Modernity

Hear excerpts from interviews with Mark Noll, Stanley Fish, James Peters, Scott Moore, and Makoto Fujimura. (28 minutes)

Reuben Slife discusses key concerns in the work of David L. Schindler (1943–2022). 31 (minutes)

David L. Schindler (1943–2022) explores the implications for a civilization that discards the reality that being is grounded in God. (minutes)

David Cayley (1946–2026) describes Ivan Illich’s insights into the “instrumental attitude” that defines modernity, in particular the blurring of the distinction between mechanisms and organisms. (39 minutes)

Todd Gitlin argues that we simultaneously resent and crave the experience of media saturation, and that it ultimately cheapens our lives. (33 minutes)

Leszek Kolakowski on Cartesian rationality and modernity’s loss of meaning

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)

Craig Bartholomew reflects on the importance of place to our humanity. (58 minutes)

In this lecture, N. T. Wright examines the epistemology of love and how it counters the reductionism of Enlightenment and Epicurean ways of knowing. (63 minutes)

In this October 2023 lecture, Carl Trueman explores the concept of “desecration” as a frame for understanding the nature of modernity in our time. (42 minutes)

FROM VOL. 164 Tiffany Schubert argues that Jane Austen’s novels subtly incorporate some medieval literary conventions in ways that enable modern readers to experience a sense of wonder, romance, and the benevolence of Providence. (30 minutes)

Oliver O’Donovan describes the distinctive character of publicity in modernity, which drowns us in a flood of ever-changing representations that do not serve the common good. (37 minutes)

Oliver O’Donovan describes the nature of publicity as the force that mediates our communication with one another, creating common interests and then rapidly subsuming them into newer ones.(Lecture 3 of 3; 57 minutes)

In this lecture, Heidi White explains how the modern project is a diabolical inversion of Christendom and calls for Christians to build lives and a culture that can counter it. (53 minutes)

Oliver O’Donovan explores how the “religion” of modernity lacks a coherent world in which one may participate with full human agency and moral purpose. (Lecture 3 of 3; 61 minutes)

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)

FROM VOL. 36 Roger Lundin explains how Emily Dickinson’s understanding of love, nature, religion, and mortality are modern in content. (11 minutes)

FROM VOL. 48 Historian Jon Butler explains how aspects of modernity were already present and at work in colonial American life prior to 1776. (12 minutes)

FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Youngblood, R. J. Snell, Nicholas Denysenko, Nigel Biggar, Robert McNamara, and David Cayley

D. Stephen Long explores a consistent theme in the work of theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar: the relationship between Christianity, modernity, and secularity. (46 minutes)