Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 78

Related reading and listening

• We are not “stochastic parrots” — In this essay, Talbot Brewer argues that our understanding of the nature of words and their relationship to human nature is “teetering” due to artificial intelligence chatbot systems and large language models (LLMs). (42 minutes)
• The strengths of Christian scholarship — FROM VOL. 25 George Marsden explores the culture of suspicion in academia toward Christian scholarship and argues for its inclusion as intellectually viable and coherent with regard to reality. (11 minutes)
• Mid-20th century intellectual consensus — FROM VOL. 122 George Marsden discusses the influence of public intellectuals in America during the 1950s and their concerns for national moral consensus. (22 minutes)
• The reclaiming of authentic liberalism — John Médaille examines the Christian roots of liberalism and how liberalism might be recovered from the heresy of secularism. (51 minutes)
• Catechesis in “Screentopia” — In this lecture, Brad East builds a case for why he believes digital technology is the greatest threat facing American Christians today. (57 minutes)
• On disposable experience — Todd Gitlin argues that we simultaneously resent and crave the experience of media saturation, and that it ultimately cheapens our lives. (33 minutes)
• Social(izing) medium — Todd Gitlin on the ways in which television and other media have shaped our ways of having emotions
• Looking past the juicy distraction — Marshall McLuhan on the necessity of evaluating how — not just what — various media convey
• Immediately yours — Todd Gitlin on the effect of media on our sense of time
• Truth lives in language — Craig Gay reflects on how language is not merely a tool for humans to use, but is a part of our very being as creatures made in the image of the God who is the living Word. (52 minutes)
• Modern isolation — FROM VOL. 150 Eric Jacobsen argues that the emblematic items of the car windshield, the television, and the cell phone — “three pieces of glass” —have led to alienation from people and the places where we live. (22 minutes)
• How tech is making us less human — Christine Rosen argues that we must reckon with serious moral and ethical questions raised by the acceleration of “artificial intelligence” into almost every area of life. (31 minutes)
• A living tradition — In this lecture, James Matthew Wilson explores the nature of tradition as a “condition of possibility” that situates both reason and poetry. (49 minutes)
• Human beings as “word-bearers” — In this lecture, D. C. Schindler argues that misology — hatred for reason and contempt for language — is a deep cause of our current cultural crisis. (56 minutes)
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 167 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nicholas Carr, Thomas Ward, Joseph Stuart, Steven Knepper, Robert Wyllie, Ephraim Radner, and Andrew Willard Jones
• Nietzsche, technology, and desire — Steven Knepper and Robert Wyllie discuss philosopher Byung-Chul Han’s thought on Nietzsche and on the effects of digital media on concepts of freedom, desire, and receptivity to others. (14 minutes)
• 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)
• St. Thomas the anthropologist — G. K. Chesterton on Aquinas’s complete Science of Man
• Knowing and living our metaphysical totality — Clyde Kilby on the power of myth to bring together “the slender hints of the knowable”
• 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
• 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 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)
• 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)
• A humanist urban vision for Chicago — Philip Bess imagines what metropolitan Chicago might look like in one hundred years if it were designed according to classical humanist principles and with an overt acknowledgement of sacred order. (93 minutes)
• 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)
• “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)
• 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)
• Buying and selling holidays, identities, and ourselves — We present four interviews on American consumerism, with Leigh Eric Schmidt, David Lyon, Thomas Frank, and Sam Van Eman. (46 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)
• 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)
• Politics and idolatry — FROM VOL. 109 Theologian William Cavanaugh explains how the modern state is a unique kind of political entity, inviting a new kind of idolatry. (26 minutes)
• The modern invention of “religion” — FROM VOL. 101 Theologian William Cavanaugh examines the emptiness of the myth of religious violence. (22 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)
• 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)
• 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)
• Money, status, and satisfaction — FROM VOL. 44 David Myers and Robert Frank discuss the tenuous relationship between wealth and happiness. (22 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
• 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)