Real Food, Real Communities

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• Reason and the love of truth — FROM VOL. 97 James Peters discusses historical understandings of reason and rationality and how they differ from the modern notion of rationality. (21 minutes)
• The primacy of the Body of Christ — FROM VOL. 134 Philip Turner reflects on how Christian ethics is misplaced if it has as its central concern individual moral behavior or social justice. (28 minutes)
• How communities remember who they are — Oliver O’Donovan on the necessity of tradition in sustaining communal identity
• How common loves shape communities — Oliver O’Donovan discusses how communities mediate love and knowledge to their members and what challenges arise as a community’s traditions are confronted by sin, error, and plurality. (Lecture 2 of 3; 49 minutes)
• Stewarding God’s creation — FROM VOL. 116 Fred Bahnson talks about how a Christian understanding of God’s redemptive work on the earth should influence our practices of growing and sharing food. (19 minutes)
• Money, status, and satisfaction — FROM VOL. 44 David Myers and Robert Frank discuss the tenuous relationship between wealth and happiness. (22 minutes)
• Landscape and living memory — FROM VOL. 44 Gayle Brandow Samuels examines the ways in which trees have served as anchor-points for memory and identity in American culture. (9 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)
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 165 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jeffrey Bilbro, Daniel McInerny, Joseph Minich, Carl Elliott, Nadya Williams, and Don W. King
• What are students for? — FROM VOL. 140 Drawing from Wendell Berry’s works, Jack Baker and Jeffrey Bilbro discuss a vision of higher education that respects a multidimensional notion of place. (23 minutes)
• Clips from five extended interviews — We are pleased to share clips from five interviews that we’ve recently produced as full-length Conversations. (30 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)
• “The search for shared ends” — Oliver O’Donovan examines whether and to what extent there might be the possibility of a unifying Christian perspective on political doctrine or policy. (59 minutes)
• Antagonism or fruitfulness? — FROM VOL. 108 Jean Porter describes how natural law justifies legal and moral authority within the life of the human person. (17 minutes)
• The collapse of public life — FROM VOL. 154 D. C. Schindler explains how liberalism sought to make way for individuals to function together without any orientation to an explicit common good. (37 minutes)
• The personal element in all knowing — Mark Mitchell connects key aspects of Michael Polanyi’s conception of knowledge with Matthew Crawford’s insistence that real knowing involves more than technique. (34 minutes)
• Impact of “infotainment” on community — Neil Gabler and C. John Sommerville discuss how the mentalities conveyed by our experience with communications media work against the nurturing of community. (36 minutes)
• The digital revolution and community — FROM VOL. 7 Ken Myers talks with Jane Metcalfe, the founder of WIRED Magazine, about technology and community. (8 minutes)
• Education that counters alienation — In this lecture, Jeanne Schindler explores how digital technologies warp not only education but our experience of being human. (30 minutes)
• Courtesy as a theological issue — FROM VOL. 37 Donald McCullough discusses his insights into the increasingly coarse nature of society and the theological foundations for courtesy. (12 minutes)
• Farming and our primal vocation — Shawn and Beth Dougherty make a theological case for biomimicry, or fulfilling our original vocation of tending the earth by working according to the nature of Nature. (68 minutes)
• A theology of eating — FROM VOL. 113 Theologian Norman Wirzba examines the relationship between food and faith. (24 minutes)
• Honoring the pigness of pigs — FROM VOL. 137 Popular innovator and speaker on farming practices Joel Salatin talks about the challenges of caring for Creation within an agricultural and food system that pays little attention to the purposes and inclinations of Creation. (25 minutes)
• The historian’s communal role as storyteller — FROM VOL. 127 Historian Christopher Shannon discusses how American academic historical writing presents a grand narrative of progressivism, which it defends by subscribing to an orthodoxy of objective Reason. (21 minutes)
• Friendship and life together — In a lecture at Providence College, Ken Myers explores how the concept of friendship, which used to be central to political philosophy, was banished from considerations of public life as the state was exalted over society. (53 minutes)
• Blest be the ties of language that bind us — Marion Montgomery on the precious gift of words
• The academy’s deconstruction of both person and community — Marion Montgomery on cultivating “a deportment of intellect governed by a continuing concern for the truth of things”
• Community, the giver of freedom — Thomas H. Naylor and William H. Willimon on why suspicion about big government shouldn’t take the form of autonomous individualism
• Making peace with the land — Fred Bahnson challenges us to consider how we might honor our created and redeemed relationship with the earth as God’s stewards. (48 minutes)
• Welcoming one another — Christine Pohl describes the practice of hospitality in Church history and the particular challenges to hospitality we face in our era. (30 minutes)
• Living in a meshwork world — Theologian Norma 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. (17 minutes)
• Convivial is beautiful — Ivan Illich on “the opposite of industrial productivity”
• Loving relationships in community — In conversation with moral philosopher Oliver O’Donovan, and with readings from his book, Entering into Rest, Ken Myers explores a central theme in O’Donovan’s work: that we are created to enjoy loving relationships in community. (27 minutes)
• Freed from the burden of choice — Writing in the mid-1990s, Alan Ehrenhalt reflects on the relationship between authority and community
• Why communities need authority — Alan Ehrenhalt argues that real community can only be sustained when three things are assumed: the goodness of limits, the necessity of authority, and the reality of personal sin. (13 minutes)
• The Bruderhof’s Christ-centered community — Clare Stober discusses the book she edited of stories of the Bruderhof, a network of 26 community settlements around the world. (30 minutes)
• Beer brewing and monasticism — Fr. Andrew Bushell talks about why and how he became a brewer and about the intertwined history of brewing and monasticism. (28 minutes)
• Confronting modernity through farming — Jesse Straight, who nurtures the life of Whiffletree Farm in Warrenton, Virginia, talks about how he decided to pursue a vocation as a farmer in an effort to discover a way of life that worked against the characteristic fragmentation so dispiriting in modern culture. (24 minutes)
• Lessons from quarantine: Making do with tinned fruit — In this audio reprint of “Wendell Berry and Zoom,” Front Porch Republic editor Jeffrey Bilbro reflects on two metaphors that can help put our new-found “dependency” on web-based video conferencing into perspective: tinned fruit and a prosthetic limb. (17 minutes)
• Keeping “the good” in the common good — D. C. Schindler on the metaphysical character of real community
• The Good City: Community and Urban Order — Architects, historians, activists, and clergy discuss how loving our neighbors can and must take shape in how we order the material aspects of shared life. (100 minutes)
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 116 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stratford Caldecott, Fred Bahnson, Eric O. Jacobsen, J. Budziszewski, Brian Brock, and Allen Verhey
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 113 — FEATURED GUESTS: Steven Shapin, Arthur Boers, Christine Pohl, Norman Wirzba, Craig Bartholomew, and David I. Smith
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 108 — FEATURED GUESTS: Thomas Albert Howard, Jean Porter, Peter Augustine Lawler, Hans Boersma, Felicia Wu Song, and Elias Aboujaoude
• Joshua P. Hochschild: “Globalization: Ancient and Modern” — Joshua P. Hochschild examines the effects of globalization on local communities and argues for the need for reflection on the ends of politics given the ends of human beings. (36 minutes)
• Food and the modern world — Why would someone quit a job at The New Yorker in order to become an apprentice to various chefs and “food artisans” in Manhattan and Italy?
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 68 — FEATURED GUESTS: Murray Milner, Jr., Steven C. Vryhof, Douglas J. Schuurman, Robert Gagnon, Richard Stivers, and Quentin Schultze
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 67 — FEATURED GUESTS: Eric O. Jacobsen, Allan C. Carlson, Terence L. Nichols, R. R. Reno, David Bentley Hart, J. A. C. Redford, and Scott Cairns
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 62 — FEATURED GUESTS: Craig A. Bernthal, James Turner Johnson, Alissa Quart, Stephen M. Barr, Lilian Calles Barger, and Corby Kummer