Modernity

In an essay titled “The Abolition of Mania” (Modern Age, Spring 2022), Michael Ward applies C. S. Lewis’s insights to the polarization that afflicts modern societies. (16 minutes)

The book of Leviticus may be assumed to be irrelevant for charting a way through the challenges of modernity. Theologian Peter J. Leithart disagrees. (22 minutes)

Peter Harrison argues that modern Western culture’s partitioning of ‘science’ and ‘religion’ into distinct spheres is a novel categorical conception in history. (58 minutes)

Roger Lundin shares what he has appreciated about Mars Hill Audio conversations, and he discusses what makes Christian belief so implausible to non-believers. (32 minutes)

In this Friday Feature — presented courtesy of Biola University — Carlo Lancellotti talks with Aaron Kheriaty about the central ideas in Augusto Del Noce’s writings. (43 minutes)

Thaddeus J. Kozinski on reading modernity’s symptoms wisely (and wonder-fully)

Stephen Gardner and Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn discuss Philip Reiff’s diagnosis of how psychology replaced the social roles of religion, morality, and custom, redefining the meaning of what is public. (39 minutes)

Jesse Straight, who nurtures the life of Whiffletree Farm in Warrenton, Virginia, talks about how he decided to pursue a vocation as a farmer in an effort to discover a way of life that worked against the characteristic fragmentation so dispiriting in modern culture. (24 minutes)

Dr. Kimbell Kornu, who teaches health care ethics and palliative medicine at St. Louis University, talks about why modern medicine can’t adequately explain health or suffering, even as doctors promote health and try to eliminate suffering. (28 minutes)

Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman argues that the spirit of the (hyper) modern world is one of relentless disposability and of denial of a transcendent order to the cosmos. (36 minutes)

Peter Leithart discusses Johann Georg Hamann’s insights about the nature of language and his prophetic critique of the Enlightenment. (17 minutes)

Thomas Howard describes C. S. Lewis’s fictional works in terms of a mythological re-presentation of the Christian and pre-modern moral and cosmic vision. (41 minutes)

James Matthew Wilson examines T. S. Eliot’s cultural conservatism and religious conversion in light of his intellectual and familial influences. (79 minutes)

FEATURED GUESTS: Mark Regnerus, Jessica Hooten Wilson, John Henry Crosby, John F. Crosby, Wynand De Beer, and Sørina Higgins

Alison Milbank discusses how both Chesterton and Tolkien restore reason to fantasy and help us to see things as we were meant to see them. (20 minutes)

In his book Returning to Reality, philosopher Paul Tyson imagines a grand “Song of Modernity.” In it, he captures the triumphant sense of enlightenment characteristic of modern thought. Ken Myers summarizes some of the key themes in Tyson’s book. (17 minutes)

Theologian Robert W. Jenson describes how a postmodern world is characterized by the loss of a conviction that we inhabit a “narratable world” that exists coherently outside of ourselves. (40 minutes)

FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson

FEATURED GUESTS: Nicholas Carr, Robert Pogue Harrison, R. J. Snell, Norman Wirzba, Philip Zaleski, Carol Zaleski, and Peter Phillips

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