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Volume 127 (CD Edition)
Guests on Volume 127
• CHRISTOPHER SHANNON on the historian's communal role as story-teller
• KEVIN VANHOOZER on the dramatic purposes of doctrine
• OLIVER O'DONOVAN on negotiating our way in the created realities
• REBECCA DEYOUNG on the forgotten vice of vainglory
• THOMAS FORREST KELLY on the invention of Western musical notation
• CALVIN STAPERT on the life and work of Joseph Haydn
A digital edition of this Volume is also available
Click here to download a pdf file with the contents listing and bibliographic information about this Volume.
Christopher Shannon
“If we truly believe in pluralism . . . then [we] have to let some substantively different stories and different conceptions of the good into the conversation, or [pluralism] is a sham.”
— Christopher Shannon, author of The Past as Pilgrimage: Narrative, Tradition, and the Renewal of Catholic History (Christendom Press, 2014)
Historian Christopher Shannon discusses how American academic historical writing presents a grand narrative of progressivism, which it defends by subscribing to an orthodoxy of objective Reason. In The Past as Pilgrimage, Shannon and his colleague, Christopher Blum, take their cue from Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, in which MacIntyre argued that a community’s conception of the good is rooted and upheld in communal stories and practices. For Shannon, the historian’s craft is to give an authentic re-telling of a community’s vision of the good as it is sustained through story and practice. ⇧
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Kevin Vanhoozer
“Doctrine is direction for understanding the drama of the Christ. And that direction for understanding, we only demonstrate that we’ve understood when we participate in that same drama in a knowing, understanding, fitting way.”
— Kevin Vanhoozer, author of Faith Speaking Understanding: Performing the Drama of Doctrine (Westminster John Knox Press, 2014)
Theologian Kevin Vanhoozer recounts his experience that seminary students think doctrine is of little consequence to the everyday details of ministry. In contrast to this theory/practice dichotomy, Vanhoozer asserts that doctrine is essential for performing the drama of the Christ and is necessary for informing our everyday practices. In other words, the extent to which we perform the creative and redemptive work begun in Christ as the Kingdom of God is the extent to which we perform our roles as disciples of Christ. By combining elements of the language of narrative and practices, Vanhoozer advances that “drama” is story made flesh, which, when we participate as actors, shapes not only our minds and bodies, but also our imaginations. ⇧
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Oliver O’Donovan
“Spontaneity is doing what comes into your mind. Freedom is not doing what comes into your mind; freedom is doing what you have in your mind.”
— Oliver O’Donovan, author of Self, World, and Time (Eerdmans, 2013)
Moral philosopher Oliver O’Donovan discusses the first two volumes of his three-volume set on Ethics as Theology. In this conversation, O’Donovan identifies some important touchstones that have guided his thinking about moral reflection, including his insight in Resurrection and Moral Order (1986) that moral thinking and action proceed from, and must resonate with, the realities of the created order. O’Donovan also reflects upon the significance of the thinking moral subject as well as what form of moral inadequacy the “life of the flesh” suggests. ⇧
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Rebecca DeYoung
“Vice names a pattern in our behavior and our way of seeing the world and our way of feeling about the world that has been built up by many acts over time.”
— Rebecca DeYoung, author of Vainglory: The Forgotten Vice (Eerdmans, 2014)
Philosopher Rebecca DeYoung talks about the forgotten vice of vainglory. As DeYoung explains, the body of reflection upon the “deadly sins ”—originally conceived as source vices, or capital vices—were passed on from the tradition of moral reflection and practices of the Desert Fathers. After examining the difference between glory and vainglory, DeYoung discusses how vainglory is socially fed and rewarded in our culture. ⇧
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Thomas Forrest Kelly
“I think the really earliest [notation] — these gestural signs — are really not so much a picture of the music, as they are a picture of how the music goes, as how you do a song that you already know.”
— Thomas Forrest Kelly, author of Capturing Music: The Story of Notation (W. W. Norton, 2014)
Harvard musicologist Thomas Forrest Kelly talks about how music, particularly the remembering and performing of it, mediates for us a foregrounded experience of time. In his book, Capturing Music: The Story of Notation, Kelly looks at the technologies involved in transferring the temporal and aural medium of music into a spatial representation, and how the decisions made along the way reveal and conceal different elements of what we perform and hear in music. ⇧
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Calvin Stapert
“No composer has ever achieved the respect of his colleagues and the love of the general musical public to the degree that Haydn did.”
— Calvin Stapert, author of Playing Before the Lord: The Life and Work of Joseph Haydn (Eerdmans, 2014)
Musicologist Calvin Stapert looks at the life and work of composer Joseph Haydn. Stapert regrets that Haydn’s reception history has fallen victim to a progressive aesthetic, in which the zenith of musical expression was achieved in the Romantic compositions of Beethoven. Stapert argues that while much of Haydn’s music retains the preferred “pleasantness” of the time, it is rarely mere pleasantry. Instead, like the rustic characters of the pastoral tradition, Haydn’s music carries with it a simple profundity that offers insight and understanding. ⇧
