Mars Hill Audio Conversations present extended dialogues with one or two guests. With a typical duration of an hour, Conversations allow a greater depth of analysis and a more extensive exchange of ideas than do our Journal interviews.
Modernity’s crisis of place
Craig Bartholomew reflects on the importance of place to our humanity. (58 minutes)
Sacred and Profane Love: Graham Greene and the Catholic Imagination
Katy Carl discusses novelist Graham Greene’s fiction and spiritual struggles in light of the concept of the Catholic imagination. (49 minutes)
City of God, City of Man
Architect Philip Bess discusses how our modern-day confusion and moral illiteracy are worked out visibly in the cities and buildings our architects create. (57 minutes)
Media as agencies of order
Media theorist John Durham Peters wants us to reexamine the purposes of media and how fundamental media are. (59 minutes)
Utopian dreams and cynicism
John Durham Peters discusses the history of the idea of communication, saying that our hopes are too high when we believe that the solution to social discord is just better communication. (49 minutes)
Thinking Together
Alan Jacobs discusses some principles he’s compiled to help us think well (and charitably) in our cultural context, and he warns us to be attentive to the ways technology displaces previously fixed communities. (53 minutes)
Real Food, Real Communities
Corby Kummer extols the virtues of the Slow Food movement, which seeks to honor, protect, and sustain traditional foods and ingredients from specific cultures and regions. (48 minutes)
Pathways of the Mind: The Joy of the Essay
Alan Jacobs thinks Christians should embrace the potential in the literary form of the essay, because of the way it corresponds to the navigation and journey of a Christian life. (48 minutes)
In the Image of Our Devices
Nicholas Carr considers how automation technologies impact our ability to engage with the world. (66 minutes)
Good News for All Creation
Theologian Norman Wirzba helps us rethink the category of nature in terms of the Christian doctrine of creation. (66 minutes)
Shared Practices, Strong Communities
Christine Pohl reflects on why a deliberate commitment to certain shared practices is necessary for the sustaining of community. (57 minutes)
Georges Bernanos & the Mystery of the Human Person
Translator J. C. Whitehouse praises French novelist Georges Bernanos’s profundity in exploring the depths of the human soul through the vehicle of fiction. (58 minutes)
Cultivating the Virtue of Reverence
Paul Woodruff (1943–2023) discusses the importance of reverence as a virtue that enriches relationships, elevates civic life, and helps leaders to wield power wisely. (53 minutes)
Beauty, Spirit, & Embodiment: A Christian View of Art
Adrienne Chaplin explains why a Christian approach to art must involve various levels of inquiry and not be limited to discussions of worldview or meaning alone. (46 minutes)
Poetry and Liturgy
Karen Dieleman explores the influence of liturgical practices on shaping the imaginations and poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, and Adelaide Proctor. (49 minutes)
The Transformed Vision of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Poet Malcolm Guite explores the dramatic and even prophetic parallels between the life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and that of the titular character in his famous poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” (59 minutes)
Sacramental Poetics
Poet and Eastern Orthodox believer Scott Cairns explains how a good poem functions like an icon: it assists the process of our becoming aware of what is real, and it is generative in the ways it keeps opening up new understandings. (56 minutes)
Seeing Creation Anew: The Life & Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins
Dana Gioia examines Gerard Manley Hopkins‘s poetic genius and dedication to Christ in spite of his personal trials and difficult cultural context. (55 minutes)
John Donne’s Passion in Life, Faith, & Verse
Poet Dana Gioia discusses the remarkable life of poet John Donne and how his spiritual and intellectual struggles created the conditions for his unique poetic voice. (53 minutes)
On the Degeneration of Attentiveness
Critic Nicholas Carr talks about how technology-driven trends affect our cultural and personal lives. (56 minutes)
