James Davison Hunter

Guests on Volume 101: James Davison Hunter, on how the most prominent strategies of Christian cultural engagement are based on a misunderstanding about how cultures work; Paul Spears, on why Christian scholars need to understand their disciplines in ways that depart from conventional understanding; Steven Loomis, on why education needs to attend more carefully to nonquantifiable aspects of human experience; James K. A. Smith, on how education always involves the formation of affections and how the form of Christian education should imitate patterns of formation evident in historic Christian liturgy; Thomas Long, on how funeral practices have the capacity to convey an understanding of the meaning of discipleship and death; and William T. Cavanaugh, on the distinctly modern definition of "religion" and how the conventional account of the "Wars of Religion" misrepresents the facts in the interest of consolidating state power.

Guests on Volume 100: Jennifer Burns, on the life and legacy of Ayn Rand, "goddess of the market" and entrenched enemy of altruism; Christian Smith, on the aimless cultural world of "emerging adulthood" and on how it makes the idea of objective moral order implausible; and Dallas Willard, on why it's important to recover the conviction that religious beliefs involve real knowledge. In honor of the five score milestone, part two of the issue features a look back at the beginnings of the Journal and a few special excerpts of conversations with those early guests, including Peter Kreeft on Lewis, Huxley, and J.F.K. after death; P. D. James, on good and evil in fiction; James Davison Hunter, on culture wars; Paul McHugh, on when psychiatry loses its way; Ted Prescott, on nudity in art and advertising; Ed Knippers, on the powerful presence of the body; Martha Bayles, on pop and perverse modernism; Dominic Aquila, on Christopher Lasch; Gilbert Meilaender, on random kindness; Neil Postman, on technology and culture; and Alan Jacobs, on being maudlin in Madison County.

Guests on Volume 44: James Davison Hunter, on the limits of the psychological view of character; Brian Robertson, on the changes in attitudes toward work and home; David Myers, on the disjunction of wealth and happiness, and crafting a "new American dream"; Robert Frank, on the escalation of luxury and how it can be slowed; Gayle Brandow Samuels, on trees, landscape, and cultural identity; Thomas Hine, on The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager; Thomas Hibbs, on Seinfeld, Hannibal Lecter, and nihilism in popular culture; and Robin Leaver, on how J. S. Bach used musical forms to impart theological truths.

Guests on Volume 24: James Davison Hunter, on a survey about American political life conducted by the Post-Modernity Project; Robert H. Bork, on judicial complicity in the coarsening of America; Rochelle Gurstein, on how some advocates of unbridled free expression had second thoughts; Roger Shattuck, on how we've lost the ability to recognize the fact that some knowledge is bad for us; Michael Behe, on how complexity in cells suggests an intelligent designer; David Morgan, on the Paintings of Warner Sallman; and Ted Libbey, on Gabriel Fauré's Requiem.

Guests on Volume 8: Alan Jacobs, on novelist Iris Murdoch and how fiction encourages reflection in the moral life; Gilbert Meilaender, on "Random Acts of Kindness," cultivating virtue, and the meaning of kindness; Richard Lints, on The Fabric of Theology: A Prolegomenon to Evangelical Theology; Lynn Neary, on religion reporting's rebirth in the mainstream media; Ken Myers, on Recent Periodicals; James Davison Hunter, on the superficiality of journalism; Howard Rheingold, on the viability of "Virtual Community"; and Dominic Aquila, on Estonian composer Arvo Pärt's Te Deum.

Guests on Volume 1: D. G. Hart, on Oliver Stone's JFK and why film has trouble relating historical realities; Peter Kreeft, on Between Heaven and Hell, a post-death dialogue among John F. Kennedy, C. S. Lewis, and Aldous Huxley; Nigel Cameron, on the loss of the Hippocratic tradition in medicine; Ted Prescott, on the life and work of the late English painter Francis Bacon; Quentin Schultze, on Pat Robertson's plans to begin a 24-hour game show TV channel; James Davison Hunter, on Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America; Gregory Wolfe, on Mark Helprin's novel, A Soldier of the Great War; Edward Mendelson, on how poet W. H. Auden responded to modern culture; and Ted Libbey, on soprano Kathleen Battle.