Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 87

Related reading and listening

• The Bride of Christ — John Cavadini explores the different views of Origen and Augustine as to the nature and mission of the Church, and he calls for a recovery of the identity of the Church as the Bride of Christ. (38 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)
• Early ambivalence toward anti-Nazi resistance — FROM VOL.107 Biographer Ferdinand Schlingensiepen talks about the memory of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in the post-war period of Germany, and how his popularity changed over the years. (15 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)
• 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)
• 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)
• A “cosmological omnibus” — George Grant recounts the fascinating history of Hernando Colón’s attempt in the 16th century to curate a universal library of the world’s knowledge. (41 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 implausibility of belief — FROM VOL. 123 James K. A. Smith discusses the evangelical and ecclesial ramifications for Christians living within Charles Taylor’s third wave of secularism. (25 minutes)
• The pathos of sin — FROM VOL. 15 Poet Robert Pinsky discusses his translation of Dante’s Inferno. (9 minutes)
• Existential preparation for reading literature — FROM VOL. 128 Rod Dreher recounts how he thought he was reading Dante’s Commedia, when in reality the poem was reading him. (18 minutes)
• An icon of the whole world — Jason Baxter explains how Dante includes a panoply of characters and creatures in his Comedia, offering a prismatic view of all of Creation in its glory. (20 minutes)
• The soul’s awakening — FROM VOL. 145 Jason Baxter discusses the great psychological subtlety in Dante’s Divine Comedy. (20 minutes)
• How literature shaped Lewis — FROM VOL. 155 Jason Baxter explains how reading medieval literature enabled C. S. Lewis to become a “naturalized citizen of the Middle Ages.” (25 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)
• 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)
• The “book” of Creation — Alan Noble explains why the modern world makes it profoundly difficult to experience Creation as revelation, and he encourages unmediated encounters with Creation that lead to meditation. (52 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)
• Ontology and reality in fiction — Katy Carl discusses Catholic novelist Graham Greene’s skill in portraying the struggle between spiritual belief and doubt. (27 minutes)
• Sacred and Profane Love: Graham Greene and the Catholic Imagination — Katy Carl discusses novelist Graham Greene’s fiction and spiritual struggles in light of the concept of the Catholic imagination. (49 minutes)
• Alert to the magic in the world — Junius Johnson discusses the importance of teaching stories, particularly fairy stories, in classical education. (25 minutes)
• City of God, City of Man — Architect Philip Bess discusses how our modern-day confusion and moral illiteracy are worked out visibly in the cities and buildings our architects create. (57 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)
• Christian belief as real knowledge — Dallas Willard on the modern divorce between faith and knowledge
• The de(con)struction of the humanities (and of truth) — Historian Gertrude Himmelfarb on the skeptical tendencies of the postmodern academy
• Secularization and anarchy — Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger on the necessary connection between law, ethics, and worship
• 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)
• Nervousness about the shape of religion in America — Thomas Albert Howard discusses European perspectives of eighteenth-century American religious life. (21 minutes)
• Christian unity and civil society — Oliver O’Donovan introduces listeners to Dutch lay theologian Hugo Grotius, arguing that the questions he tackled relate to perennial concerns about the relationship between divine and human agency, and between civil and ecclesiastical authority. (Lecture 2 of 3; 57 minutes)
• Attentiveness to the world, the self, and time — Oliver O’Donovan uses the metaphor of waking to discuss the concept of moral sensibility as attention to the world, the self, and time. (Lecture 1 of 3; 60 minutes)
• Poetry and Liturgy — Karen Dieleman explores the influence of liturgical practices on shaping the imaginations and poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, and Adelaide Proctor. (49 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)
• Natural law as “performance” — FROM VOL. 124 R. J. Snell discusses how novel ideas about natural law focus less on moral propositions and concepts and more on the thrust for meaning and value. (27 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)
• Poetry and piety — FROM VOL. 48 James Trott discusses insights he learned while editing A Sacrifice of Praise: An Anthology of Christian Poetry in English from Caedman to the Mid-Twentieth Century. (7 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 life of the city in poetry — FROM VOL. 1 Ken Myers talks with W. H. Auden’s biographer and literary executor, Edward Mendelson, about political and social themes in Auden’s poetry. (7 minutes)
• Joy & sorrow, destitution & abundance — In this poetry reading and talk, poet Christian Wiman discusses his own faith journey and how his struggles worked themselves into his poems. (40 minutes)
• Seeing Creation Anew: The Life & Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins — Dana Gioia examines Gerard Manley Hopkins‘s poetic genius and dedication to Christ in spite of his personal trials and difficult cultural context. (55 minutes)
• “The essence of a moment, clearly perceived” — Haiku poet Gary Hotham reads his poetry and discusses how the form of haiku reveals the connection between creatures and creation. (45 minutes)
• The joy and mystery of poetry — FROM VOL. 98 Jeanne Murray Walker discusses how she helps students approach and appreciate poetry as the mysteriously meaningful literature it is, rather than as a linguistic cage containing static meaning to be abstracted from the words of the poem. (23 minutes)
• The idiom for the revelation of mystery — Dana Gioia on the foundational place of poetry in Christian faith
• Breaking the frozen sea — Dana Gioia on how poetry enchants
• John Donne’s Passion in Life, Faith, & Verse — Poet Dana Gioia discusses the remarkable life of poet John Donne and how his spiritual and intellectual struggles created the conditions for his unique poetic voice. (53 minutes)
• The importance of literary reading — FROM VOL. 70 Dana Gioia discusses the important role literary reading plays in society and the 2004 publication from the NEA about such reading. (13 minutes)
• Longfellow’s appeal — FROM VOL. 53 Poet and critic Dana Gioia explains why Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) is one of the three great American poets. (30 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)
• Hillbilly Augustinian — Ralph Wood on Flannery O’Connor’s refusal to adapt her fiction to the national temper