Thinking Together

Related reading and listening

• “A Myth Retold” — Literary critic Thomas Howard explains why he considers C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces to be one of the author’s richest and most rewarding works. (18 minutes)
• Disengagement from the world — Nicholas Carr encourages us to consider how automation technologies impact our ability to engage with the world and whether — like a good tool — they present a more inviting world or close us off from that world. (30 minutes)
• 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)
• Silence at the end of history — Alan Jacobs examines several literary imaginings of “the last days” and argues that such narration is profoundly inadequate and perhaps even presumptuous. (51 minutes)
• The beauty of truth and goodness — FROM VOL. 141 James Matthew Wilson talks about how cultivating the desire to perceive the interior life of things sustains the basic human capacity for recognizing truth, pursuing wisdom, and contemplating beauty. (23 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)
• A flood of images — Oliver O’Donovan describes the distinctive character of publicity in modernity, which drowns us in a flood of ever-changing representations that do not serve the common good. (37 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)
• The “sovereign uselessness of moral reflection” — Calling on the wisdom of St. Augustine, Oliver O’Donovan reminds his listeners that all knowledge participates in the eternal Logos of God and is rooted in love, not disinterested moral judgement.(Lecture 1 of 3; 52 minutes)
• Beyond a reasonable doubt — From a 1980 interview with Ken Myers, Mortimer J. Adler discusses his argument that belief in the existence of God is rational. (14 minutes)
• Mystery novels with theological concerns — In these interviews from 1993, mystery author P. D. James speaks about the philosophical and theological issues woven into her novels, and Alan Jacobs discusses James’s novel The Children of Men. (23 minutes)
• Heaven and earth are full of His glory — Gerald R. McDermott examines the typological tradition of the Church, particularly through Jonathan Edwards’s thought, and he argues for a recovery of the Christian understanding of the universe as an “immense Trinitarian symbol.” (61 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)
• A false dichotomy — In this conversation from 2009, Dallas Willard (1934–2013) discusses the truth of spiritual knowledge and its epistemological validity. (63 minutes)
• All trees, no forest — Richard Weaver on the attenuating of knowledge
• Christian belief as real knowledge — Dallas Willard on the modern divorce between faith and knowledge
• Humility and moral knowledge — FROM VOL. 149 Steven L. Porter discusses The Disappearance of Moral Knowledge, an unfinished manuscript (which he helped to complete) by the late philosopher Dallas Willard. (22 minutes)
• Harbinger of disorder — Mark Mitchell on Michael Polanyi’s recognition of the dangerous dead-end of materialistic reductionism
• Universities as the hosts of reciprocating speech — Robert Jenson on how the Christian understanding of Truth in a personal Word shaped the Western university
• The vice of curiosity — Stanley Hauerwas on the warning from Paul Griffiths about desiring to own knowledge
• University or “utiliversity”? — In this essay, Reinhard Hütter examines in depth John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University and argues that its insights and prescriptions are urgently relevant to the current status of higher education. (87 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)
• Students as arbiters of knowledge — FROM VOL. 94 Tim Clydesdale discusses the experience of freshmen year at college, suggesting that by that time students have been effectively inoculated against a love of knowledge. (21 minutes)
• What adolescence misses — FROM VOL. 94 Mark Bauerlein talks about the ways of learning and living practiced by contemporary youth, how they impact the acquisition and use of knowledge and form intellectual habits, and what this means for the future of our society. (16 minutes)
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 165 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jeffrey Bilbro, Daniel McInerny, Joseph Minich, Carl Elliott, Nadya Williams, and Don W. King
• The amplification of distraction — FROM VOL. 152 Jeffrey Bilbro advocates a Christian posture toward our contemporary digital media ecosystem that addresses its disorienting and disintegrating effects. (23 minutes)
• 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)
• 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)
• Immediately yours — Todd Gitlin on the effect of media on our sense of time
• 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)
• Wayfaring, but not strange — Alan Jacobs on being on the way
• 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)
• 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)
• How paintings convey meaning — FROM VOL. 121 Theologian Walter Hansen and painter Bruce Herman question contemporary conceptions of meaning that confine it to the verbal or consider visual and verbal meaning to be completely exclusive. (20 minutes)
• Lives of generosity — Jonathan Wilson distinguishes between two fundamental ways of viewing Creation: a true Christian account of the world and a “survival of the fittest” one. (21 minutes)
• “Only a real world can save us” — Oliver O’Donovan explores how the “religion” of modernity lacks a coherent world in which one may participate with full human agency and moral purpose. (Lecture 3 of 3; 61 minutes)
• Moral knowledge of reality — Oliver O’Donovan argues that admiration is the fundamental form of knowing the world, as we cannot know fully those elements of reality (“bare facts”) that contain no significance for us. (Lecture 2 of 3; 55 minutes)
• The recovery of an integrated ecology — In this essay, Michael Hanby unpacks the summons of Laudato si’ to an ecological way of life based on a proper understanding of creation in its fullness and integrity. (57 minutes)
• Manners and morals — FROM VOL. 19 Film and literary critic Alan Jacobs discusses how modern audiences relate to the manners and morals portrayed in Jane Austen films. (16 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 hatred of logos — D. C. Schindler draws on Plato to argue that in its very form, social media evidences a general contempt for logos — reason and language — which defines man. (26 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)
• 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)
• How social media truncates relationships — In this lecture, Felicia Wu Song explains how social media industrializes and monetizes our relationships, forming us in modes of relationships and identity that are detrimental to ourselves and to society. (41 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)
• Making contact with reality — FROM VOL. 139 Esther Lightcap Meek discusses the realism of philosopher and chemist Michael Polanyi. (23 minutes)