Materialism

Mark Mitchell on Michael Polanyi’s recognition of the dangerous dead-end of materialistic reductionism

FROM VOL. 147 Mary Hirschfeld argues that modern economics makes some fundamental assumptions about personhood, material goods, and God that prevent the development of a truly human understanding of economic life. (20 minutes)

FROM VOL. 13 Historian and cultural critic Jackson Lears discusses the power of advertising to reinforce and shape cultural attitudes about material goods. (9 minutes)

FROM VOL. 42Science journalist John Horgan, author of The Undiscovered Mind: How the Human Brain Defies Replication, Medication, and Explanation, discusses the limits of neuroscience. (13 minutes)

David Bentley Hart on the evasiveness implicit on all efforts to explain away human consciousness

Leon Kass on the pressure exerted by the authority of science to embrace reductionistic materialism

Karen Swallow Prior and Don W. King discuss C. S. Lewis’s early poetry and the evidence therein of a “frustrated dualism.” (23 minutes)

FROM VOL. 126 Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)

George Parkin Grant on how sex drives out love

David Bentley Hart on the spirituality of the material world

FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold

FEATURED GUESTS: N. T. Wright, George Marsden, Makoto Fujimura, David Bentley Hart, and Thomas Lessl

FEATURED GUESTS: Craig A. Bernthal, James Turner Johnson, Alissa Quart, Stephen M. Barr, Lilian Calles Barger, and Corby Kummer