Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 106

Related reading and listening

• Knowing and living our metaphysical totality — Clyde Kilby on the power of myth to bring together “the slender hints of the knowable”
• Christian culture and the myth of the secular — Ken Myers draws on T. S. Eliot to argue that Western civilization has broken down, not into a multiplicity of cultures, but into a “post-culture.” (47 minutes)
• How to make war on nothingness? — David Bentley Hart argues that if it rejects Christ, the only remaining option for a post-Christian culture is conscious or “narcotic” nihilism, which takes the form of absolute, meaningless volition. (66 minutes)
• Modernity’s crisis of place — Craig Bartholomew reflects on the importance of place to our humanity. (58 minutes)
• The inward eye, cosmic truth, and making well — Andrew Kern takes his listeners along an “interlinear” reading of a portion of St. Augustine’s Confessions that explores the differences between how God makes and how we create. (38 minutes)
• “If there is no God, all is permitted” — Gary Saul Morson explores the consequences of belief and disbelief in God through Russian literature. (51 minutes)
• In tune with the muses of Zion — Ken Myers on the Christmas music of Michael Praetorius
• The cost of “killing” God — In this October 2023 lecture, Carl Trueman explores the concept of “desecration” as a frame for understanding the nature of modernity in our time. (42 minutes)
• Nun komm der Heiden Heiland — Ken Myers looks at the history of an Advent hymn written by St. Ambrose in the fourth century, adapted by Martin Luther in the sixteenth century, and transformed by J. S. Bach and many others in the years since. (21 minutes)
• How music blesses and teaches — FROM VOL. 64 Theologian and musician Jeremy Begbie explores what we learn about time, theology, and the structure of Creation from the experience of music. (28 minutes)
• Ethics hidden in economics — FROM VOL. 134 William Cavanaugh explains why Christians should think about economics theologically, not just as a science or an ethical discipline. (25 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)
• Cosmic realities in the built world — Christopher and Christine Perrin discuss the implications of architect Christopher Alexander’s (1936–2022) discovery of patterns of building that cohere with the the created cosmos and with ourselves as human creatures. (59 minutes)
• Modern fictional “heroes” — FROM VOL. 141 Susanna Lee discusses moral authority in the heroes of hard-boiled crime fiction. (24 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)
• Money, status, and satisfaction — FROM VOL. 44 David Myers and Robert Frank discuss the tenuous relationship between wealth and happiness. (22 minutes)
• “Emerging adulthood” — FROM VOL. 100 Christian Smith discusses the aimless cultural world of emerging adulthood and on how it makes the idea of objective moral order implausible. (17 minutes)
• 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)
• 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)
• Man as “both mystic and hobbit” — D. C. Schindler explores how building is a quintessential human activity and an expression of our view of the meaning of reality. (47 minutes)
• Setting the liberal arts free — In addressing the state of liberal arts education in the U.S., Gilbert Meilaender raises some core questions and makes some surprising proposals. (28 minutes)
• Still connected to the land — Nadya Williams on the inescapably earthy character of human flourishing
• The reciprocity of all things — FROM VOL. 148 Jeffrey Bilbro explores the importance of sustainability through the essays, poetry and fiction of Wendell Berry. (13 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)
• Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
• A Christian understanding of human nature — FROM VOL. 35 Robert C. Roberts and Mark R. Talbot discuss the need for Christian psychologists to draw from Christianity’s deep tradition of understanding human nature. (15 minutes)
• Postmodern culture and the gospel — FROM VOL. 6 Roger Lundin discusses the ethical and theological consequences of our postmodern culture. (9 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)
• 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)
• Politics and the good — FROM VOL. 160 D. C. Schindler argues that political order cannot be disentangled from the social, and that fundamental questions of what humans are and what the good is cannot be bracketed from politics. (30 minutes)
• The profound drama of human sexuality — In this lecture, D. C. Schindler explains the cosmological significance of human sexuality and why it is paradigmatic of the relationship between nature and freedom. (32 minutes)
• Music that conveys spiritual truths — FROM VOL. 137 Musicologist Michael Marissen discusses the masterful way in which J. S. Bach uses musical idiom and quotation by way of theological counterpoint to the texts of his sacred vocal works. (13 minutes)
• A poet’s relationship to time — FROM VOL. 57 Poet Wilmer Mills (1969–2011) discusses how his agricultural and cross-cultural childhood in Brazil shaped his imagination and his relationship with modernity. (11 minutes)
• The downward spiral of all technocracies — Andrew Willard Jones explains the two paths that exist with the development of new technologies: one which leads to an expansion of the humane world and one which exploits and truncates both Creation and humanity. (65 minutes)
• To see people as people — Anthony Bradley argues that a recovery of Christian personalism is needed to counter the dehumanization, polarization, and tribalism of our day. (45 minutes)
• Ethical issues in neurobiological interventions — William Hurlbut explores current neurobiological advancements and the ethics and dangers of biotechnology interventions that go beyond therapy. (62 minutes)
• An impoverished anthropology — FROM VOL. 146 Mark Mitchell asks whether there is anything that truly binds Americans together beyond their commitment to self-creation. (34 minutes)
• St. Thomas the anthropologist — G. K. Chesterton on Aquinas’s complete Science of Man
• Economics and personhood — FROM VOL. 147 Mary Hirschfeld argues that modern economics makes some fundamental assumptions about personhood, material goods, and God that prevent the development of a truly human understanding of economic life. (20 minutes)
• Etiquette and ethics — In this essay, Judith Martin (a.k.a. Miss Manners) argues that etiquette is “civilization’s first necessity” and an indispensable societal virtue. (21 minutes)
• An embedded life — Following a move from one state to another, Gilbert Meilaender explores the tension between being simultaneously a sojourner and a body located in place and time. (30 minutes)
• Cultures of chance, cultures of control — Historian Jackson Lears explains how gambling springs from a longing for an experience of “unbidden beneficence,” a repudiation of the idea of control that marks modernity. (49 minutes)
• Against hacking babies — Oliver O’Donovan raises questions about IVF and the technologically ordered motive for efficiency
• Eugenics and the rise of “evolutionary ethics” — FROM VOL. 70 Richard Weikart describes evolutionary ethics and examines the ties between national racism and the eugenics movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. (16 minutes)
• Gratitude, vitalism, and the timid rationalist — In this lecture, Matthew Crawford draws a distinction between an orientation toward receiving life as gift and a timid and cramped rationalism that views man as an object to be synthetically remade. (52 minutes)
• Humans as biological hardware — In this essay, Brad Littlejohn and Clare Morell decry how modern technology tends to hack the human person in pursuit of profit. (55 minutes)
• A richer, deeper view of human dignity — FROM VOL. 98 Moral philosopher Gilbert Meilaender examines the question of human dignity and its place within political discourse. (25 minutes)
• “The system will be first” — FROM VOL. 27 Robert Kanigel describes the transformation of work due to Frederick Winslow Taylor’s concept of scientific management. (11 minutes)
• What it means to be a person — FROM VOL. 147 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. (24 minutes)
• Voluntarily silencing ourselves — FROM VOL. 39 John L. Locke discusses the value of personal communication and how technology is displacing it. (12 minutes)