Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 142

Related reading and listening

• The desire for truth — In this article, Romanus Cessario, O.P., recounts the life, theology, and influence of St. Thomas Aquinas (1224/5–1274). (38 minutes)
• When myth becomes fact — In this 1976 interview, Clyde Kilby (1902–1986) discusses C. S. Lewis’s critique of scientism and rationalism, his belief in the primacy of the imagination, and his mythic vision. (37 minutes)
• A great Reality at the core of things — Clyde Kilby on the nature and need for myths
• Paradoxes of “nature” and “culture” — Robert Spaemann, on the destructive consequences of a merely naturalistic understanding of nature
• 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)
• 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)
• Modernity’s crisis of place — Craig Bartholomew reflects on the importance of place to our humanity. (58 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)
• The just war tradition and whole-life discipleship — Daniel M. Bell, Jr. discusses the just war tradition, a tradition which is often invoked by figures who, upon closer inspection, tend to lack a robust understanding of its history and criteria. (57 minutes)
• Grace and Christian realism — Jennifer Frey explores Thomist elements in Flannery O’Connor’s theology and writing, with a particular emphasis on a Thomist understanding of art. (39 minutes)
• Divine love and human sexuality — Paul Tyson argues that views about sexuality are downstream from theological — or at least metaphysical — assumptions about human nature. (16 minutes)
• “Investigations of divine works” — Greg Wilbur explains how closely connected music is to the order of the cosmos and how it even reveals attributes of God. (56 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)
• To be at home in the world — D. C. Schindler examines how rituals enable us to experience time in a meaningful way — how they actually make time habitable for us. (41 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 experience of a “real presence” in sacred music — FROM VOL. 126 Jonathan Arnold explores why people of no religious commitment pay money to hear specifically sacred music. (22 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)
• 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)
• Publicity and representative images in society — Oliver O’Donovan describes the nature of publicity as the force that mediates our communication with one another, creating common interests and then rapidly subsuming them into newer ones.(Lecture 3 of 3; 57 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)
• Life more abundantly — Jeanne Schindler advocates for a return to an understanding and prioritizing of sensory experience — real engagement with the real world — as foundational to learning and living. (35 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)
• An invitation to a feast — Christina Bieber Lake explains how poetry is an invitation to experience the beauty and goodness of Creation as gift. (44 minutes)
• Alert to the magic in the world — Junius Johnson discusses the importance of teaching stories, particularly fairy stories, in classical education. (25 minutes)
• The de(con)struction of the humanities (and of truth) — Historian Gertrude Himmelfarb on the skeptical tendencies of the postmodern academy
• 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)
• 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)
• The “scandal” of theology in the university — Edward T. Oakes, S.J. explains why John Henry Newman’s eloquent defense of the nature of university education, The Idea of a University, continues to inspire, challenge, and even frustrate its sympathizers. (24 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)
• The establishment of nonbelief — FROM VOL. 10 George Marsden explains how and why American universities became places where religious concerns are excluded. (10 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)
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 165 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jeffrey Bilbro, Daniel McInerny, Joseph Minich, Carl Elliott, Nadya Williams, and Don W. King
• Pathologizing personalities — FROM VOL. 41 David Healy discusses how definitions of health are shaped not just by medical science, but also by intertwining social, cultural, and economic forces. (16 minutes)
• 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)
• 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)
• Immediately yours — Todd Gitlin on the effect of media on our sense of time
• The avant garde of secularization — FROM VOL. 38 Alvin Kernan explains sweeping changes in American university education since the 19th century. (11 minutes)
• Christ-animated learning — FROM VOL. 142 Perry L. Glanzer and Nathan F. Alleman discuss the fragmentation of modern higher education and why we need theology to unify universities. 26 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)
• 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)
• How the Church promotes the cause of freedom — Oliver O’Donovan: “We discover we are free when we are commanded by that authority which commands us according to the law of our being, disclosing the secrets of the heart.”
• What is beyond our choosing? — D. C. Schindler on our nihilistic quest for freedom
• The danger of not defining “freedom” — Richard Bauckham insists that an adequate understanding of freedom requires recognition of God as the ground of true human freedom