“The greatest works of art are endless”

Related reading and listening

• The contested idea of beauty in art — FROM VOL.58 Ted Prescott describes the turn that the role of art in the West took in the 19th century in response to the weight of the “canons” and philosophy of beauty developed during the 17th and 18th centuries. (23 minutes)
• A sampling of newly published lectures — Ken Myers introduces listeners to four recently released lectures, courtesy of our Partners. The lecturers are Jennifer Frey, Gary Saul Morson, N. T. Wright, and Andrew Kern. (27 minutes)
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 166 — FEATURED GUESTS: William Cavanaugh, Kent Burreson, Beth Hoeltke, Jeffrey Barbeau, Jason Baxter, John Betz, and Bruce Herman
• Art that witnesses, consoles, and strengthens — Artist Margaret Adams Parker explores the human need to lament and reveals how various “arts of lament” console, strengthen, bear witness to those who engage with them. (51 minutes)
• Films that lead to contemplation — FROM VOL. 162 David Paul Baird discusses some of the films on the Vatican’s list of recommended films. (25 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)
• Prayer and complexity in Arvo Pärt’s music — In honor of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt’s 90th birthday, Ken Myers talks with Peter Bouteneff, about the singular qualities of Pärt’s music. (19 minutes)
• How to illustrate music and mystery — FROM VOL. 164 Illustrator Joonas Sildre discusses his graphic biography of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. (19 minutes)
• Showing as meaning — Daniel McInerny on how the arts convey meaning
• Introducing Volume 165 — Ken Myers introduces listeners to Volume 165 of the Journal with short segments from each interview. (32 minutes)
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 165 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jeffrey Bilbro, Daniel McInerny, Joseph Minich, Carl Elliott, Nadya Williams, and Don W. King
• From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
• Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
• Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”
• Art and whateverism — Jed Perl on why great art is triumphantly intolerant
• 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)
• 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)
• The troubled marriage of art and democracy — Historian David Smith explains the idealistic (and naïve) political motivations behind the establishing of the National Endowment for the Arts, founded in 1965. (52 minutes)
• Sacramental correspondence — FROM VOL. 51 Poet Dana Gioia discusses the state of contemporary poetry and the sacramental relationship between language and reality. (15 minutes)
• From culture war to culture care — In this 2016 lecture, artist Makoto Fujimura asks what would it look like for Christians to be stewards of beauty and human flourishing in all areas of life and culture. (48 minutes)
• How fantasy restores the world — In this 2019 lecture, Alison Milbank shows how fantasy can help restore to us a vision of human flourishing that counters the atomization and meaninglessness of modern life. (43 minutes)
• The powerful presence of the body — FROM VOL. 9 Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 minutes)
• The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art — FROM VOL. 88 Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
• Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud — FROM VOL. 7 Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
• Depicting the human form — FROM VOL. 6 Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 minutes)
• The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
• Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
• The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism” that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
• Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
• The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
• Roger Scruton: Music as an Art — Philosopher Roger Scruton explains why there are some things — music in particular and art in general — which one can’t rightly or fully perceive without making judgments. (32 minutes)
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 121 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel Gabelman, Curtis White, Michael Hanby, Alan Jacobs, James K. A. Smith, Bruce Herman, and Walter Hansen
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 119 — FEATURED GUESTS: Mary Eberstadt, Allan Bevere, Peter J. Leithart, Steven Boyer, Karen Dieleman, and Peter Phillips
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 104 — FEATURED GUESTS: James Le Fanu, Garret Keizer, Daniel Ritchie, Monica Ganas, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, and Peter J. Leithart
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 97 — FEATURED GUESTS: Mark Noll, Stanley Fish, James Peters, Scott Moore, and Makoto Fujimura
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 59 — FEATURED GUESTS: Ron Hansen, Bernard Lewis, Alan Jacobs, Adrienne Chaplin, Todd Gitlin, and Quentin Schultze
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 58 — FEATURED GUESTS: Hubert Dreyfus, Francis Fukuyama, Gordon Preece, Gijs van Hensbergen, Ted Prescott, and Bradley J. Birzer
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 50 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stanley Carlson-Thies, Bruce S. Thornton, A. J. Conyers, Stanton L. Jones, Arthur F. Holmes, Carson Holloway, Ted Prescott, and Glenn Arbery
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey