Culture

Robert Spaemann, on the destructive consequences of a merely naturalistic understanding of nature

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)

David Bentley Hart argues that if it rejects Christ, the only remaining option for a post-Christian culture is conscious or “narcotic” nihilism, which takes the form of absolute, meaningless volition. (66 minutes)

Ken Myers examines the cultural implications of the Incarnation and the deep-seated dualism of modernity that divorces spirituality from our material experience. (22 minutes)

FROM VOL. 100 Christian Smith discusses the aimless cultural world of emerging adulthood and on how it makes the idea of objective moral order implausible. (17 minutes)

Media theorist John Durham Peters wants us to reexamine the purposes of media and how fundamental media are. (59 minutes)

FROM VOL. 6 Roger Lundin discusses the ethical and theological consequences of our postmodern culture. (9 minutes)

FROM VOL. 108 Jean Porter describes how natural law justifies legal and moral authority within the life of the human person. (17 minutes)

FROM VOL. 20 Robert Richardson and Roger Lundin discuss how Ralph Waldo Emerson’s legacy lingers in American culture. (18 minutes)

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)

In this 2016 lecture, artist Makoto Fujimura asks what would it look like for Christians to be stewards of beauty and human flourishing in all areas of life and culture. (48 minutes)

In this essay, Judith Martin (a.k.a. Miss Manners) argues that etiquette is “civilization’s first necessity” and an indispensable societal virtue. (21 minutes)

FROM VOL. 85 Professor Christopher Shannon discusses how early twentieth-century social scientists encouraged the American idea that individual identity works against communal membership. (17 minutes)

FROM VOL. 37 Donald McCullough discusses his insights into the increasingly coarse nature of society and the theological foundations for courtesy. (12 minutes)

From our archives, Michael Kammen compares popular and mass culture, and Philip Fisher analyzes the idea that new cultural forms inevitably dissolve old ones. (26 minutes)

Roberta Bayer draws on the work of George Parkin Grant (1918–1988) to argue that our “culture of death” must be countered with an understanding of reality based in love, redemptive suffering, and a recognition of limitations to individual control. (33 minutes)

Historian Dermot Quinn discusses the work of fellow historian Christopher Dawson (1889–1970). (15 minutes)

Dermot Quinn discusses historian Christopher Dawson’s meta-historical perspective and his wisdom about what makes cultures healthy or unhealthy. (54 minutes)

FROM VOL. 103Eric Miller discusses the late historian and social critic Christopher Lasch’s intense commitment to understand the logic of American cultural confusion. (20 minutes)

Continuing our time travel back to 1992, we hear two more interviews from the pilot tape for the Mars Hill Tapes, with sociologist James Davison Hunter and bioethicist Nigel Cameron. (28 minutes)