modern Christians, he suggests it “may have been worse for the country than for Bible believers.”      ⇧

•     •     •

David Ney

“At its broadest, figural readers are interested in exploring and teasing out the connections that exist between different Scripture words. Figural readers refuse to atomize biblical texts and, in fact, they’re convinced that the meaning and specifically, the divine meaning of words, can only be understood in light of the whole canon of Scripture. Ultimately, the promise of figural reading is being able to see the world through the lens of Scripture; and therefore, somehow, if only in an attenuated, impartial way, through the eyes of God himself.”

— David Ney, co-author of All Thy Lights Combine: Figural Reading in the Anglican Tradition (Lexham Press, 2022) 

Church historian David Ney explains how the figural reading of Scripture promises to help readers inhabit the Scriptures and see the world through the lens of Scripture. Ney is the co-editor of All Thy Lights Combine: Figural Reading in the Anglican Tradition, which presents case studies through church history of those who exemplify figural reading. Figural reading contrasts with a grammatical-historical method because it refuses to atomize the text. Nonetheless, it does not endorse making the text into abstractions so that Scripture can become a free-for-all of meaning. Instead, figural reading means taking seriously the Scripture words for individual objects, recognizing, as Ney states, “There is a divine meaning attached to each object in the Scriptures and the only way we can similarly attach a divine meaning to the objects we encounter every day is to inhabit the Scriptures.”      ⇧

•     •     •

William C. Hackett

“Narrative intelligence — storytelling — is older than theoretical intelligence. . . . Theoretical intelligence emerges out of the milieu of mythic intelligence. That’s one indication that storytelling — narrative understanding — is not only the condition of the emergence of theoretical intelligence but also its the permanent condition for theoretical intelligence. That means that all theory and the formulation of concepts based on the perception of fundamental distinctions in the world (so we’re talking about what philosophy is there) is only possible within a framework of narrative understanding.”

—William C. Hackett, Author of Philosophy in Word and Name: Myth, Wisdom, Apocalypse (Angelico Press, 2020) 

Philosopher William C. Hackett reflects on the integral relationship between narrative and theoretical intelligence in his book Philosophy in Word & Name: Myth, Wisdom, and Apocalypse. In the High Middle Ages, theology and philosophy were deliberately divided in the universities by faculty consensus. Hackett sees this encapsulating moment as “framing the history of modernity itself.” Because modernity prioritizes theoretical intelligence above mythic or metaphorical intelligence, then myth, wisdom, and apocalypse become fragmented. But Hackett argues that they are each integral and that they must not supplant each other. Ultimately, Hackett says, “myth never goes away” and in some way apocalypse itself includes a “recovery” of myth and wisdom.      ⇧

•     •     •

Marian Schwartz

“What it really comes down to in translating is being so intimate with the language that you understand what is standard and what deviates from the standard and why it does and how it does and what the implications of that are. So if something is completely standard and unmarked in any way, then it has to be translated by something unmarked. And obviously, you’re looking at register; you’re looking at types of vocabulary; you’re looking at approaches to word formation.”

— Marian Schwartz, translator of Eugene Vodolazkin’s Brisbane: A Novel (Plough Publishing House, 2022)

Translator Marian Schwartz discusses intricacies and fashions in the translation world as well as her recent work on Eugene Vodolazkin’s Brisbane: A Novel. Schwartz explains that the fundamental part of translation is an intimacy with the language that attends to what is standard and what deviates. The role of the translator is to be able to artfully mark what is non-standard. Schwartz draws attention to matters of syntax that most readers overlook (for example, that “said Mark” is word order from a century ago and all modern books would use “Mark said”). Since, in a translation, one will always be reading both the original and the translator, ultimately, Schwartz states, “There is no translation that is not interpretation.”       ⇧
 

Guests on Volume 155

• DONALD KRAYBILL on how the Amish "negotiate" with modernity as communities by making decisions about the uses of technology
• THADDEUS KOZINSKI on the dubious claim within liberalism that public life can be well-ordered by entirely neutral (non-transcendent) principles
• DAVID BENTLEY HART on how "two-tier Thomism" deviates from historic Christian understanding of the relationship between God and Creation
• NIGEL BIGGAR on recognizing problems with the notion of "natural rights," without denying the importance of rights understood as granted within social and political contexts
• RAVI SCOTT JAIN on reconfiguring science and the teaching of science within the framework of natural philosophy, natural history, and natural science
• JASON BAXTER on how C. S. Lewis’s imagination was shaped by texts from the Middle Ages

Click here to download a pdf file with the contents listing and bibliographic information about this Volume. 

Donald Kraybill 

“My basic research question when I started this research with the Amish in the mid-80s to late-80s was, how is it possible for a tradition-laden group like the Amish who reject cars, reject electricity off the public grid, who reject high school, on and on — how is it possible for a group like that to be growing and thriving and flourishing in modern life, in modern society? They were and still are doubling every 20 years . . . And my answer was, well, they have found ways to negotiate with modernity: to accept certain things, to reject other things, and then to make a lot of compromises and then also to adapt — or as one Amish man said “Amishize” — equipment and make it fit into their way of life."

— Donald Kraybill, author of What the Amish Teach Us: Plain Living in a Busy World (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021)

Sociologist Donald Kraybill explains how the Amish have learned to “negotiate with modernity,” in his book What the Amish Teach Us: Plain Living in a Busy World. Kraybill has been writing about the Amish for decades. His curiosity was piqued initially by observing that Amish were flourishing — doubling every twenty years — despite the fact that they look like they are from the year 1900. His answer is that the Amish have found ways to dynamically reject and accept certain aspects of modernity as a community. Interestingly, the Amish origins do not contain a protest to technology. And, in fact, their origins include such modern ideas as voluntarism and separation of church and state (manifested in their rejection of the state’s demand for infant baptism). Kraybill also marvels at Amish ingenuity and innovation. In many ways, he observes, the Amish have a “culture of restraint” that is “spurring innovation.”      ⇧

•     •     •

Thaddeus Kozinski

“As the idolatries become more and more insane and explicit, and when one realizes that substitute religions are kind of taking over the culture, one starts to see that, ‘Wait a minute, this isn’t supposed to happen in liberalism,’ and yet it is happening.  And then the question is, ‘Why is it happening?' And the way I look at is, if politics and culture are not based on the real, and the real is known to us through tradition (and through the God-established tradition of Christianity) . . . if in some sense, all our actions (whether individual or communal, social, institutional or personal) are not somehow guided by that tradition in an integrated way, then some other comprehensive tradition — a substitute, a counterfeit — is going to crop up and emerge.”

— Thaddeus Kozinski, author of Modernity as Apocalypse: Sacred Nihilism and the Counterfeits of Logos (Angelico Press, 2019)

Thaddeus Kozinski argues that liberal order’s ideal of tradition-less neutrality is itself a tradition, in his book Modernity as Apocalypse: Sacred Nihilism and the Counterfeits of Logos. Kozinski, highly influenced by philosopher D. C. Schindler, explains how all the elements of a worldview exist “within a mythos and a logos that’s enculturated and integrated in a theology.” And, when they are not integrated within the real — what God has established in Christianity — these elements become disparate and “insane.” Ultimately, it’s “Christ or nothing.” And, as Kozinski states (referencing David Bentley Hart) “the nothing ends up portraying itself as a counterfeit architectonic religion.”       ⇧

•     •     •

David Bentley Hart

“If there is, as I say, a certain porosity between the natural and supernatural, if the human . . . is invested already by its very nature with a divine vocation and a divine dignity and a predisposition to the good that’s intrinsic to our nature, then there are all sorts of realms where the law is non compos. But if in fact grace is extrinsic to the nature of the creature — which is the axiom that dominates this sect — then in fact, those who claim a divine warrant for governance can make the law absolute. There’s nothing in human nature itself that demands deference, that intrinsically possesses the dignity of created gods on the way to becoming one with God. Instead, we are just natural beings with an inherently natural end and if we are to be conduced to a higher destiny by an extrinsic grace, then that may take the form of an absolute legal power invested in a sort of throne and altar or a sacerdotal monarchical system and that’s . . . the form the new integralism takes.”

— David Bentley Hart, author of  You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature
  (Notre Dame Press, 2022)

In his book You are Gods: Nature and Supernature, David Bentley Hart argues that Biblical and Christian history flatly contradict the new integralist return to a two-tiered system of nature versus supernature. Hart believes that the impulse toward this metaphysical vision follows after the political vision: a desire to return to a non-existent medieval ideal where absolute power is manifested in “throne and altar or a sacerdotal monarchical system.” While we can all justly criticize modernity, Hart believes the new integralist critique of modern liberalism neglects the reality that the flaws of liberalism proceed out of the flaws of Christendom. Even the common dismissal of modern ideas of freedom as “voluntarist” is inadequate, Hart articulates. Because Enlightenment understandings of freedom proceed out of Renaissance humanism, modern ideas of freedom find their origin in an age that took seriously the god-like endowment of freedom of choice to those created in the image of God.        ⇧

•     •     •

Nigel Biggar

“As a Christian, I don’t believe in a general right to liberty. I mean, if I’m a Hobbesian, then yes, we’re all at liberty to do whatever it takes to survive; if that means scratch each others’ eyes out, then we’re at liberty to do it. But, as a Christian, I believe we are born with responsibility and therefore we have room for choices, but we are born, not only with the liberty of making choices, we are born also into social obligations, which are, as it were, co-original. So there is no original, undefined liberty. . . . We may have a right to liberties of certain kinds in certain circumstances, but it is the abstraction that is the problem.”

— Nigel Biggar, author of What's Wrong with Rights? (Oxford University Press, 2020)

In his book, What’s Wrong with Rights?, theologian Nigel Biggar argues that the problem with rights talk today is its abstraction from context and from the process of moral deliberation. While Biggar does take issue with much of contemporary rights talk, he is also critical of many Christian thinkers’ carelessness in dismissing it altogether — not distinguishing between natural moral rights and positive legal rights. Some rights talk is legitimate, Biggar explains. Positive legal rights are often vitally important. On the other hand, he argues that there are no natural rights because the social institutions that strengthen and enforce what are normally considered natural rights are not always everywhere existent. Ultimately, Biggar argues that legal rights belong at the end of a process of moral conclusion — if they are introduced at the outset, they are too abstract to be helpful.        ⇧

•     •     •

Ravi Scott Jain

“The best way to understand theology is the same kind of genetic/synthetic way that we advocate in the study of physics and biology — seeing the narrative of discovery. And part of it, too, is that the narrative of discovery is not merely discovery, it’s also a narrative of demonstration. Because in the liberal arts, there’s always this alternation between, 'You discovered something. That’s great!' But how do you get other people to believe your discoveries? You have to demonstrate it. And so that, when the students start learning not only to discover things, but also to demonstrate them to others, that’s also powerful and creates powerful habits of thought that cross all the disciplines.”

—  Ravi Scott Jain, co-author of A New Natural Philosophy: Recovering a Natural Science and Christian Pedagogy (Classical Academic Press, 2021)

Science teacher Ravi Jain discusses natural philosophy, the “love of wisdom in the realm of nature,” as the overarching discipline in the sciences. In A New Natural Philosophy: Recovering a Natural Science and Christian Pedagogy, Jain and his co-authors, Robbie Andreason and Chris Hall, approach the sciences with a belief that “truth does not exclude mystery, but embraces it.” A posture of wonder as well as respect for mystery form the bedrock to approach science along the “narrative of discovery.” This “genetic/synthetic” pedagogy means a student comes to a subject by first understanding its context and the grappling that made the question emerge. Then, the process comes to fruition as the student demonstrates what they have discovered. In the end, this movement from discovery to demonstration creates habits and skills that cross all disciplines of learning.       ⇧

•     •     •

Jason Baxter

“If you’ve understood something, you’ve realized it’s beautiful. And when you realize it’s beautiful (this is just good Thomism here), you reach out to grasp it. Your will desires it. You want to sort of bury it in your heart and in your veins, such that it becomes a part of you and it’s not . . . just a set of kilobytes of information in your brain. And I think that Lewis (even before the height of the age of information, what we live in, or what Deborah Lupton calls the ‘datafication of the self’) I think recognized this aspect of literature, but particularly pre-modern medieval literature, as its ability to be haptic, to have this sense of touch and taste and the palpable and then all the consequences of that extraordinary metaphor.”

— Jason Baxter, author of The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind (InterVarsity Press, 2022)

Scholar Jason Baxter explores the limitations of the modern imagination in his book The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind.  C. S. Lewis marveled at the possibilities of literature — especially medieval literature — to communicate an atmosphere, a “weather of emotions.” Reading this literature enabled Lewis to become a “naturalized citizen of the Middle Ages,” and Baxter believes this aspect of Lewis can guide moderns to see and surpass the narrow boundaries of a “psychic paradigm controlled by scientific methodology.” Literature can influence the “deep structure of our thoughts,” Baxter explains. And this helps us to not turn back the clock but attend to the way that our daily lives have become so integrated to the machine. And, most importantly, we can learn that our deepest responses to beauty and goodness are not mere emotions but real knowledge that points to the eternal.        ⇧

Guests on Volume 154

• FELICIA WU SONG on how social media promote “networked individualism” and establish market-driven notions of authority 
• MICHAEL WARD on the historical background of and the central ideas in C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man 
• NORMAN WIRZBA on why we need to think more deeply about what Creation means and about the consequences of recognizing the presence of Christ — the Logos — in all of Creation 
• CARL TRUEMAN on the long-developing social trends that gave rise to new understandings of the self, and to new claims about human sexuality 
• D. C. SCHINDLER on how liberalism — especially in its boundaries between “private” and “public” — allows for less freedom than it pretends 
• KERRY McCARTHY on the life and accomplishments of Tudor-era composer Thomas Tallis 

Click here to download a pdf file with the contents listing and bibliographic information about this Volume. 

Felicia Wu Song 

“When you move into the digital — in the ways that social media has framed us, organized us — we are all individuals. We aren’t attached to households or places. And so there’re ways in which our perceptions of ourselves and even the interactions that we have really are increasingly individualized because there are no other people that are mediating our interactions with other people. . . . No one’s knocking on my Facebook account door . . . to have to get past my brother to get to me — it’s just me. And so, what ends up happening is that the actual infrastructure of the social media shapes our imaginations about where we are located in society. It shapes how we imagine ourselves to be at the center of the networks.”

— Felicia Wu Song, author of Restless Devices: Recovering Personhood, Presence, and Place in the Digital Age (InterVarsity Press, 2021)

Felicia Wu Song argues that social media flattens relationships into problems that need to be solved. Relationships have also been changed by the way social media frames all people as isolated individuals. Before the digital age, individuals were always known in the context of households, in the context of community. With social media, Song explains that each person becomes the center of the network. They also become trained into the sensibilities that life is defined by scarcity and optimization. A Christian social imaginary, she argues, must be counter-cultural to these sensibilities and grapple with what it looks like to live in the abundance of God’s grace and rest.        ⇧

•     •     •

Michael Ward

“The objectivity of value does not mean that we all have to sing in unison. There can still be a plurality of voices, but unless we acknowledge the objectivity of value, there’s no grounds for pluralism. There’s no grounds for anything. And, that’s the fundamental thing, you know, at the back of Lewis’s whole argument. It’s not why should we care whether this or that is valued... but it’s why we should care about anything at all.”

— Michael Ward, author of After Humanity: A Guide to C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man (Word on Fire Academic, 2021)

C. S. Lewis scholar Michael Ward explains why The Abolition of Man is one of Lewis’s most important but also most difficult books. While some readers think that The Abolition of Man is an almost modernist attempt by Lewis to establish absolute value, Ward explains that the book is really much more subtle. Lewis does not deny that we are subjects who experience reality through our own lenses. Instead, says Ward, “All Lewis is denying is that those things are themselves absolute and that they eradicate the possibility of objective knowledge.” Ultimately, Ward explains, Lewis warns that if we embrace radical subjectivism, we are headed toward cultural ruin.        ⇧

•     •     •

Norman Wirzba

“If the starting point for Christians is that the world that we inhabit is not only occasionally, perhaps at certain points, the object of God’s love, but is in fact the material manifestation of God’s love, how can we simply leave that behind and say, ‘Well, the doctrine [of creation] is primarily about origins, and we fight about when that actually happened, but it’s not of enduring perennial practical significance.’ That seemed to me to be a theological catastrophe and it’s no accident then that Christians are really late to the game in thinking about how do we build a world in which species can flourish together.”

— Norman Wirzba, author of This Sacred Life: Humanity’s Place in a Wounded World (Cambridge University Press, 2021)

Theologian Norman Wirzba believes that Creation is the “material manifestation of God’s love” and that this fundamental teaching affects everything, especially our understanding of the meaning of modern environmental crises and climate change. In This Sacred Life, Wirzba addresses how the Scriptures never depict a God who is interested in escaping the Creation, and he has never wanted for people to do so either. Instead, as we see in the miracles of Jesus, God desires for all creation to live into the fullness of their way of being — their “tropos,” according to Maximus the Confessor. In the end, Wirzba explains, the tropos of everything in creation is to take care of others — to be for others.        ⇧

•     •     •

Carl Trueman

“If we were to look at the problem of modernity as a basic anthropological mistake,  epitomized by Jean Jacques Rousseau's claim that “Man is born free and everywhere is in chains,” (self-evidently nonsense: nobody’s born free; we’re all born remarkably dependent upon others obviously our parents, but not restricted simply to them); if you think about modernity as being predicated on that fundamental anthropological mistake, then many of the ways that conservative Christians think are predicated on precisely that mistake as well: the emphasis on rights, the emphasis on autonomy, the emphasis on the unencumbered self.”

— Carl Trueman, author of The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution (Crossway Books, 2020)

Historian Carl Trueman argues that conservative Christians are complicit in the same dynamics that they condemn in modern culture. Sexual immorality is the manifestation of deeper issues, Trueman explains, resulting out of the basic anthropological mistake of modernity: assuming that man is “born free, but is everywhere in chains” (Jean-Jacques Rousseau). Trueman explores the way that the concept of self has changed historically, from being outwardly directed to being inwardly directed. The atmosphere of expressive individualism that is pervasive today, he argues, leads to a kind of cultural amnesia.        ⇧

•     •     •

D. C. Schindler

“There is a profound difference between a coincidence of self-interest and an actual real common good — a real thing in its objective reality that gathers us around itself. And when you lose a sense of things being able to gather us in a common good — and things beyond mere material concerns, so things like truth, dignity, culture, beauty, things that have a transcendent significance and ultimately God and the worship of God — when those things are no longer permitted to be affirmed, you lose any positive principle for genuine public life.”

— D. C. Schindler, author of The Politics of the Real: The Church Between Liberalism and Integralism (New Polity Press, 2021)

Philosopher D. C. Schindler argues that — because of the nature of the incarnation — when one rejects reality, one is rejecting God. Rejecting the real — failing to recognizing and honor what is really the case — also means the loss of any true “public” gathered around a common good. In the pre-modern world, “the public” was understood as the life of the community, but with modernity, the individual shifts from being a member of a community to being the center of gravity in and of himself. This means that the public sphere became merely the place for the gathering of individuals. Liberalism sought to make way for these individuals to function together without any orientation to an explicit common good. But, as Schindler argues, without a common good, public life collapses in upon itself.        ⇧

•     •     •

Kerry McCarthy

“The one thing I’m struck with most with Tallis in particular is his resilience. So many professional musicians in his situation quit music and did something else. They became teachers; they became clergy; they became theologians. A lot of them just died fairly young. But Tallis kept going and it’s almost a miraculous lifespan if you think about that.”

— Kerry McCarthy, author of Tallis (Oxford University Press, 2020)

Music historian Kerry McCarthy relates the shifting historical circumstances that surrounded the life of English Renaissance composer Thomas Tallis. While the documentary evidence we have is very slim (only about 35 to 40 documents), McCarthy shares that what emerges clearly is a picture of Tallis’s resilience over the span of his half-century long career. Riding the tumultuous tides of political and musical changes in those years, Tallis constantly had to reinvent his musical style. And, McCarthy conveys, these layers of tumult, stylistic changes, and foreign emphases led to the music which still captivates and surprises us today.        ⇧

Guests on Volume 153

• CHARLES C. CAMOSY on how the exclusion of theological affirmations in bioethics threatens human dignity
• O. CARTER SNEAD on how laws and public regulations conceal an implicit theological anthropology
• MATT FEENEY on how anticipation of the “college admissions process” increases the temptation toward competitive parenting
• MARGARITA A. MOONEY on how the liberal arts promote a love of learning
• LOUIS MARKOS on why Christians shouldn’t ignore the gifts to the Church given by Plato’s philosophical insights
• ALAN JACOBS on escaping the tempestuous climate of modern media by reading books by dead people

Click here to download a pdf file with the contents listing and bibliographic information about this Volume. 

Charles C. Camosy 

“Some secular folks . . . claim to have a vision according to natural kinds where we would include the newborn, disabled infant along with the college professor as being along the same lines, despite the obvious difference . . . but I’m not very convinced that those arguments actually work. Frankly, I think we see the more and more people move, you know, from a theological lens to a philosophical one, the more that that particular set of arguments fails to convince, and instead we move more towards autonomy, rationality, self-awareness, productivity as the things that we value. And then we find quite readily that not all human beings have those in equal measure — some appear not to have them at all — and we end up with radical inequality.”

— Charles C. Camosy, author of Losing Our Dignity: How Secularized Medicine is Undermining Fundamental Human Equality (New City Press, 2021)

Professor Charles Camosy argues that modern medicine lacks an adequate explanation for why all people should be treated with equal worth in his book Losing Our Dignity: How Secularized Medicine is Undermining Fundamental Human Equality. Instead, when the highest values are autonomy, rationality, and productivity, he states, “We end up with radical inequality.” Nonetheless, Camosy argues that the best ethical intuitions and judgments in modern medicine are grounded in a theological account of human nature. For example, historically, the de facto posture of “not aiming at death” emerged from medieval battlefield discussions between priests and doctors. Christians ought to be confident in our theological rationale, Camosy believes, because it has vital implications for thorny medical issues today.        ⇧

•     •     •

O. Carter Snead

“The methodological claim is that the richest way to understand matters of public bioethics – this area of law and public policy–  is to ask the question of  ‘What vision of human identity and human flourishing anchors and undergirds and animates the laws and policies under consideration?’ And the reason I think this is a valuable point of entry into that kind of analysis is because all law purports to (and is intended to and is best understood as) providing for the flourishing of persons or protecting of persons. And so, if that’s true – and I think it is – the law has to assume (or have a set of assumptions) about what a person is and what human flourishing is.”

— O. Carter Snead, author of What It Means to Be Human: The Case for the Body in Public Bioethics (Harvard University Press, 2021)

Political scientist O. Carter Snead argues that all matters of public bioethics are determined by beliefs about human identity and flourishing. In his book, What It Means to Be Human: The Case for the Body in Public Bioethics, Snead analyzes abortion, end-of-life decision-making, and assisted reproduction, finding that the public bioethics concerning these matters is undergirded by the values of expressive individualism. Within this modern vision, human identity is found through a process of self-discovery, obviously prioritizing autonomy and detachment. And Snead makes the point that this vision is just a snapshot of humans at their most fortunate. Even at their very best, humans experience radical dependence at the beginning and end of life, which means that all humans have unchosen obligations and duties of care. Snead argues that this reality must be seriously reckoned with in public bioethics.        ⇧

•     •     •

Matt Feeney

“There’s an irony about this stuff because the kids are kind of trained in the appearance of . . . niceness and concern, but, you know, from the standpoint of citizenship, it’s also perhaps a training in pliability and agreeability and conformity. This is my argument: that the process . . . of forming yourself in order to satisfy a committee is a process of making yourself . . . pliable. You have to kind of bend yourself in order to look the right way and then, to turn yourself into the kind of person that a committee likes.”

— Matt Feeney, author of Little Platoons: A Defense of Family in a Competitive Age (Basic Books, 2021)

In his book Little Platoons: A Defense of Family in a Competitive Age, political philosopher Matt Feeney argues that family life has become “colonized” for the sake of competitive child rearing. A father of three, Feeney started to explore this idea when his oldest daughter was in middle school, and he saw the pressure on students to take extracurriculars simply for the sake of their college application. Feeney does not take a scornful or shaming stance. Rather, his book flows from reflection on how children have been forced to compete in order to stand out to college admissions committees. These admissions committees now play an outsized role in the lives of students, and he wonders why college faculties do not do more to protest the diminishment of the formative role of the teacher as the center of collegiate life.        ⇧

•     •     •

Margarita A. Mooney

“A liberal arts approach to education is broader than simply the content of the curriculum. It’s broader than simply including the great works of philosophy, literature, and theology. It’s an approach to the human person . . . that builds social order from the ground up. The liberal arts vision of education presupposes that by forming persons holistically, they will know how to enter into common life and how to build social bonds. So, the liberal arts education is not a social project in the sense that it doesn’t set out to create a particular set of political or social institutions. It aims to equip the next generation with an understanding of the traditions that preceded them — with a starting point for which to venture out into their common life, their shared life together.”

— Margarita A. Mooney, author of The Love of Learning: Seven Dialogues on the Liberal Arts (Cluny Media, 2021)

Professor Margarita A. Mooney argues that a liberal arts approach starts with a holistic and personal understanding of the individual and “builds social order from the ground up.” In her book, The Love of Learning: Seven Dialogues on the Liberal Arts, Mooney invites the reader into conversations with seven individuals invested in educational philosophy. As a professor, her own interest in the subject began in listening to her students' needs and realizing how vital it was for them to grasp the telos of their educational model. She wants students to grapple with whether the end of knowledge in their educational model is primarily about power or about knowledge in and of itself (and its ability to shape the soul). Ultimately, she argues that a liberal arts education is the model that does the most justice to the shape of the human soul and the needs of the greater social order.        ⇧

•     •     •

Louis Markos

“We need to move beyond the shifting shadows to contemplate that which is truly true, and really real. It was Plato who taught us to seek after the beatific vision of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. Now, thankfully, we have special revelation to tell us that yes, we can contemplate, but what we’re contemplating is not impersonal forms, as they are in Plato, but the very personal, trans-personal, triune God. But still, Plato is explaining to us the need not to be deceived by shadows, and to grow and move forward into the light of reality.”

 — Louis Markos, author of From Plato to Christ: How Platonic Thought Shaped the Christian Faith (InterVarsity Press, 2021)

Professor Louis Markos is weary of Plato being blamed for everything bad in the western Christian world. In his book, From Plato to Christ: How Platonic Thought Shaped the Christian Faith, Markos claims instead that Plato needs to be recognized for his unique and serendipitous role in preparing the world for Christ. While certainly recognizing that the fullness of revelation is not to be found in Platonic philosophy, Markos still believes Christians need to reclaim the goodness that the great philosopher was able to reveal. He also wants Christians to stop reading later Gnosticism into Plato himself. Though Plato could not have had the revelation that humans are “enfleshed souls,” he did not believe that the body is inherently evil. Essentially, Markos argues that Plato can be “lifted up” into the fullness revealed in Christ.        ⇧

•     •     •

Alan Jacobs

“It occurred to me that one of the really great things about ‘breaking bread with the dead’ — that is, with the writers and the thinkers and all the people from the past — is that that’s not as scary as sitting down at table with a political enemy, knowing that the conversation could escalate into something very tense or even angry. When you’re breaking bread with the dead, you don’t have to worry about that. . . . If this dead person says something to you that offends or hurts you, you can set the book down. Maybe you can come back to it later or maybe you don’t come back to it later, but you’re in charge of the situation. And it occurred to me that maybe if we can learn to break bread with the dead, it might give us a bit of training that would help us to break bread with the living.”

— Alan Jacobs, author of Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader's Guide to a More Tranquil Mind (Penguin Press, 2020)

English professor Alan Jacobs encourages readers to pick up old books, not primarily for the sake of greatness, but for the sake of difference. In his book Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader’s Guide to a More Tranquil Mind, Jacobs considers how reading old books may be an education in patience and therefore applicable to difficult relationships, especially in our current political and cultural climate. Taking his title from a W. H. Auden quotation, Jacobs reflects on the similarities between reading old books and table fellowship. But he claims that the advantage to reading old books is that readers are in control of the conversation. They can put down the book, pausing (or even ending) the exchange. Nonetheless, if readers patiently engage, especially giving attention to the differences that make them uncomfortable, they may become more adept in dealing with differences between people and even achieve a “tranquil mind.”        ⇧ 

Guests on Volume 152

• ELISABETH LASCH-QUINN on the revival of interest in pre-Christian philosophical schools (in response to postmodern nihilism)
• JEFFREY BILBRO on resisting the disorienting and disintegrating effects of modern media
• ZENA HITZ on the love of learning and the freedom animated by the intellectual life
• JAMES L. NOLAN, JR. on the lessons we should have learned from the experience of the Manhattan Project
• BISHOP ROBERT BARRON on God, freedom, faith, reason, and the need to keep theology linked with sanctity
• JASON BLAKELY  on how the social sciences are interpretive disciplines, more like the humanities than the “hard” sciences

Click here to download a pdf file with the contents listing and bibliographic information about this Volume.

Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn 

“I do really think that part of what we see in these ancient schools of thought — and then, possibly in their resurgence — is that side of human beings: the intellectual and philosophical. And then, that’s not even speaking quite yet of the spiritual. But, I do think that in everyday life, we can see all around us philosophies of different kinds. You know, sometimes fragmented, but sometimes . . . speaking quite loudly, through pretty much everything that we do or say or think or even feel. . . . There is something about reality — the human reality, the reality of the human person — that can resist the incursions of various different other ways of thinking.”

— Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, author of Ars Vitae: The Fate of Inwardness and the Return of the Ancient Arts of Living (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020)

Historian Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn discusses philosophy as the art of living in her book Ars Vitae: The Fate of Inwardness and the Return of the Ancient Arts of Living. Birthed out of her deep personal interest in antiquity and her alarm at the “shrinkage” of modern life and thought, Lasch-Quinn’s book explores five ancient philosophical schools experiencing a contemporary resurgence. Describing modern society as a therapeutic culture wedded with consumerism, she argues that we live in a “fourth sophistic” era, because of the “acrobatic” way words and philosophies are utilized in relation to actual truth. Lasch-Quinn argues that a return to philosophy as the art of living (not an esoteric territory claimed only by academics) offers an alternative way of life.        ⇧

•     •     •

Jeffrey Bilbro 

“Curiosity, in the news context, you might think of the rubbernecking tendency: the tendency to be drawn toward the spectacular or the outrageous or the crazy. . . . It can also be a way of wanting to know stuff in order to better manipulate or control reality to get what we want. It doesn’t have to take superficial forms. You can be quite serious and still be curious. It’s about the posture toward new knowledge and the . . . ends to which you want to put this new knowledge to: Is it to better understand and love and care for creation, other people, your neighbor? Or is it to satisfy your own appetites?”

— Jeffrey Bilbro, author of Reading the Times: A Literary and Theological Inquiry into the News (InterVarsity Press, 2021)

English professor Jeffrey Bilbro explores a Christian posture toward contemporary digital media in his book Reading the Times: A Literary and Theological Inquiry into the News. Bilbro orients his inquiry around three questions: “To what should we attend? How should we imagine and experience time? And how should we belong to one another?” Bilbro is not a declinist – he recognizes that people have always struggled against distraction. Nonetheless, he is concerned with how social media amplifies that tendency. He wants Christians to evaluate their understanding of time, to realize that their experience of “chronos” time (modern quantified duration) inhabits “kairos” time (time that is seasonal and patterned). This type of realignment toward the eternal can help cultivate the sort of “holy indifference” which Pascal encouraged: a stance which enables Christians to care deeply, but also rest in the providence of God.        ⇧

•     •     •

Zena Hitz 

“I want to distinguish between ‘knowledge as power’ in the contemporary sense — where it means . . . the power to do something, the power to get things, the power to acquire, I think, in the end, a kind of mastery. And, rather, it’s the power that’s connected with one’s dignity as a human being with the growth of one’s capacities, with the development of one’s freedom, that’s a different kind of power and it’s something that you have in yourself for its own sake, and that you can maintain in situations of really extreme powerlessness.”

— Zena Hitz, author of Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life (Princeton University Press, 2020)

Zena Hitz explores the dignity and freedom possible through the pursuit of learning with her book Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life. An intellectual life is not necessarily tied to the university, according to Hitz. On the contrary, educational institutions are often captured by private interests and captive to the marketplace; they are not places where real learning can necessarily flourish. For Hitz, real learning is always hidden learning. It is not about competing for power and domination. It is also not an acquisition, a private possession. Real learning means studiousness, rather than the “love of spectacle.” And it entails a “seriousness about living and learning” which is ultimately undertaken in communion with others.     ⇧

•     •     • 

James L. Nolan, Jr.

“It was a very exciting time in nuclear physics — the exchange of ideas and the kind of discoveries that were unfolding at a rapid pace and, you know, ‘Can we do this?’ and I think that was clearly part of it. And again, the consequences, in terms of the military application of it, I don’t think was the primary or the leading motivation for the scientists. So much so that once they saw the Trinity Test and witnessed the enormity of the explosion, many of them all of a sudden had worries. Oppenheimer famously cited the Bhagavad Gita, ‘I have become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ And there’s all of a sudden a sense of ‘What have we done? What have we created?’”

— James L. Nolan, Jr., author of Atomic Doctors: Conscience and Complicity at the Dawn of the Nuclear Age (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020)

In the book Atomic Doctors: Conscience and Complicity at the Dawn of the Nuclear Age, sociologist James L. Nolan, Jr., tells the story of his grandfather’s medical involvement in the Manhattan Project — the World War II research and development which produced the first atomic weapons. Nolan had known the basics of his grandfather’s history in the nuclear age. However, it was only after discovering a box filled with family memorabilia that Nolan discovered the extent of his grandfather’s involvement, spanning from working on the Trinity Project to being one of the first doctors in Japan after the war. While the book is primarily a historical account, Nolan also sees this time period as a case study in the dangers of technological enthusiasm outpacing wisdom and caution, and he believes that we need to take these lessons seriously in our own day.        ⇧

•     •     • 

Bishop Robert Barron

“Precisely because God is not a being among beings, he is not one being sort of competing for territory in the same ontological space as creatures, then God’s presence is a non-competitive one. God can come close to his creatures without compromising their integrity. And, of course, the great moment when we see this is the incarnation. The two natures coming together —‘without mixing, mingling, or confusion,’ as Chalcedon puts it. So, the integrity of Jesus’ s humanity is preserved, it’s enhanced, it’s made perfect and beautiful precisely by the closeness of God.”

— Bishop Robert Barron, author of Renewing Our Hope: Essays for the New Evangelization (The Catholic University of America Press, 2021)

One of the central threads of Bishop Robert Barron's work through the years has been the non-competitive transcendence of God — that “God can come close to his creatures without compromising their integrity.” In his latest book, Renewing Our Hope: Essays for the New Evangelization, Bishop Barron continues exploring this theme and (among other topics) how it conflicts with the modern conception of freedom. Rather than a "zero-sum game," where the existence of God means the loss of human freedom and dignity, Barron argues that God’s non-competitive transcendence means the possibility of true freedom and dignity. Bishop Barron also believes the application of this theme addresses the tragic rift between theology and spirituality — in the same way that God's existence does not denigrate human dignity, right doctrine does not denigrate the human experience. The encounter with Christ is the purpose of theology and doctrine, and Barron does his best to exemplify this in his life and work.        ⇧

•     •     • 

Jason Blakely

“I think that actually the dominant philosophical school in the social sciences thinks of itself as on the path to articulating something akin to the natural sciences, this sort of descriptive theory that is often articulated in almost an abstraction away from the socio-political lifeworld. I mean, if you told a social scientist, ‘Are you interpreting?’ they might very well say, ‘Yes, I’m interpreting,’ but then if you looked at their actual methods and concepts, they would not show interpretive sensitivity.”

— Jason Blakely, author of We Built Reality: How Social Sciences Infiltrated Culture, Politics, and Power (Oxford University Press, 2020)

Political scientist Jason Blakely argues in his book We Built Reality: How Social Sciences Infiltrated Culture, Politics, and Power that the social sciences have too often been treated as though they were the same as the natural sciences. In contrast to the natural sciences, where theories do not affect what is being studied, social theory massively affects and changes studies within the social sciences. When this is not recognized, the social sciences can be misused as pseudo-scientific means to justify changes in culture and politics.  As a “hermeneuticist” committed to the art of interpretation, Blakely believes that the solution to this is to treat the social sciences in a way that is more akin to the humanities, recognizing the need for interpretive sensitivity. And he calls for social scientists to become comfortable with story as a way to capture the contingent causality that is always at play in the human sciences.        ⇧

Guests on Volume 151

• RICHARD STIVERS on lessons from Jacques Ellul about media technologies and society
• HOLLY ORDWAY on the surprising reading habits of J. R. R. Tolkien
• ROBIN PHILLIPS on the challenge of sustaining a posture of gratitude in the midst of suffering
• SCOTT NEWSTOK on why William Shakespeare offers valuable perspectives on the means and ends of education
• JUNIUS JOHNSON on why the experience of beauty is dangerous, but necessary
• PETER MERCER-TAYLOR on how early 19th-century hymnody introduced many Americans to a repertoire of classical music

Click here to download a pdf file with the contents listing and bibliographic information about this Volume. 

Richard Stivers

“When you’re in real dialogue with a person, when you see this other person as independent, you make yourself vulnerable. So, basically, I think wanting to stay in control, not wanting to be vulnerable, people don’t want to be hurt. They want every relationship to be pleasant and to go their way. And so, I guess this is the great danger: that the more we use social media in particular, and every other type of anonymous/almost anonymous discourse, the less human we become. To be human is to be vulnerable, to try to understand another person, to not try to impose one’s will on a person, to listen to the other person, and these are clearly in short supply today.”

— Richard Stivers, author of The Media Creates Us in Its Image and Other Essays on Technology and Culture (Cascade Books, 2020)

Sociologist Richard Stivers argues that the destructive tendencies blamed on new technologies are actually the fulfilment of much older dynamics and priorities. In his book, The Media Creates Us in Its Image and Other Essays on Technology and Culture, Stivers continues to build on the work of philosopher Jacques Ellul, unpacking how the race for efficiency — what Max Weber called the “religion of the modern world” — shapes all of life in our technological society. One area in which we see this is in the increasing abstraction of human relationships. When efficiency is prioritized over meaning, the skills to navigate real human relationships atrophy. We lose the ability to disagree or to handle awkward realities of true relationships. As Stivers warns, “The more abstract human relationships become, the more the entire human being disappears.”        ⇧

•     •     •

Holly Ordway

“A lot of the criticism, a lot of the scholarship, and indeed most of the popular view of Tolkien has been that he simply ignored all things modern, whether that’s theological, or philosophical, or simply chronological modernity, that he just shut himself off from it. That he wasn’t interested — at all — and he just kind of hid himself away in the Middle Ages and engaged there. And that’s completely not the case. And he actually engages quite significantly with modernity in all sorts of interesting ways.”

— Holly Ordway, author of Tolkien's Modern Reading: Middle-earth Beyond the Middle Ages (Word on Fire Academic, 2020)

Professor Holly Ordway counters the assumption that J. R. R. Tolkien was stuck in the past in her book Tolkien’s Modern Reading: Middle-earth Beyond the Middle Ages. Ordway claims that we don’t even recognize the stereotype that Tolkien was hopelessly nostalgic. But in fact, as she demonstrates, Tolkien engaged widely and profoundly with modern literature, philosophy, and theology. Even in terms of technology, Tolkien was no Luddite, embracing in a nuanced way many of the most up-to-date technologies of his day. One of his students called Tolkien a “translator,” a “bridge” between the Middle Ages and the modern world. Ordway argues that to be an effective translator, one must be equally comfortable in both worlds. And she claims that because Tolkien was at home in both the Modern and the Medieval, his work continues to possess deep resonance today.        ⇧

•     •     •

Robin Phillips

“Gratitude can’t be developed in isolation. Gratitude grows in an ecosystem of other virtues. And that’s another area where I think the self-help literature on gratitude goes wrong. They’ve recognized something important, which is that gratitude helps with health and well being and with joy. But it’s impossible to develop true spiritual gratitude outside of this larger ecosystem of virtues.”

— Robin Phillips, author of Gratitude in Life's Trenches: How to Experience the Good Life Even When Everything is Going Wrong (Ancient Faith Publishing, 2020)

Robin Phillips writes about his experience moving from a pop-culture to sacramental understanding of gratitude in his book Gratitude in Life’s Trenches: How to Experience the Good Life Even When Everything is Going Wrong. Influenced heavily by G. K. Chesterton and Alexander Schmemann, Phillips conveys how “embracing the dark side of life” and accepting its inherent difficulty helped him discover a more profound experience of gratitude, even in suffering. Phillips believes that gratitude requires vulnerability — it’s not a matter of either stoicism or a trivializing optimism. Gratitude also requires an “ecosystem of virtues.” It can’t be developed in isolation either from other people or from the virtues that support it. Ultimately, the church institutionalizes the practices and virtues that cultivate and sustain gratitude.        ⇧

•     •     •

Scott Newstok

“I'm trying to offer a number of analogues, and models, and patterns for inspiration, but I am actually not doing the more conventional ‘how to do X’ book or self-help book where you lay out the seven habits of highly successful people or whatever the model might be. In some ways, the . . . implicit point of the book is the way to think like Shakespeare is not to follow a set pattern of things, it’s to go through a number of habit inducing practices; and, it means reading widely, and it means thinking imaginatively, and it means all kind of things, but it’s not really programmatic.”

— Scott Newstok, author of How to Think Like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education (Princeton University Press, 2020)

English Professor Scott Newstok sets forth Shakespeare as a guide for the craft of thought in his book How to Think Like Shakespeare. Citing Shakespeare's "sponge-like quality of mind," Newstok points to habits and practices that helped refine Shakespeare's native brilliance. One habit is keeping a commonplace book to collect quotations. He also highlights the pedagogical practice of imitation, a ubiquitous technique in the past. Newstok believes that while we accept unreservedly the importance of imitation in physical practices, moderns are more critical of the use of imitation in scholarly pursuits. But, while imitation can certainly be stunted into parrot-like practice, it also can help develop a rich idiosyncratic style. With all that said, Newstok is not offering a procedural account of how to think like Shakespeare; he is articulating patterns and "habit-inducing practices" that contain the possibility of intellectual growth.        ⇧

•     •     •

Junius Johnson

“The beautiful, Plato says, is difficult. The beautiful is very powerful. The beautiful is earth-shaking and heart-breaking. And I think that’s one of the main aspects of beauty in a broken world like we live in, is that it breaks our hearts. But the things of God, when they come to break our hearts, they do so because our hearts need to be broken. They do so because our hearts are hardened into forms that become these defenses against grace. Beauty is able to come in and fracture, and create these lines in our hearts that crack open — and these fissures — and through that, grace pours.”

— Junius Johnson, author of The Father of Lights: A Theology of Beauty (Baker Academic, 2020)

Junius Johnson warns that the pursuit of beauty is both perilous and unavoidable in his book The Father of Lights: A Theology of Beauty. The desire for beauty points to the desire for God. For unbelievers, that desire for beauty, Johnson says, is “the person’s heart witnessing against them,” because beauty is particularly capable of destroying modern defenses against God.  Nonetheless, humans must be wary because we are experts in twisting good into evil, “mistaking the intermediary for the ultimate.” Johnson articulates Bonaventure’s idea of “contuition” as a way to rightly align recognition of the beautiful and recognition of God. He also brings in the concept of analogy, explaining how creation is a language God invented to speak about Himself and that, therefore, “things belong to a vocabulary of the divine.”         ⇧

•     •     •

Peter Mercer-Taylor

“There were hundreds and hundreds of these adaptations published in the United States. And I have not looked at, for example, the English scene nearly as much as the American one, but my strong sense is that there wasn’t nearly that amount of this sort of thing going on in England. And at the same time, England had a more robust tradition of classical music performance, that in the United States, it was just much rarer as a general rule, to actually have exposure to the classical music that these [hymn tunes] were based on. And so, in that sense, it’s as though these hymn tune adaptations were serving a more . . . central cultural purpose in the American context than in the English.”

— Peter Mercer-Taylor, author of Gems of Exquisite Beauty: How Hymnody Carried Classical Music to America (Oxford University Press, 2020)

Musicologist Peter Mercer-Taylor tells the story of how 19th-century American musicians adapted classical repertoire into hymn tunes in his book Gems of Exquisite Beauty: How Hymnody Carried Classical Music to America. Mercer-Taylor’s research began as an extension of his Felix Mendelssohn scholarship, specifically when he began to uncover the story of Hark, the Herald Angels Sing. This led to his discovery of many hundreds of these adaptations, specifically in the American context. While classical hymn tunes were not uncommon in England, they were more prominent in America, serving a “central cultural purpose,” since the performance of classical music was a rarity. These hymn tunes gradually fell out of vogue, but we can still see traces of the adaptations in the hymnals used today.         ⇧

Guests on Volume 150

• DAVID I. SMITH on how Christian schools can make wise decisions about the use of educational technologies
• ERIC O. JACOBSEN on how living in a world mediated by screens encourages loneliness
• MATTHEW CRAWFORD on how the “promise” of self-driving cars threatens the capacities of agency enabled by driving 
• ANDREW DAVISON on how the metaphysical concept of participation helps us understand God’s relationship with Creation (and with us)
• JOSEPH E. DAVIS on the medicalization of suffering and the reductionism promoted by neuroscience
• REBECCA KONYNDYK DEYOUNG on the wisdom of the tradition of understanding faithfulness and morality in the framework of virtues, vices, and spiritual disciplines

Click here to download a pdf file with the contents listing and bibliographic information about this Volume. 

David I. Smith

“So many technology books . . . are either . . . ‘Technology, digital devices will save us and transform our future; there’s no going back, etc. etc.’ or ‘Digital devices are going to ruin us and destroy civilization and render us all mute’ and so on. Reality just seems to be in a more complex middle space than either of those stories — where there are always gains and losses, where when we change our technologies . . . they challenge us to figure out those gains and losses, and how to respond, and what choices to make.”

— David I. Smith, author of Digital Life Together: The Challenge of Technology for Christian Schools (Eerdmans, 2020)

Educator David I. Smith articulates the difficulties Christian schools face as they seek to use technology in a faithful way. The book he co-authored, Digital Life Together: The Challenge of Technology for Christian Schools, was the result of a multi-year project in which the authors meticulously analyzed the technological philosophies and artifacts of several Christian schools. Smith warns that technology, mixed with modern priorities of efficiency and productivity, can lead to an unfortunate alchemy, impoverishing a rich education into “getting things done by the deadlines.” However, he wants to avoid an all-out condemnation of technology, believing that wisdom calls for a careful assessment of the gains and losses that all new technologies bring. Smith encourages school administrators to keep their first principles before them as they make each decision about whether to incorporate a new technology into the life of their school.        ⇧

•     •     •

Eric O. Jacobsen

“[Jane] Jacobs said that the city itself was a problem of organized complexity. It works, but it works in such a complex way that it defies our complete understanding. So, you make small interventions, but you pay attention to what is happening outside of your understanding. So, I say that with belonging as well. It’s not simply a matter of ‘Oh, people need a few more friendships.’ It’s not something that we’re going to solve with a really clear program like that. We need to create environments where friendship and connection are going to happen organically. It’s just really hard to engineer, it’s hard to engineer belonging. It grows in the right kind of soil.”

— Eric O. Jacobsen, author of Three Pieces of Glass: Why We Feel Lonely in a World Mediated by Screens (Brazos Press, 2020)

Pastor Eric O. Jacobsen addresses modern isolation and how to foster belonging in his book Three Pieces of Glass: Why We Feel Lonely in a World Mediated by Screens. The title “three pieces of glass” refers to the car windshield, the television, and the cell phone. Jacobsen structures his argument around these emblematic items to illustrate how modern priorities have led to alienation from people and the places where we live. Applying his previous work on the importance of place, Jacobsen explains how urbanist Jane Jacobs argued for respectful attentiveness to “organized complexity” in the city. Jacobsen applies her ideas to what he calls “kingdom-belonging,” arguing that it’s not possible to straightforwardly engineer, but only organically cultivate. The belonging that grows in this way, he believes, is the subjective experience of “shalom:” the goodness and beauty of right relationships in the Kingdom of God.        ⇧

•     •     •

Matthew Crawford

 “Urban driving . . . looks chaotic. It’s messy, but we’re basically improvising; we’re working it out on the fly; we’re solving problems together; we’re cooperating. For Tocqueville, that was really an important part of the democratic personality: The ability to cooperate in some practical activity, without having to be supervised (whether by some bureaucracy, or by some technology that does everything for us). So now we’re getting into the realm of political culture and sensibility. So the big worry here is that as the space for intelligent human action and skill and cooperation gets colonized by machines, our skills atrophy and I think our social intelligence is likely to atrophy — which of course leads to demands for further automation to replace trust with machine generated certainty.”

— Matthew Crawford, author of Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road (William Morrow, 2020)

Philosopher and mechanic Matthew Crawford argues for the renewal of manual competence through the lens of modern driving in his book Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road. Provoked by the specter of self-driving cars, Crawford laments the losses of human skill that correspond with gains in mechanical automation. For him, more automation means submitting to more bureaucracy as the car becomes a “device” comparable to a smartphone. Quoting Nietzche’s axiom that “Joy is the feeling of your powers expanding,” Crawford argues that we miss out on fundamental aspects of human experience the further we move toward automation and away from skill and responsibility. Drawing from Tocqueville’s insights into the democratic personality, Crawford ultimately holds that cultivating everyday skill (like the ability to drive well) is necessary for the “messy” realities of self-government.        ⇧

•     •     •

Andrew Davison

“One helpful distinction that we get from theological writing is the distinction between cause in being and a cause in coming to be, initially. So, I think it would be a mistake to say that God is only cause of the world as if that were a past event; but rather . . . God is the cause of the being of the world every moment. So I think it is useful to think that there is a kind of freshness to God’s gift to us at every moment, really as fresh as the first moment of the existence of the world. We can continually see the world as given to us.”

— Andrew Davison, author of Participation in God: A Study in Christian Doctrine and Metaphysics (Cambridge University Press, 2019)

Theologian and priest Andrew Davison believes that retrieving the historic doctrine of participation in God is vital to help Christians escape from the default philosophy of the age. In his recent book Participation in God: A Study in Christian Doctrine and Metaphysics, Davison undertakes a systematic treatment of the doctrine, approaching it from two angles: Creation (all things — whether the justice of man or the greenness of trees — find their being in God) and Redemption (God has saved us in order that we may become partakers in his very nature). The doctrine of participation means reckoning with the nature of being as ongoing gift of God and with the awareness that God’s transcendence does not mean God is distant from the world — “in Him and through Him and to Him are all things.”        ⇧

•     •     •

Joseph E. Davis

“These older concepts and language implicate us in a way that the neurobiological seems to let us . . . not implicate our own history, our own life, our own experience. . . . That kind of stuff suggests either that the story I’m telling about myself might be wrong in some fundamental way, or that I might have to really do some painful soul searching. Psychotherapy can often be quite painful, if it’s good — or counseling . . . or broader kind of dialogical thinking about our suffering and shared experience and so on. If that’s done well, it’s going to force us to confront aspects of ourselves.”

— Joseph E. Davis, author of Chemically Imbalanced: Everyday Suffering, Medication, and Our Troubled Quest for Self-Mastery (University of Chicago Press, 2020)

Sociologist Joseph Davis investigates the modern “healthscape” in his book Chemically Imbalanced: Everyday Suffering, Medication, and Our Troubled Quest for Self-Mastery. He traces how the language of psychiatry entered the popular realm around 1980, providing a new neurobiological vocabulary that was socially validated. While Davis doesn’t dismiss the neurobiological, he wants to push back on reductionist explanations which don’t account for factors like personality, history, vices, or choices. Neurobiological language isolates the problem within an individual’s (merely material) existence, rather than situating persons within a larger social and spiritual context. Recovering older language (like “alienation” or “acedia”) may help to recontextualize experience. Nonetheless, coming to terms with factors beyond the neurobiological takes courage because of the way that we are implicated and may have to confront unattractive aspects of ourselves.        ⇧

•     •     •

Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung

“What I often tell my students is ‘It’s very important to ask yourself, “Is this right thing to do?”’ That’s an important ethical question no doubt. But, it’s at least as important an ethical question to ask yourself, ‘If I do this thing today, and tomorrow, and the next day, and over and over again for the next five years, what kind of person will I become?’ And that’s a character question. So, I don’t want to reduce ethics to act-centric-only kind of thinking. . . . So, I think the vice lens is important because it narrates your ethical character over time. It says this is a life-long project of character building.”

— Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung, author of Glittering Vices: A New Look at the Seven Deadly Sins and Their Remedies (Brazos Press, 2020)

Philosophy professor Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung illuminates how the seven deadly sins work to malform the heart in her book Glittering Vices: A New Look at the Seven Deadly Sins and Their Remedies. Instead of “deadly sins,” DeYoung argues that we should recover an older term, the “capital vices,” because it connotes how these sins are the principal underlying sources behind sinful actions. DeYoung situates the capital vices in the territory of habits, of accumulated patterns that become part of our ethical character through time. Explaining the need for a second edition of her book, DeYoung explains that she wrote the first edition from a philosophical perspective, not anticipating the broad audience who would read and be convicted by the book. In this edition, she focuses more explicitly on the healing and wholeness that come when we are able to name the roots of sin in our lives.        ⇧

Guests on Volume 20

• ELIZABETH FOX-GENOVESE on the benefits of single-sex education, and the confusion of "elite" feminism
• ROBERT D. RICHARDSON, JR., on why the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson continues to attract certain religious seekers
• ROGER LUNDIN on Emerson's assertion of alternatives to Christianity, and how they have seeped under the American cultural skin
• WILFRED MCCLAY on individualism and collectivism in American society
• ANDREW A. TADIE on learning to love and learn from G. K. Chesterton
• ROBERT JENSON on why the life of the mind matters to the Church, and how it should take shape in the world
• TED PRESCOTT on why artists have been attracted to abstraction, and what viewers should look for in abstract art
• TED LIBBEY on Haydn's The Creation

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese

On January 17, 1996, the Supreme Court heard arguments in United States v. the Commonwealth of Virginia. At stake in the case was the question of whether or not the Virginia Military Institute was guilty of violating federal regulations on gender discrimination by maintaining its male-only admission policy. One of the expert witnesses on behalf of the Citadel and Virginia Military Institute was Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, professor of Humanities and History at Emory University. Her 1991 book, Feminism without Illusions, challenges many of the inconsistencies and blind spots of contemporary feminism. A graduate of an all-women's college, she is an ardent advocate of single-sex education for men and women.

•     •     •

Robert D. Richardson, Jr.

The figure of the sage-poet Ralph Waldo Emerson is a commanding presence in American culture. The answers he sketched out to questions of meaning, society, and individual identity continue to inform the American way of life. Those who worry that the nineteenth century figure inaugurated an unprecedented spirit of relativism and self-centeredness remember that it was Emerson who first uttered the maxim, "Do your own thing." Robert Richardson published a masterful study of Emerson's life, Emerson: The Mind on Fire. It is an intellectual biography which examines the way Emerson's ideas germinated, took root, and manifested themselves in his life.

•     •     •

Roger Lundin

Roger Lundin is a professor of English at Wheaton College, a cultural historian, and the author of The Culture of Interpretation: Christian Faith and the Postmodern World. One of the chapters in his book looks at the influence of Emerson's ideas on contemporary literary theory and on society at large. Lundin presents an audio essay, a musing on why Emerson's influence lingers in American culture. Specifically, he examines Emerson's assertion of alternatives to Christianity and how they have been adopted by the American people.

•     •     •

Wilfred McClay

American culture has long struggled with the paradox of radical individualism coexisting with a tendency to institutionalization and bland conformism. The spirit of the 1960s and the spirit of the 1950s are both essentially American. Historian Wilfred McClay's book The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America traces the history of the vacillating fortunes of these two tendencies. On the one hand, the individualism of Emerson, Andrew Jackson, Charles Finney, and the frontier; on the other, the growing consolidation of power in national government and of experience in national culture. His book tells the story of a society that does not know quite what to make of authority.

•     •     •

Andrew Tadie

One of the most quoted and quotable writers on matters of society and culture is G. K. Chesterton. Dr. Andrew Tadie teaches English at Seattle University and has served as co-editor of two collections of essays concerning Chesterton, the more recent entitled Permanent Things. Tadie talks about his own difficulties with Chesterton as a young man and the way he has attempted to make Chesterton accessible for his students. He gives some critique of The Napoleon of Notting Hill, one of Chesterton's works of fiction, and examines its message about community and neighborhoods.

•     •     •

Robert Jenson

Dr. Robert Jenson is a professor of religion at St. Olaf College, and his essay, "On the Renewing of the Mind: Reflections on the Calling of Christian Intellectuals," is part of a new anthology of short pieces called Essays in Theology of Culture. Dr. Jenson suggests that the crisis of modern higher education cannot be explained in terms of funding, politicization, or overspecialization but that the modern university has forgotten from where it came. The present-day university upholds the Enlightenment vision of individual and autonomous reason rather than the original vision of thinkers in communion and conversation.

•     •     •

Ted Prescott

Art critic Ted Prescott offers a primer for understanding abstract art. For many people, abstract painting and sculpture is at best a highly specialized and technical interest, and at worst a joke. If, however, one is interested in comprehending the dynamics of twentieth-century culture, it is imperative to have some understanding of the rise of abstraction-how ideas about abstraction have evolved and how numerous social and cultural forces outside the art world influence its development.

•     •     •

Ted Libbey

The Creation, written by Haydn in 1796, is a compilation of settings from Genesis, the Psalms, and Milton's Paradise Lost. Much historical evidence exists to suggest that Haydn considered this project one of the most meaningful efforts of his career. The musical style is reminiscent of Handel's oratorios. Haydn had heard a lot of Handel during a visit to London in 1791 and had been very impressed. In The Creation, Haydn uses a great deal of dramatic orchestral coloring to evoke the feeling of various events in the narrative. Music critic Ted Libbey points out that in addition to this obvious musical expression, Haydn used a number of musical devices to make up for not having sets, scenery, or stage action.



Guests on Volume 53: Lawrence Adams, on the possibilities of religious pluralism in Islamic views of state and society; Dana Gioia, on the craft, popularity, and significance of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; Elmer M. Colyer, on theologian Thomas F. Torrance's understanding of the Incarnation; R. A. Herrera, on how the Christian view of Creation and Incarnation shapes an understanding of history; Margaret Visser, on learning to recognize the deep meaning in the design of Christian churches; and Joseph Pearce, on Tolkien's other writings and on his view of myth and story.

"Reform tends to be something that brings Islam back to its roots, and creates a movement that's even more antithetical to Western society in its secular form, as we know it now. It's often been said--going back to the issue of tolerance--that Islam in its early centuries was very tolerant. You often hear it said it was more tolerant than the Christianity of the time was. But what it was tolerant of was a Medieval and Ancient form of Christianity."
— Lawrence Adams

Political philosopher Lawrence Adams discusses why some strains of Islam are threatened by the concept of a secular "New World Order." The Islamic worldview divides the world into places where Islam is practiced and places where it is not practiced. These are two distinct realms which ought not be conflated. Western states, however, seek homogenization, mixing religious and non-religious souls in pluralistic, secular communities. This is deeply offensive to many Islamists who do not share the West's understandings of tolerance and pluralism.

"Longfellow is not simply part of American literature, he's part of American history."
— Dana Gioia

Poet and critic Dana Gioia explains why Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) is one of the three great American poets. He was one of the first to understand that accounts of American nationality had to recognize the country's "extraordinary diversity" in order to be truly representative of the nation. He practiced what he believed and wrote about French Canadian Catholics in the Midwest, early British Puritans in New England, and Native Americans before the "white man" settled in North America. He was a master at developing atmosphere in his works and was very popular even in his own lifetime; his poetry appealed to readers across every age, social class, and region in the United States. Gioia says, "He . . . Was an extraordinarily sophisticated intellectual poet, but his gift was to take all of that learning and wear it lightly . . . And it's that combination . . . Of profound intelligence and the common touch that was Longfellow's calling card."

"If [the] triune God is not a solitary God, but a being in communion . . . And if in the Incarnation Christ assumes our broken humanity and restores it to union and communion to God, than we have to think of our humanity as radically relational. We can't be fully human without being in relationships, with God and one another."
— Elmer Colyer

Professor Elmer Colyer discusses Thomas F. Torrance's doctrine of the Incarnation and how it could influence the disorder found in contemporary culture. Colyer is author of How to Read T. F. Torrance: Understanding His Trinitarian and Scientific Theology. Contemporary culture does not fully appreciate what it means to be human; Torrance understands the Incarnation as an indication of how greatly God appreciates humanity. When Christ became incarnate he assumed humanity in its brokenness and alienation from God, restoring humanity to full communion with God. Colyer explains the importance of this reality for contemporary culture, noting particularly that humanity is made for fellowship with God and one another.

"Once the world is created, then the philosophy of history becomes a possibility."
— R. A. Herrera

Philosopher R. A. Herrera explains why a linear view of history is such an important Judeo-Christian legacy for the West. Herrera is author of Reasons for Our Rhymes: An Inquiry into the Philosophy of History. While the Greeks had "wonderful philosophers and historians," history had no sense or meaning for them because they had nothing by which to order it; it was merely one cycle following another. The Judeo-Christian notion of Creation, of history as a story with a beginning and end, established an order for history while enabling an understanding of its meaning.

"We think of ourselves as so rich, but in many ways we're very, very, very poor. And I think we should reclaim the riches that are lying there waiting to be looked at in everyday life."
— Margaret Visser

In her book The Geometry of Love: Space, Time, Mystery, and Meaning in an Ordinary Church, writer Margaret Visser asks questions of a small church in Rome in order to discover the story it tells. Visser explains that church buildings sustain memory and meaning and have stories to tell. The memories, meaning, and stories can be discerned by attending to how the buildings are put together. Her book is an example of what it means to attend to the "plot" of a church, discovering meaning in what appears to be "banal and trivial." Visser explains how her work considers and refutes modernity's insistence that there is no meaning in matter.

"It's paradoxical, but really myth--at least good myth, in the way that The Lord of the Rings is good myth-- can be more realistic than a factually based novel."
— Joseph Pearce

Biographer Joseph Pearce discusses the paradoxical nature of myth and what J. R. R. Tolkien believed about human creativity. Pearce, author of Tolkien: Man and Myth, explains that myth deals with realistic issues (theological, ethical, or philosophical, for example) in a setting that is not realistic. The advantage of mythology, he says, is that one can get to the core of truth without having the whole message become "foggy with fact." Pearce also names some of the works in which Tolkien articulated why humanity is compelled to create and to tell stories. As images of The Creator and Storyteller, people can do no less.

On this CD bonus track, Dana Gioia talks about the sorrowful life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; the congenial literary circle that gathered around him; and the international recognition that he achieved for American letters.

Guests on Volume 40

• JOSEPH EPSTEIN on writing essays and education through magazines
• JOHN GRAY on the cultural contradictions of global capitalism
• KENNETH R. CRAYCRAFT, JR. on why the First Amendment doesn't really protect Christian liberty
• WILLIAM T. PIZZI on Trials without Truth: Why Our System of Criminal Trials Has Become an Expensive Failure and What We Need to Do to Rebuild It
• PAMELA WALKER LAIRD on how nineteenth-century advertising promoted progress
• ALBERT BORGMANN on how technology disengages us from experiencing reality
• NEAL STEPHENSON on the "eureka" moments with codes and computers
• ALAN JACOBS on why Harry Potter's magic shouldn't trouble Christians

Joseph Epstein, essayist and editor, speaks about the art of writing. Epstein briefly tells of finding the form of the essay while in college while reading the intellectual magazines. He comments on the role of editors in the writing process. He criticizes writing on the Internet for its lack of style and notes the difference between writing on the computer versus writing for the computer. The interview concludes with comments on the educational value of magazines and the difference between editor and writer-driven composition in magazines.

John Gray, author of False Dawn, argues that the globalization of the world economies according to the model of free market capitalism will have unseen and unfavorable effects on the social and political orders of the world's various nation-states. Gray argues that free markets depend on the laws and habits of a civil society; however, the relationship is parasitic because the demands of the free market deplete the foundation of those laws and habits. The demands of the free market should be tempered and understood in order to restrain this depletion. Gray fears that if cultural restraints do not curtail free market economic ideals, nations will react with large scale protectionism.

Kenneth R. Craycraft, Jr., author of The American Myth of Religious Freedom, discusses the four myths of American religious freedom which he sees in the culture. One of his fundamental beliefs is that a theologically rich definition of religious liberty is at odds with the American definition of religious liberty. During the interview he details the myths which are so commonly held by American Christians and analyzes their fallacies.

William T. Pizzi comments on the defects in America's legal system. He postulates that many of the problems of the system come from values which the system embodies: a desire for procedure and a fixation on the rules. Pizzi argues that the many rules get in the way of delivering justice. The question that exposes the flaws in the system is "What is the object of the system?" It is not a game nor an exhibition of brilliance but rather a search for the truth. The complications of litigation obfuscate the search for truth. The rich can manipulate the system, while the poor often plea-bargain to avoid the cost of a trial. Pizzi compares the American system with others regarding the role of lawyers. Other systems do not closely identify a lawyer with his client. Thus, the defendant is more active and the trial more spontaneous and interactive.

Pamela Walker Laird, author of Advertising Progress: American Business and the Rise of Consumer Marketing, speaks about the theme of progress in advertising in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Ads in this age were a toast to the progress that producers had made. Thus, ads featured the wonders of factories running on electricity or a factory owner in his finely furnished home. For consumers who were enthusiastic about the fine products produced by progressive technology, products from a modern factory, or that arrived on new transportation technologies, had a sacramental nature that could link them with progress. Laird explains that ads reflect, even now, the values of their creators, who were originally the advertisers themselves, before advertising agents intervened in the process. Advertisers portrayed life as easier, more wholesome, and more prestigious if only consumers possessed the correct and progressive new products.

Albert Borgmann, most recently author of Holding onto Reality: The Nature of Information at the Turn of the Millennium, speaks briefly about the history of technology and the ephemeral rewards new technology brings. Borgmann notes that Pre-modern technology required people with skill to produce a product where modern technology requires skill only for its construction not its use. Thus, in pre-modern times music required skilled musicians whereas now it only requires the flip of a switch. Borgmann gives three reasons for the promise of greater information and says that the combination of these accounts for our disappointment. He also dismisses the techno-utopia proposed by many and concludes that technology tends to detach people from a true experience of life.

Neal Stephenson, author of Cryptonomicon, talks about the context of his novel: the subculture of those who work to "crack" computer codes. Often, those who crack these codes have a feeling that they have touched something deeper than the problem. At times, the solutions come to the thinkers in an almost intuitive way. Thus, many often have a platonic sense that they are discovering the nature of things.

Alan Jacobs interprets the magic aspect of the Harry Potter novels by J. K. Rowling. Jacob argues that framing the magic in these children's novels in the believable, coherent, yet alternative world of the novel should calm the fears of those concerned about their children reading about wizards and magic. In this world, magic is not innately evil but, like technology in ours, must be judged by the end to which it is put to use.

Guests on Volume 149

• DRU JOHNSON on how rituals serve to shape our understanding of God and Creation
• STEVEN L. PORTER on the causes and consequences of the loss of confidence in the rationality of morality
• REINHARD HÜTTER on why Christian ethics must be ordered by Christian eschatology
• MATTHEW LEVERING on the theological and philosophical concerns of Hans Urs von Balthasar
• DAVID LYLE JEFFREY on the influence of the Bible on English poetry
• CHRISTOPHER PHILLIPS on the cultural and spiritual effects of hymns and the “thingness” of hymnals

Click here to download a pdf file with the contents listing and bibliographic information about this Volume. 

Dru Johnson

“Every good endeavor to understand the world contains a lot of ritual in it — and rituals where you don’t necessarily understand what you’re doing, or why you are doing them at first. . . . The idea that you should be able to understand it from the outset, before you set foot into any activity, is kind of absurd in all of life. So I don’t know why we think it would be any different if God is enjoining us through our bodies into his world, to see it properly.”

— Dru Johnson, author of Human Rites: The Power of Rituals, Habits, and Sacraments (Eerdmans, 2019)

Biblical scholar Dru Johnson highlights the unique way the Scriptures link ritual with epistemology; what we know is inextricable from what we do. Human life is inescapably ritualistic, he argues, even if rituals are spurned as inauthentic or superficial. Approaching ritual studies from a Hebrew Bible perspective, Johnson views ritual as the umbrella concept for liturgy and sacrament. In his experience, the ritual nature of daily life garners resistance from Christians who want the sacraments to be almost bizarrely special. But discerning the ritual nature of all life helps us to discern the sacramentality of all life — guided by the sacredness of a particular meal and bath. Like poetry and story, the sacraments are irreducible; they cannot be boiled down to propositional statements. We are to “theologize through performance” because as Johnson explains, “The body is not ‘second-tier’ in how we understand the world.”        ⇧

•     •     •

Steven L. Porter

“To tolerate someone else’s opinion and to respect their opinion actually needs to be grounded in knowledge, in moral knowledge, because . . . [toleration] is a form of respect; it’s to give the other person the dignity to hold the view that they hold, and to be as sympathetic and understanding as we possibly can as to the reasons they hold that. So knowledge actually engenders a kind of humility, a kind of open-mindedness, an actual respect and ability to listen to the other side without immediately thinking of how I’m going to respond without even understanding their arguments.”

— Steven L. Porter, editor of The Disappearance of Moral Knowledge (Routledge, 2018)

Steven L. Porter discusses The Disappearance of Moral Knowledge, an unfinished manuscript (which he helped to complete) by the late philosopher Dallas Willard. The book traces how modern culture lost the assumption that ethical claims are matters of knowledge, which can be right or wrong. Without a basis in rationality, morality is confined to private opinion, pulled along by rhetoric and tribalism. While Willard held that this disappearance primarily resulted from sociological factors, nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophers did not help matters, as they failed to provide an adequate foundation to ground ethical theory. As Porter explains, Willard grounds moral knowledge conclusively in love — an embrace of the other. Ultimately, toleration and humility grow out of recovering moral knowledge, making space for respect and complexity in the mutual pursuit of what is right.          ⇧

•     •     •

Reinhard Hütter

“In Thomas Aquinas, eschatology runs all the way through. . . . The eschaton describes the final end of humans with God. And the final end is, in a certain way, already thematized right at the beginning [of the Summa Theologiae]. . . . If Christian theology is not all the way shot through by eschatology, it’s not Christian theology. It’s something else. Christian theology is all the way eschatological . . . because it’s always a connection — in the encounter with Christ, it’s a connection, not only with God . . . but also an encounter with that end to which God has called humans.”

— Reinhard Hütter, author of Bound for Beatitude: A Thomistic Study in Eschatology and Ethics (Catholic University of America Press, 2019)

Theologian Reinhard Hütter argues that Christian theology must be oriented toward the beatific vision — eschatalogical “all the way through.” While many modern Christians anticipate an Edenic paradise as the ultimate telos, this parts from the Church’s tradition, which recognized that Adam and Eve were made for something beyond Paradise: for union with God Himself. Hütter sets forth Thomas Aquinas’s theology as a corrective to modern underreaching eschatology. From the beginning of the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas weaved in eschatology. He taught that each soul is directly created by God ex nihilo and that, therefore, the end of each soul is union with God. Despite the anti-human agendas of modernity, Hütter follows Aquinas and encourages that the transcendent will always break through, because the human soul is ordered to God and created for union with Him.         ⇧

•     •     •

Matthew Levering

“Balthasar believes that the credibility of Christianity ultimately rests on love. He has a book called Love Alone is Credible because Christ alone reveals the form of divine love. And so the ultimate apologetic for the truth of Christianity is love. . . . And Nietzsche is a factor because Nietzsche cuts through this rationalism of the day and insists upon the role of the will. Now Balthasar does not accept the will to power, but he argues repeatedly that truth — when you uncover truth, when you get to the bottom of it — you see that truth is the will to love, the divine will to love.”

— Matthew Levering, author of The Achievement of Hans Urs von Balthasar: An Introduction to His Trilogy (Catholic University of America Press, 2019)

Theologian Matthew Levering discusses how Hans Urs von Balthasar engaged with the philosophies of Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche in order to spread the Christian faith among intellectuals. Balthasar believed that Catholic Neo-scholastics had an overly negative response to Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche, shunning them as a "triad of heretics." Instead, Balthasar took these philosophers seriously, with a view towards apologetics. Responding to Nietzsche, for example, Balthasar rejected the overly propositional Christianity of Neo-scholasticism, arguing that truth does involve the will, as Nietzsche insisted, but not the will to power — rather the will to love. He held that self-surrender in love is the ground of all knowing, all beauty. For Hans Urs von Balthasar, as Levering explains, love is what makes Christianity credible.         ⇧

•     •     •

David Lyle Jeffrey

“John Donne is keenly aware that when God speaks most authoritatively concerning his people, from the prophets on, through to the end of the Scriptures, and Jesus as well — when he teaches something that’s authoritative, that is absolutely necessary for the disciples to know, he resorts to a form of poetry. When Donne calls the Lord a ‘metaphorical God,’ what he means is that God, when he reaches out to us because he desires that we understand Him, recognizes the need for poetry both to communicate -- but it also becomes the stamp of Him speaking.”

— David Lyle Jeffrey, author of Scripture and the English Poetic Tradition (Baker Academic, 2019)

English professor David Lyle Jeffrey emphasizes the effect of “magnificent fruitfulness” that Scripture had upon the writings of English poets. Reason is not the only conduit of reality, Jeffrey observes, which is why God speaks so frequently through poetry in the Scriptures (and why John Donne can call him a “metaphorical God”). Beginning with medieval poetry, Jeffrey describes the surprising way Italian dramatic sermons, encouraged by St. Francis of Assisi, made the Gospel accessible to the imagination and later influenced English poets and Biblical translators. These dramatic sermons led to Gospel paraphrases which laid a foundation for translating Scripture into the vernacular, culminating in the incomparable King James Version. Accentuating the aural and oral nature of the English Scriptures, Jeffrey makes the case that beautiful poetic language is not only self-revelatory, but is also a stamp of authoritative divine revelation.         ⇧

•     •     •

Christopher Phillips

“One of the things that I really found really exciting about this project was realizing how many things, not just people did with hymns, but how many things hymns enabled people to do and empowered them to do. To think that a creative mind as powerful as William Cowper, who would write everything from very witty rewrites of Horace and Pindar to scathing attacks on the evils of slavery to one of the most incisive descriptions of what depression fells like that a poet’s ever written. . . . He gets to it through what had been written off as this very conventional means.”

— Christopher Phillips, author of The Hymnal: A Reading History (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018)

English Professor Christopher N. Phillips discusses hymnals as physical artifacts and how these “lived-with books” have formed devotion at church, school, and home. While teaching through Susan Warner’s nineteenth-century novel The Wide, Wide World, Philips noticed how hymnbooks kept appearing in the text. This led him to focus on the “subplot of the hymnbook” within the novel, and how it “traces a growth of the self.” Making application beyond the novel, Phillips highlights how physical things like hymnbooks are deeply formative, in fellowship with practices and rituals. Philips also explores how the poetic form of hymns — sometimes disparaged as conventional — actually  “enabled and empowered” some poets (such as Cowper, Frost, and Dickinson) toward original creative expression.        ⇧

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

This Volume is also available on CD

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

This Volume is also available on CD

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.        ⇧

•     •     •

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 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

This Volume is also available on CD

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.”        ⇧