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Each quarterly volume of the Journal features over two hours of conversation with perceptive and engaging thinkers examining the ideas, institutions, practices, and fashionable assumptions that shape our cultural lives. Its host and producer, Ken Myers, has over 45 years of experience in cultural journalism. Previously an arts and humanities editor for National Public Radio, Myers also served as editor of Eternity magazine and of the quarterly journal This World, the predecessor to First Things.
Our guests are selected from a wide range of disciplines, most of whom have written notable books examining aspects of our cultural experience, how the interaction of historical forces have created the cultural conditions in which we presently live, and — in many cases — how such conditions can be evaluated in light of Christian theological concerns.
The Journal does not offer neatly packaged answers to predictable questions. Rather, our guests provide a model of thoughtful conversation much needed in an age of rant and rage. They provide tools to sustain a framework of understanding within which Christians can more wisely discern the meaning of our current cultural challenges.
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WE CANNOT ACCEPT GIFT SUBSCRIPTIONS ONLINE. YOU MAY PURCHASE A GIFT CARD FOR SOMEONE — REDEEMABLE FOR A GIFT SUBSCRIPTION — HERE.
Each quarterly volume of the Journal features over two hours of conversation with perceptive and engaging thinkers examining the ideas, institutions, practices, and fashionable assumptions that shape our cultural lives. Its host and producer, Ken Myers, has over 45 years of experience in cultural journalism. Previously an arts and humanities editor for National Public Radio, Myers also served as editor of Eternity magazine and of the quarterly journal This World, the predecessor to First Things.
Our guests are selected from a wide range of disciplines, most of whom have written notable books examining aspects of our cultural experience, how the interaction of historical forces have created the cultural conditions in which we presently live, and — in many cases — how such conditions can be evaluated in light of Christian theological concerns.
The Journal does not offer neatly packaged answers to predictable questions. Rather, our guests provide a model of thoughtful conversation much needed in an age of rant and rage. They provide tools to sustain a framework of understanding within which Christians can more wisely discern the meaning of our current cultural challenges.
In this playful article from First Things, theologian David Bentley Hart muses on what is arguably America’s greatest contribution to civilization: baseball. Baseball, as Hart would have it, is the Platonic ideal of sports, “a game utterly saturated by infinity,” a game not contrived by our own artifice, but a discovery long kept secret in the dark mysteries of Reality. Contrary to what Hart disparagingly dubs “the oblong game” — the spatial and temporal confines of which are “pitilessly finite” — baseball in its shape and motion stretches towards endless vistas, unfolding organically according to its own narrative and inner logic while at the same time striving to complete the most perfect of shapes, the circle.
This article was originally published in First Things, August 2010. Read by Ken Myers. 27 minutes.
Alan Jacobs, literary critic and professor of humanities at Baylor University, has been a regular guest on the MARS HILL AUDIO Journal since 1993, discussing subjects ranging from the problem of literary sentimentalism (as in The Bridges of Madison County), and the delights of historical fiction (as in seafaring narratives of Patrick O’Brian) to the repulsive attraction of the vampire novels of Anne Rice. In his most recent book, A Visit to Vanity Fair: Moral Essays on the Present Age, Jacobs displays a similar range of breadth and depth, as well as significant portions of wit and grace. Included are essays on the mystery of true friendship (“Friendship and Its Discontents”), the severing of theology and literature (“Preachers without Poetry”), and the desire to know the future (“Dowsing in Scripture”).
Read by the author. 5 hours, 30 minutes. $15
In this Conversation with Ken Myers, Alan Jacobs, author of The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis, discusses a number of Lewis’s writings, including The Great Divorce, The Abolition of Man, The Magician’s Nephew, That Hideous Strength, and The Pilgrim’s Regress. The theme that dominates the discussion is Lewis's view of the imagination, and his deep conviction that the shaping of the conscience requires the training of the imagination.
53 minutes.
In his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, C. S. Lewis wrote that the early Romantics “taught me longing - Sehnsucht; made me for good or ill, and before I was six years old, a votary of the Blue Flower.” The Blue Flower, a symbol popularized among the early Romantics by the poet Novalis, represented a transforming encounter with beauty that provoked feelings of desire and longing for transcendence. But, as Milbank explains in her talk, Lewis understood his initial encounters with beauty as separable from his later longing for heaven, toward which he redirected his earlier feelings after he converted to Christianity. For Lewis, while his initial encounters with beauty may have awakened him to longing and the absence of something, they did not bring him closer to the knowledge of heavenly realities.
Lewis famously wrote in an essay published in 1939 that “reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition.” In other statements and in his poem “Reason,” Lewis suggests that not only are reason and imagination distinct from each other, but that they are opposed and that we experience this opposition internally as an irreconcilable tension.
Lewis’s understanding of the imagination featured most prominently in a series of exchanges with his friend Owen Barfield that became known as “C. S. Lewis’ ‘Great War’ with Owen Barfield” (explored in depth by Lionel Adey in his book of the same title). Lewis’s view of the imagination differed from Barfield’s (and earlier Romantics, such as Coleridge and Novalis) in that the imagination was helpful when it came to aesthetic concerns, but unessential as a way of knowing the truth about things. By contrast, as George Tennyson explains in his essay “Owen Barfield: First and Last Inkling,” Barfield thought that the “Imagination” was the only means by which we could perceive or comprehend anything at all.
The distinction between these two views on the imagination can have significant consequences for how we view the rest of Creation. For Barfield, and for his predecessor Novalis, the Blue Flower both awakens us to an absence within ourselves and to a presence that resides in the creatures and things around us. As Dr. Milbank explains, “For Novalis, Nature is a magic petrified city which lies as if under a spell and it’s the task of the philosopher-poet to bring this frozen entity back to life by means of his imagination.” With the two-fold “longing for” and “awareness of” some other presence produced by the Blue Flower, the rational response is to enter into a relationship with the Blue Flower and to receive it as a loving gift. For the Christian, this gift is then offered back with gratitude to God.
In her lecture, Alison Milbank challenges “disciples” of C. S. Lewis to consider additional, yet sympathetic voices on the role of the imagination in order to more fully defend the Christian life as a wholly transformative way of thinking and of living that has both human and cosmic ramifications.
Is humanity — the quality of being human — a blessing or a curse? Do we simply put up with it, or do we embrace it? Many Christians consider their purpose in life to deny or escape their humanity. But the humanity of Christians is tied up in the humanity of Christ. If Jesus Christ is human, then his humanity is something to be learned and lived. Many Christians, however, do not believe in the humanity of Jesus and consequently find it hard to affirm and live out their own humanity. As Nigel Cameron points out in Are Christians Human? An Exploration of True Spirituality (Zondervan, 1990), being human as Jesus Christ is human has profound implications for daily living. It means living as embodied creatures, using the gifts of perception and intellect, feeling and responding emotionally to life, using one's discernment and will to chart a course in keeping with God's leading. “The purpose of redemption,” Cameron reminds us, “is to enable man to be once more himself, restored to his right mind and his right place as a creature under God. . . . The Christian life is the life of man, male and female, made in the image of God and after his likeness. To deny this humanity and attempt to reach beyond to a ‘spirituality’ which somehow contradicts it, is to fall prey once more to the tempter in his shining, specious livery, who as an angel of light beckons us to reach beyond the confines of our human existence to a place where in fact we deny it and fall from its dignity.”
Read by Ken Myers. 4 hours. $15.
In his article “Awakening the Moral Imagination,” Vigen Guroian discusses the role that fairy tales plays in moral formation. The multi-dimensional world of the fairy tale has the capacity to depict a compelling vision of what is good and evil without reducing moral formation to mere instruction and the moral imagination to advanced utilitarian reasoning skills. In this essay, Guroian also contrasts the features of character and virtue with those of what is more modernly called “values,” and examines how these different approaches to moral consideration reflect conflicting ways of understanding self-formation.
This article was originally published in The Intercollegiate Review, Fall 1996. Read by Ken Myers. 47 minutes.
As Americans grow increasingly weary with the emptiness and aridity of materialistic culture, they have shown a growing interest in books on spirituality. Best-Selling Spirituality examines the new style of American religious belief through the stories of three best-selling books: The Celestine Prophecy, Embraced by the Light, and Conversations with God.
This Report includes interviews with people who have been guided by such books, as well as with various critics. Among the guests featured are Betty Eadie, Robert Wuthnow, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Gene Edward Veith, Peter Jones, and many others.
2 hours. $15.
It is often noted that Martin Luther’s Reformation could never have advanced the way it did without the technology of the printing industry. While the coincidence of Luther and the printing press undoubtedly contributed to the Reformation’s rapid spread, the printing world at the time of Luther was largely under the patronage of the Catholic church (a large portion of which went toward the printing of indulgence certificates), and it was not inevitable, according to Andrew Pettegree, that “print would become an agent of insurrection.” In his book, Brand Luther: 1517, Printing, and the Making of the Reformation, historian Andrew Pettegree shows how Luther’s facility for writing in German and his intuitive business sense not only spread ideas and incited controversy, but completely transformed the distribution model of the printing industry.
56 minutes.
“It is easy to imagine that we see the shadows of our society in Huxley’s vision of the future. But could it be that our insistence on seeing Huxley’s book as an exceedingly successful prophecy actually prevents us from recognizing its real insight? Is there a way for us to understand the book free of the great distorting influence of our own times?” That's what Caitrin Nicol accomplishes in this essay which combines a survey of contemporary reviews of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World with some thoughtful reflections on happiness and freedom.
This article was originally published in The New Atlantis, Spring 2007. Read by Ken Myers. 44 minutes.
Leon Kass, physician, biologist, and professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago, discusses his book The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of Our Nature, in which he explores how the activity of eating provides clues for understanding human nature and helps guide morality and communal life. Then Brother Peter Reinhart talks about the art of bread-making as a metaphor for spiritual life.
72 minutes.
Robert Wuthnow of Princeton University discusses his book Sharing the Journey. He highlights the advantages and dangers of the small-group movement. Then Richard Lints, professor at Gordon-Conwell Seminary, discusses his book The Fabric of Theology, and the need for a return to an understanding of the importance of theology.
84 minutes.
The development in nineteenth-century Catholic social thought of the idea of society as a spiritual and cultural reality is one of the themes in this Conversation with Dr. Russell Hittinger. In addition to the contribution of Pope Leo XIII and the revival of Thomistic thought to Catholic social thinking, Hittinger discusses the significance of marital notions to society, the limits of the idea of social contract, the effect of an increasing proportion of Muslims on European social thought, and how modern democracies have abandoned the project of understanding public life in moral terms.
60 minutes.
In this early article from First Things, historian Christopher Lasch poses the question of whether cultural conservatism is compatible with capitalism. If, as Lasch argues, conservatism is defined by a respect for limits — that human freedom has constraints imposed upon it by nature, history, human fallibility, and “original sin” — then the unrelenting and insatiable quest for ever-increasing standards of comfort that capitalism encourages is completely at odds with conservative values. Despite nineteenth-century attempts to bolster the family as the primary means of curbing the large-scale transfer of “private vices” to “public virtues” implied in liberal economic theory, the effects of twentieth-century capitalism have only underscored how vulnerable the family is when the integrity of its surrounding local institutions is destroyed. Also included in this article is an account of lower-middle class versus upper-middle class cultural values as well as the alternative — though now largely unheard of — economic approaches to liberal capitalism advanced by the distributists and syndicalists.
This article was originally published in First Things, April 1990. Read by Ken Myers. 42 minutes.
Modern liberalism, by contrast, has stepped outside of the Christian tradition and its synthesis of Jewish, Greek, and Roman thought. While religious freedom as it is understood today gives the impression of being amenable to religious faith of all types by claiming neutrality, it does so only by making all religions matters of private faith and preference. Religion, which historically has made ultimate and authoritative claims about reality, is reduced within modern liberalism to mere opinion. Through institutional obstruction of ultimate claims, modern liberalism threatens not only our protection from coercion, but ultimately the very meaning of nature, human and otherwise.
When St. Paul tells the Galatians that “for freedom Christ has set us free,” argues Schindler, he is not only referring to freedom understood in moral or theological terms, but also to freedom that is political and historical, as well as natural and metaphysical. In other words, the freedom for which Christ has set us free encompasses all of reality and all of human experience.
In his 2005 book, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, pastor-theologian Eugene Peterson argued that believers should attend to the way God works in creation, history, and community. Such attention prevents theology from being mere abstraction and spirituality from becoming vague and gnostic. In this Conversation, Peterson discusses the necessity of taking time in worship; the benefits and liabilities of small groups; the delightful gifts of language; and the centrality of “fear of the Lord” in describing our response to God’s initiative in salvation.
73 minutes.
Literary critic and C. S. Lewis biographer Alan Jacobs has enriched our understanding of Christian faith and its consequences with his thoughtful book Original Sin: A Cultural History (2008). The book looks at beliefs about human waywardness and its sources through much of Western history, and how those beliefs have affected literature, politics, music, education, and other spheres of human culture. In this Conversation, Jacobs explains how belief in original sin (in its Augustinian form) offers resources for comfort and community.
60 minutes.
In this extended Conversation, moral philosopher, Oliver O’Donovan, joins Ken Myers to discuss the first two volumes of O’Donovan’s three-volume set 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.
Portions of this interview were originally published on Volume 127 of the MARS HILL AUDIO Journal. 60 minutes.
In this extended Conversation with theologian and ethicist, Oliver O’Donovan, O’Donovan talks about how “love” as an ethical and existential category connects to the theological virtue of love consummated in the Kingdom of Heaven. O’Donovan’s final volume in the Ethics as Theology series, Entering into Rest, deals primarily with how love is transformed and “made fit for the presence of God.” But correspondingly, O’Donovan’s work also inquires into how the love operating now in the eschatological Church affects how we order our lives tomorrow in the world. Drawing from St. Augustine and figures such as Aelred of Rievaulx, O’Donovan describes how the Church, communication, community, and friendship all significantly contribute to how we understand the role of love in both ethical and political reflection.
Portions of this interview were originally published on Volume 138 of the MARS HILL AUDIO Journal. 52 minutes.
MARS HILL AUDIO presents the first available audiobook of Fr. Alexander Schmemann’s classic work on theology and liturgy, For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy. Fr. Schmemann begins his essay into the sacraments of the Church with the observation that man is a hungry being and that the world is presented to him as his food. Man must eat in order to have life. From this observation, Fr. Schmemann follows with the question: “Of what life do we speak, what life do we preach, proclaim, and announce when, as Christians, we confess that Christ died for the life of the world? What life is both the motivation, and the beginning and goal of Christian mission?”
Throughout the book, Fr. Schmemann confronts challenges of clericalism and secularism and identifies subtle dualities between the spiritual and the religious, the active and contemplative, Word and sacrament, and finally sacrament and liturgy. As he walks through the Church’s life by way of the sacraments, Fr. Schmemann offers an account of the sacraments and their liturgies that reunites through Christ the eschatological and worshiping life of the Church with the cosmos and time that is its mission.
This recording is read by Ken Myers from the newly revised 2018 edition published by St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press. 5 hours 48 minutes. $15
Drawing from MacDonald’s lesser-known fairytale, The Day Boy and the Night Girl, Kreglinger argued that MacDonald frames his account of gender roles according to the Genesis story of humanity’s Fall, emphasizing systemic sin and pathological patterns of relationships before addressing individual sins. By approaching the question of gender through universal human categories, MacDonald subverts oppressive gender stereotypes and illuminates how both women and men suffer from dehumanizing societal norms. But rather than positing individual gender identities over and against all others, MacDonald’s story shows how gender relies upon the weaknesses and strengths of its complement, such that ultimately human gender and freedom flourish through the act of self-giving love.
Beginning with the refreshing observation of the sheer ugliness of the word “globalization” (“an adjective, converted into a barbaric verb, then forced into service as a still more barbaric noun”), Joshua Hochschild observes that this misbegotten word labels a poorly defined concept. Despite its vagueness, it “suggests a trend toward increased economic and political interdependence, which at once fosters and is fostered by cultural homogenization.” Hochschild goes on to examine the effects of this trend on local communities and insists that any effort to evaluate globalization requires a return to a “political teleology,” reflection on the ends of politics given the ends of human being.
This article was originally published in The Intercollegiate Review, Spring 2006. Read by Ken Myers. 36 Minutes.
“It’s somehow the peculiar dialect of God that combines majesty with abasement, glory with this most incredible self-emptying. And [Hamann] sees this in creation, in Christ, and in the Scriptures, and so everywhere when he’s meditating on the Holy Trinity he sees this combination of glory and humility.”
—John Betz
Theologian John Betz discusses the eighteenth-century philosopher and translator, Johann Georg Hamann, critic and contemporary of Immanuel Kant and other prominent figures of the German Enlightenment. Hamann, even from the early stages of the Enlightenment, saw and argued that the project of modernity would lead to its own destruction. Hamann argued that reason could not, by itself in a pure form, give a complete account of reality, for he saw that the modern ideal of “pure reason” is a fiction. Reason, he argued, is always embedded within an historical culture and language from which one can never fully be detached. In his evaluation, Hamann anticipated the postmodern critics of the twentieth century; however, he avoided the nihilism of postmodernism by observing the revelatory character of language and history. By focusing on the divine kenosis or humility of God, who creates, reveals, and condescends to humanity through His Word, Hamann maintained that man’s pursuit of truth is always contingent on God’s Word in special and general revelation through history and creation. Throughout the interview, Professor Betz describes the centrality of God’s condescension in Hamann’s understanding of knowledge and reason. It is through the humility of God in his condescension to communicate to man that Hamann recognizes the Promethean project of modernity to attain enlightenment from man’s resources alone.
56 minutes.
Writing in The American Scholar in 1991, critic Bruce Bawer claimed that Richard Wilbur is “the outstanding contemporary instance of the type of poet who writes in strict forms about traditional themes, and whose poems—making, as they do, frequent, appropriate, and instructive use of meter, rhyme, imagery, alliteration, assonance, and even the occasional classical allusion—could serve as models in a textbook of prosody.” But the attentive (and therefore delighted) reader will take less note of Wilbur’s model practice than of the sense of marveling that saturates his work. As David Lyle Jeffrey observes in his article, “God’s Patient Stet,” the sense of consistency one perceives in Wilbur’s work “emerges not only from his craftsmanship as a poet but from his constancy as an affectionate observer of creation, both Nature and human nature.” Jeffrey’s article focuses on the poems in Wilbur’s 2010 anthology Anterooms, especially those that are more explicitly Biblical or theological in their allusions. David Lyle Jeffrey is Distinguished Professor of Literature and Humanities at Baylor University.
This article was originally published in First Things, July/August 2011. Read by Ken Myers. 25 minutes.
In this Conversation, Ken Myers talks with Susan Srigley about how Flannery O’Connor’s perception of reality suffuses her fiction in ways that fit the views of how art works developed by Thomas Aquinas, views often summarized as “sacramental” or “incarnational.” And Ralph Wood discusses O’Connor’s acceptance of the limits placed in our lives by Providence, how limits may be a source of wisdom rather than frustration.
60 minutes.
In this article, 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. Although modernity — as opposed to postmodernity — presupposed in its arts and philosophy this narratable world, it did so while at the same time discarding the Judeo-Christian framework that enabled such a supposition in the first place. Increasingly, as the arts prefigured and now as the general culture at large displays, the experience of and confidence in such a coherent narrative has broken down into fragments. How then is the Church to respond to a world that has lost its story? In Jenson's words: “If the church does not find her hearers antecedently inhabiting a narratable world, then the church must herself be that world.”
This article was originally published in First Things, October 1993. Read by Ken Myers. 40 minutes.
Modern people tend to ignore questions about the nature and purpose of things while learning to control them more efficiently. But as science and technology offer us the ability to fundamentally transform human nature, we can no longer avoid addressing metaphysical questions. The crisis of our time, many thinkers agree, is one concerning the definition of human nature. In “Human Life, Human Dignity,” Leon Kass outlines what is at stake and sets forth a framework for indispensable discussions surrounding biotechnologies. Kass stresses that we must approach the discussion with reverence and awe and that a major component of the discussion should be the notion of human dignity. Kass recommends that we turn first not to the findings of science and technology, but to the canon of “residual wisdom” in the East and West — found in literary, philosophical, and religious traditions — that vividly depicts human nature in its glories and tragedies.
60 minutes.
Transhumanism is an attitude toward humanity that views life and consciousness as data and material limitations (particularly the body) as disposable wetware. Through science and technology, transhumanists hope to achieve immortality by surpassing our current bodily limits, thus crossing over to a different type of humanity. While it is tempting to dismiss transhumanism as a fringe science fiction, professor of classical studies, Mark Shiffman, warns that the Cartesian aspirations of transhumanists are becoming more accepted and more common. And this should not come as a surprise, since the agenda to transcend ourselves emerges from a history of thought that reaches as far back as the thirteenth century. In this Audio Reprint, Shiffman repeats a forgotten account of human history in order to help readers identify our own assumptions about humanity and to reexamine our relationship to God and his creation.
This article was originally published in First Things, November 2015. Read by Ken Myers. 45 minutes.
The garden is a personal place of retreat and delight and labor for many people. Gardening helps us collect ourselves, much as praying does. For rich and poor — it makes no difference — a garden is a place where body and soul are in harmony. In Inheriting Paradise, Vigen Guroian offers an abundant vision of the spiritual life found in the cultivation of God's good creation. Capturing the earthiness and sacramental character of the Christian faith, these uplifting meditations bring together the experience of space and time through the cycle of the seasons in the garden and relate this fundamental experience to the cycle of the church year and the Christian seasons of grace. The tilling of the fresh earth; the sowing of seeds; the harvesting of rhubarb and roses, dillweed and daffodils — Guroian finds in the garden our most concrete connection with life and God's gracious giving. His personal reflections on this connection offer a compelling entry into Christian spirituality.
Read by the author. 2 hours. $15.
In this essay, Stephen Gurney shows how in his sermons, Newman draws the listener in through the craft and beauty of his prose — and, for those who heard his sermons, Newman’s entrancing voice — while nonetheless removing himself from the spotlight in order to convey his listeners to the True Presence of Christ. With a delicate and sophisticated balance of subjective devotion and sacramental ecclesiology, Newman’s sermons invite the whole person to participate in a spiritual journey that ends in an encounter with the Divine.
This article was originally published in Modern Age, Fall 2000. Read by Ken Myers. 51 minutes.
Long before Alasdair MacIntyre or Stanley Hauerwas were reminding us of the significance of historic teaching about virtue, Josef Pieper (1904-1997) was writing confidently about virtue and the virtues. Pieper is best known today for his 1952 book, Leisure, the Basis of Culture. When the book was published, The New York Times enthused “Pieper’s message for us is plain. . . . The idolatry of the machine, the worship of mindless know-how, the infantile cult of youth and the common mind — all this points to our peculiar leadership in the drift toward the slave society. . . . Pieper’s profound insights are impressive and even formidable.” While the Times may not be quite as excited about Pieper today, we’re pleased to present a primer on Pieper’s ideas in this Audio Reprint: “Josef Pieper: Leisure and Its Discontents.” This 1999 essay by Roger Kimball introduces listeners to Pieper’s arguments about the nature of leisure, which are claims about the nature of philosophy and of human well-being. The article was originally published in The New Criterion, where Roger Kimball is editor and publisher.
This article was originally published in The New Criterion, January 1999. Read by Ken Myers. 34 minutes.
Cultural critic and professor of Italian literature, Robert Pogue Harrison, examines the conditions in which cultural transmission can take place. In his book, Juvenescence: A Cultural History of Our Age, Harrison argues that Western culture is on the cusp of a new mode of civilization that can either result in a rejuvenation of the legacies of the past or in their juvenilization, the latter of which would lead to a loss of cultural memory and the infantilization of desires. A culture undergoing juvenescence, when it is going in the direction of juvenilization, is at risk of both cultural amnesia and orphanhood. Harrison reflects not only upon the ways in which our culture is evolving into a younger way of being human, but also upon the peculiar and precious qualities of youth that are uniquely receptive to fostering the amor mundi needed to preserve and transmit a world of permanence and belonging.
48 minutes.
Born in 1927 in Poland, Leszek Kolakowski grew out of his youthful Stalinism to become one of the most penetrating critics of Marxism. In his masterful three-volume Main Currents of Marxism, he concluded: “The self-deification of mankind, to which Marxism gave philosophical expression, has ended in the same way as all such attempts, whether individual or collective: it has revealed itself as the farcical aspect of human bondage.” Kolakowski’s diagnosis of the spiritual crisis of modernity goes far beyond his critique of Marxism; in a variety of books, essays, and public addresses, he regularly returned to the problem of modern culture’s denial of the sacred. This essay by Roger Kimball, editor of The New Criterion, was written on the occasion of the release of a new edition of Main Currents of Marxism, and sets the arguments in that book in the wider context of Kolakowski’s other work.
This article was originally published in The New Criterion, June 2005. Read by Ken Myers. 35 minutes.
Paul Marshall, author of A Kind of Life Imposed on Man, discusses how society and the Church have understood work throughout history, and what positive ramifications we might expect to see if Christians began to understand their life at work as part of their life in Christ. On part two, Os Guinness, author of The Call, explains how vocation and identity have lost their theological moorings among Christians.
62 minutes.
When Tom Wolfe’s novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons, was originally published in 2004, most of the reviews concentrated on the story’s sexual escapades. The book was received by social conservatives as an indictment of collegiate promiscuity and dismissed by progressives as a tired and embarrassing display of peephole prurience by a once-vital writer now in his grumpy 70s. Mickey Craig and Jon Fennell argue that sexual confusion is simply a symptom of a larger crisis prominently explored in the book. “The novel invites us to ask: Is love possible in the age of neuroscience? Or have we unmasked human beings only to discover that love is an illusion?”
This article was originally published in The New Atlantis, Fall 2005. Read by Ken Myers. 38 minutes.
While it is not a story set in the twentieth century, Tom Shippey (author of J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century) claims that The Lord of the Rings is very much a work of the twentieth century; the momentum of evil sweeps characters into action before they understand the events in which they are involved. Joseph Pearce (author of Tolkien: Man and Myth) defends The Lord of the Rings fantasy genre against those who would claim that realistic fiction is a better vessel for truth: because mythology is stripped of the factual, he explains, it can deal with truth unencumbered and therefore convey its moral more directly. Literary critic Ralph C. Wood explains why he has been drawn to J. R. R. Tolkien’s moral Middle-earth since his first reading of The Lord of the Rings in the 1960s. It is a world ordered by heroism, friendship, loyalty, and hope. These ties alone, he states, enable the hobbits to complete their quest and go where no one else can.
86 minutes.
Essays by Judith Martin (“Miss Manners”), Gertrude Himmelfarb, Deal Hudson, and James Morris discuss the relationship between manners and morals, and address the way in which the survival of a democratic society depends upon its citizens' respect for one another—respect that is manifested in the symbolic language of manners.
Read by Ken Myers. 90 minutes.
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On this MARS HILL AUDIO Conversation, Ken Myers and Thomas de Zengotita discuss how the omnipresence of “representations”—forms of communication that have been deliberately manipulated and designed to address you—contributes to the widespread sense of entitlement and partiality for autonomous choice. The postmodern condition of being constantly addressed by advertising, emails, text messages, and television results in what de Zengotita calls “the flattered self,” a self, which if left unexamined, increasingly believes itself to be the center of the universe. In his book Mediated: How the Media Shapes Your World and the Way You Live in It, de Zengotita identifies how despite our unprecedented ability to “make ourselves,” the overwhelming flow of images, options, events, and stuff generates feelings of helplessness, apathy, ambiguity, and resignation, all of which are often evasively expressed in the multivalent utterance “Whatever.”
60 minutes.
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In this Audio Reprint, ethicist Gilbert Meilaender considers the different ways in which we can think about our death, particularly from the paradoxical “simultaneities” of our finite nature and our transcendent desires. We are dual creatures, writes Meilaender, simultaneously bound by nature’s cycles and yet freed from mere finitude by our God-directed ends. To view death solely from one or the other of these realities is to trivialize either our spiritual longings or our historical and physical experiences. Taking his cues from Charlotte’s Web, Bambi, and The Last Battle, Meilaender confronts contemporary inclinations to deny death by placing both death and life within a spiritual framework that enables us to “measure our days.”
This article was originally published in First Things, February 1991. Read by Ken Myers. 51 minutes.
The familiar Advent hymn “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel,” itself a translation of the Latin hymn Veni, veni, Emmanuel, is a summary of the early liturgical plainchant antiphons that were traditionally sung during the week before Christmas. Known as the “O Antiphons,” these chants were sung in vespers services as liturgical responses on either side of Mary’s Magnificat. Each antiphon highlights a scriptural reference to Christ — O Sapientia, O Adonai, O Radix Jesse, O Clavis David, O Oriens, O Rex Gentium, and O Emmanuel — by way of preparation for Christ’s coming.
The original order of the antiphons is a bit different than the order of verses that appears in the hymn we sing today. Emmanuel is, in the traditional structure, the name invoked on the last of these seven nights. O Sapientia was originally the first of the seven, and the Latin text translates as: “O Wisdom, coming forth from the mouth of the Most High, reaching from one end to the other mightily, and sweetly ordering all things: Come and teach us the way of prudence.”
In this Conversation, poet and priest Malcolm Guite talks about his seven sonnets corresponding to the seven “O Antiphons.” Also included in this Conversation is an interview with composer J. A. C. Redford, who collaborated with Malcolm Guite to set Guite’s seven “O Antiphons” to music for unaccompanied choir. In these interviews, the poet and composer discuss how poetry and liturgy invite repetition, and how music can be an interpretation of a text so as to aid how one “inhabits” poetry over time.
45 minutes.
In this Anthology, Ken Myers talks with poet and former National Endowment for the Arts chairman Dana Gioia about the decline in reading among Americans of all ages and education. Also discussing the benefits of reading and the tragedy of its decline are literary critic Sven Birkerts, painter Makoto Fujimura, columnist Maggie Jackson, pastor-theologian Eugene Peterson, preacher and media ecologist Gregory Edward Reynolds, and portrait painter Catherine Prescott.
73 minutes.
In this biographical sketch, Jeremy Beer describes the intellectual trajectory of cultural historian, Christopher Lasch, whose career spanned from the 1960s through the early 1990s. Beer recounts how, despite growing up in a “militantly secular” home and, throughout his career, sympathetically grappling with the works of Marx and Freud, Christopher Lasch distanced himself from the leftist “radical intellectuals,” whose version of progressivism did not coincide with Lasch’s understanding of a healthy democracy. In his scholarship and criticism, Lasch was concerned about democracy, both as an achievable ideal and as an imperfect reality. He rejected the Left-Right dualism of American politics, arguing that the ostensibly opposing ideologies were merely two sides of the same coin that amounted to the refusal to acknowledge human limitations. Lasch’s diagnosis of the modern, “anxiously narcissistic” self involved a sharp critique of the culture that produced it, namely, a culture that condoned the conquest of nature through scientific, technological, and economic methods without any regard for naturally or institutionally based limits on human freedom.
This article was originally published in Modern Age, Fall 2005. Read by Ken Myers. 55 minutes.
(a Trinity Forum Reading, 1997)
In 1989, David Aikman, then a journalist with Time magazine, was granted the first major interview Solzhenitsyn had given an American news organization for years. In this essay, Aikman offers an engaging and lively account of the dramatic and sobering events of Solzhenitsyn's life: from his early years as a Communist, to the beginnings of his literary efforts and his subsequent imprisonment, to his exile and life in the West, to his return to Russia in the 1990s. A portrait emerges of a courageous man devoted to the battle for truth in the context of the distinctive disorders of modern, post-Christian culture. This Reprint is read by the author, and includes a foreword written and read by Os Guinness on the contemporary crisis of truth in the West. 107 minutes.
“The key to P. D. James’s fiction, especially her later work, is her Christianity.” So argues Ralph C. Wood, University Professor of Theology and Literature at Baylor University. “She regards our cultural malaise as having theological no less than ethical cause.” In this essay, Wood discusses the way in which the futuristic dystopia of her novel, The Children of Men, reveals much about the West’s modern spiritual confusion and about the possible sources of hope beyond that chaos.
This article was originally published in Theology Today, vol. 51, no. 20 (July 1994). Read by Ken Myers. 39 minutes.
Throughout history, great literature has been a cohesive force in Western culture. It interprets our experiences and tells us the truth about our fears and longings. It is a catalyst to our thinking and an invaluable index to the minds and feelings of people around us. In Realms of Gold, Leland Ryken proceeds chronologically through some of his most favorite classics, from Homer to Shakespeare and Milton to Tolstoy and Camus, offering not only a taste of the classics, but a framework in which to analyze them. For students studying literature, this book serves as an introduction to the classics as friends; for those who read the classics a long time ago, it is a motivation to renew delightful acquaintances; and for people already intimate with these works, it offers the opportunity to deepen their understanding within a Christian context.
Read by Ken Myers. 8 hours 30 minutes. $18.
During the last thirty-five years — and particularly since Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue — contemporary moral philosophy has recovered the language of virtues. Virtue ethics has its roots in ancient Greek philosophy, but was soon adopted into the Christian tradition by the early church fathers.
With the naming of virtues, of course, comes the naming of vices. In this conversation, philosopher Rebecca DeYoung explains how the language of vices speaks to patterns or narratives in our lives that are distinct from original sin and from acts of rule-breaking. Drawing from the wisdom of the Desert Fathers, DeYoung describes vainglory and the other “deadly sins” as capital vices from which more vices materialize.
But what is vainglory? Most people know the seven deadly sins — if they know them at all — as gluttony, greed, sloth, envy, wrath, pride, and lust. But traditionally, pride was the source of all vice and vainglory was among the original list of seven. Though this bygone word seems to have disappeared from our cultural memory, DeYoung argues that it is a term worth recovering in a time when we are constantly tempted toward vainglory.
56 minutes.
Modern culture is profoundly shaped by science—by its methods, its products, and its public authority. The centrality of science in modern society affects how we think, what we think about, the kinds of conclusions we come to, and the kinds of assumptions that we hold—including assumptions about what sort of creatures we are and what sort of lives are most fitting for our nature. Theologian Lesslie Newbigin has argued that science has effectively eliminated “Why” questions from our culture. Modern Western people, he wrote, have “a disposition to believe that purpose has no place as a category of explanation in any exercise that claims to be ‘scientific,’ and thus to look for the explanation of everything, including both animal and human behavior, without reference to purpose.
This anthology features philosophers, theologians, historians, and research scientists, all of whom have thought deeply about the interaction of science with other disciplines and with the settings in which science is practiced and exerts its influence. One theme that emerges is how science in answering “How?” sometimes obscures the “What?” of specific things, as well as the “Why?” of all things.
1 hour 47 minutes.
In 1979, a much-respected physicist named John Polkinghorne resigned from his position at Cambridge. Just five years earlier he had been honored for his remarkable achievements in mathematical physics (he had been part of the team that discovered the quark) by being appointed a Fellow of the Royal Society. Polkinghorne was departing the environs of this profound and mysterious reflection on the nature of reality for a vocation no less intellectually and personally challenging: the study of theology and service as an Anglican priest. One of the benefits to the public of Polkinghorne’s twin interests in science and theology has been the remarkable series of books he has written since 1983, beginning with The Way the World Is, continuing with the publication of his 1993 Gifford Lectures (published as The Faith of a Physicist: Reflections of a Bottom-Up Thinker) and most recently Science and the Trinity: The Christian Encounter with Reality (Yale). Sir John Polkinghorne talks about the main themes of this book in this Conversation.
54 minutes.
Sociologist John Steadman Rice, author of A Disease of One’s Own: Psychotherapy, Addiction, and the Emergence of Co-Dependency, maintains that the concept of codependency is rooted in the tenets of “liberation psychotherapy,” a way of thinking about the self that sees all psychological problems as a function of the restrictions placed on individuals by social institutions, especially by the family. Rice asks what kind of society will result if a critical mass of people are converted to an asocial existence.
48 minutes.
In the age of think tanks, consulting firms, and IKEA, craftsmanship seems to be in decline. Shop class is becoming rarer, and our children are told that college is the ticket to an “open future” as a “knowledge worker.” This rejection of craftsmanship wrongly ignores the cognitive, social, and remunerative rewards of skilled manual work, and wrongly assumes that white-collar work always engages the mind. In this essay, political philosopher Matthew B. Crawford recounts life as a motorcycle mechanic and makes a case for the manual trades as an expression of human flourishing.
This article was originally published in The New Atlantis, Summer 2006. Read by Ken Myers. 55 minutes.
What if our understanding of creation “as origin” is inadequate? Can a misunderstanding of creation lead to unhealthy and harmful cultural institutions?
The fall 2017 Areopagus Lecture, entitled “Creation, Modernity, and Public Theology,” featured canon-theologian, Simon Oliver on the traditional understanding of the doctrine of creation and on how some of our modern divisions and disputes are products of an insufficient framework for creation that developed during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Excerpts from two recent books explain how and why a greater familiarity with the forms of faithfulness of our spiritual predecessors is an important resource for twenty-first century Christians. An excerpt from Reading Scripture with the Church Fathers, by Christopher A. Hall, explains how commentaries on biblical texts from the first six centuries of the Church can provide much-needed perspective for contemporary believers. A chapter from Retrieving the Tradition and Renewing Evangelicalism: A Primer for Suspicious Protestants, by D. H. Williams, summarizes how it is a misreading of Scripture and of the history of Protestantism to insist that revelation and tradition are antithetical concerns of the Church.
Read by Ken Myers. 96 minutes.
In this essay, James Matthew Wilson examines T. S. Eliot’s cultural conservatism and religious conversion in light of his intellectual and familial influences. Wilson shows that throughout his life, Eliot grappled with the weaknesses of cultural theories that substituted art for religion, such as those proposed by Matthew Arnold and Eliot’s Harvard professors Irving Babbitt and George Santayana. Rather than filling the vacuum left by religious disbelief, the substitution of “civil religion” or “culture” for true religious faith merely confused and distracted modern man from what was at heart a theological and religious depletion. Contrary to appearances, Wilson argues that Eliot as the young modernist poet remained consistent with Eliot the cultural critic and Eliot the Christian. Despite Eliot’s radical reputation, through his poetry, one sees a working-out of Eliot’s thinking on the role of poetry and culture in light of modern man’s condition and a definite metaphysical account of reality.
Portions of this article were originally published on The Imaginative Conservative website. Read by Ken Myers. 80 minutes.
Though largely ignored, the work of research chemist-turned-philosopher Michael Polanyi (1891-1976) offers rich insight into the methods of science, the role of belief in all human knowing, and the important connections between knowledge and responsibility. Tacit Knowing, Truthful Knowing explores Michael Polanyi's criticisms of both objectivism and subjectivism, and his attempts to develop a more truthful understanding of how we know the world. His ideas are based on the belief that all knowledge is either tacit (silent and unspoken) or rooted in tacit knowledge.
This Report features interviews with leading interpreters of Polanyi's thought, including Marjorie Grene, Richard Gelwick, Thomas Torrance, and Martin X. Moleski. Interviews with Nobel Prize-winning chemist Dudley Herschbach, educator Steven Garber, and master violin makers Peter and Wendy Moes, along with readings from Michael Polanyi's books and correspondence, further illuminate his ideas.
2 hours 30 minutes. $15.
There are few issues within the church more potent than that of homosexuality. Barbara Wheeler, President of Auburn Theological Seminary in New York, has noted that “What we in the churches teach about homosexuality affects the lives of many more people than our own members.” In recent years, the debate on this issue has centered on disagreements over the exact nature of biblical teaching concerning sexuality. Dr. Robert Gagnon, Associate Professor of New Testament Pittsburgh Theological Seminary is one of the world’s foremost experts on the subject and the author of the critically acclaimed text, The Bible and Homosexual Practice. In this Conversation, Dr. Gagnon talks with Ken Myers about the cultural trends and theological arguments that have shaped the dispute over the past few decades, in the hope of clarifying the answers to many of these complex questions.
72 minutes.
The death of Solzhenitsyn in 2008 provided an opportunity to reassess the life and work of this remarkable figure, whose accomplishment is discussed on this Anthology. Ken Myers talks with the late Edward E. Ericson, Jr. (Solzhenitsyn and the Modern World and co-author of The Soul and Barbed Wire), David Aikman (Great Souls: Six Who Changed the Century), and James Pontuso (Solzhenitsyn's Political Thought) about the conditions and experiences that transformed Solzhenitsyn from a committed Communist schoolteacher to a Nobel Prize-winning novelist and the global symbol of heroic resistance to tyranny. One of the main themes emphasized by these three guests is that Solzhenitsyn was not principally concerned with politics, but with human nature and purpose, understood in light of the Christian account of reality.
73 minutes.
In this Anthology, Ken Myers talks with Clyde Kilby about Lewis’s view of the imagination; with Michael Aeschliman about Lewis’s reasonable distrust of trusting reason too much; with James Como about the rhetorical genius in Lewis’s writing; with Bruce L. Edwards, Jr. about what his students learn from Lewis’s integration of faith and life; with Thomas Howard about the deep meaning of Till We Have Faces; and with Gilbert Meilaender about the surprising approach of Lewis’s apologetics. The program concludes with Alan Jacobs reading his 1998 essay, “Lewis at 100.”
73 minutes.
After the events of September 11, 2001, many people in the West began pursuing crash courses in understanding Islamic belief and history. As a result, many realized the wisdom of acquiring some historical perspective on what appears to be a clash of civilizations. In this Conversation, Bernard Lewis, a Western historian of the Middle East whose work is recognized around the world, helps provide that essential perspective.
50 minutes.
For the Christian to think about questions of sexuality as they arise today, he or she must first think about the biblical and ecclesial teaching of marriage as “an image of what is truly ultimate.” In this Audio Reprint, Gilbert Meilaender argues that notions of sexual fulfillment that ground themselves in self-expression and emotional satisfaction, or in the mutual exchange of love cannot adequately account for the historical, spiritual, communal, and bodily dimensions of sexual union. Although the challenge to establish Christian norms of behavior while avoiding additional conditions for salvation is perennial for the Church, failure to undertake this challenge stimulates a dangerous dualism between body and spirit within the Church itself. By emphasizing that the body is the place of spiritual and moral significance in our lives, Meilaender points out the need for the Church to uphold and enforce normative behaviors of chastity, in order to practice the pastoral role of showing compassion and acceptance with integrity.
This article was originally published in Pro Ecclesia, Vol. VI, No. 4 (1997). Read by Ken Myers. 40 minutes.
In this Anthology, Ken Myers talks with architects, historians, activists, and clergy about how loving our neighbors can and must take shape in how we order the material aspects of shared life. The conversations on this Anthology give particular attention to how the New Urbanist movement has challenged the dehumanizing effects of modernism in urban design.
100 minutes.
For decades, readers and scholars have wondered whether there was a Master Plan for the structure of the seven books in C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. In his book Planet Narnia, Michael Ward makes a compelling case that the qualities attributed to the seven planets in the cosmology of antiquity and the Middle Ages are embodied in the seven books about Narnia. In this Conversation, Ward explains why Lewis thought the pre-Copernican view of the cosmos can still be of spiritual benefit, that although it may not be true in a factual sense, its beauty nonetheless reveals deeper truths.
67 minutes.
It is commonly assumed that science is a morally neutral set of practices which may be used for good or bad purposes. But Yuval Levin, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, insists that science has always been “a profoundly moral enterprise, aimed at improving the condition of the human race, relieving suffering, enhancing health, and enriching life.” Because this moral dynamic is so deeply assumed, our society finds it difficult to assess how we ought to use science when the improvement of health comes into conflict with other social goods. In this article, Levin calls for a more deliberate awareness of how science shapes how we ask and answer moral questions together.
This article was originally published in The New Atlantis, Fall 2006. Read by Ken Myers. 44 minutes.
For 2,500 years in the West, music was understood as a work of discovery, as an expression of something present in the structure of the cosmos. Despite changes in musical styles, the ways composers and musicians arranged melody, harmony, and rhythm were assumed to be expressive of some objective reality in the nature of things. As Robert R. Reilly summarizes this view, “Music was number made audible. Music was man's participation in the harmony of the universe.” In the twentieth century, that view was abandoned by courageous pioneers of the avant-garde, and “musical art was reduced to the arbitrary manipulation of fragments of sound.” In this essay, Robert R. Reilly contrasts these two sets of assumptions about music, and introduces two twentieth-century composers who rejected the metaphysics of chaos in their compositions: the Danish composer Vagn Holmboe (1909-1996) and the American John Adams (1947-).
This article was originally published in The Intercollegiate Review, Fall 2001. Read by Ken Myers. 43 minutes.
The classics are, argues Louise Cowan, “the primary curricular need of our time.” The classics are poetic in the root sense of the word: they are a form of making (poesis), based on mimesis, “the envisioning, or imagining, of fictional analogies, a kind of knowing different from philosophy or history and yet occupying an irreplaceable position in the quest for wisdom.” Cowan (a recipient of the National Humanities Medal) insists that what we label the classics “have become classics because they elicit greatness of soul,” and that such aspiration can only be informed by such works.
This article was originally published in The Intercollegiate Review, Fall 2001. Read by Ken Myers. 35 minutes.
In this book, Norman Klassen and Jens Zimmermann trace the history of higher education from its medieval roots to the present, focusing on how educational agendas have been assembled in light of shifting understandings of the nature of knowledge and the nature of human well-being. They demonstrate that some form of humanism has always been central to the purposes of higher education, and insist that the recovery of a rich, Christocentric Christian humanism is the only way for the university to recover a coherent purpose.
Read by Ken Myers. 6 hours 30 minutes. $15.
In recent years, Christian educators have rediscovered ancient ideas about how the head and heart interact. There is a relationship between the cultivation of affections, dispositions, and virtues, and the acquisition of knowledge. What we believe is inextricably linked to what we love and what we worship. What we love, in turn, is encouraged by practices: by the ways our bodies and imaginations engage the world of the senses. Christian educators are coming to question the idea that teaching is merely the transmission of ideas and are giving more attention to the formative power of classroom practices and the culture of schools. In this Conversation, David I. Smith, director of the Kuyers Institute for Christian Teaching and Learning at Calvin College, discusses some new insights on the practice of Christian pedagogy.
56 minutes.
Language professor and pedagogue, David I. Smith, joins us again to discuss in more detail how practices in the classroom reinforce or contradict the goals of Christian teaching. The phrase “integration of faith and learning” has stimulated an abundance of scholarship on why faith and reason are compatible. It has also provoked extensive and various accounts of a “Christian worldview,” a phrase that often conveys a set of doctrines which, when applied to the goal of Christian teaching, places an emphasis on Christian belief over Christian practices. In this Conversation, David Smith argues that more attention needs to be given to the meaning conveyed in our methods and assumptions about teaching. Smith considers factors like body language and position; pictures and scenarios in textbooks; time, space, and sound in classroom interaction; and the cultural power of homework.
Smith’s book On Christian Teaching: Practicing Faith in the Classroom extends the ideas discussed in MARS HILL AUDIO Conversation 28: The Practice of Christian Pedagogy (Volume I). In this interview, Smith describes his process of pursuing a Christian vocation through teaching as well as the philosophical and biblical motivations for Christian pedagogy that are explored in the book Teaching and Christian Practices: Reshaping Faith and Learning, co-edited by Smith and his colleague James K. A. Smith.
63 minutes.
Literary critic Alan Jacobs talks about how W. H. Auden returned to the Church after recognizing that liberal humanism had no answers to the problem of human evil. He also discusses the social themes in Auden’s poetry, which avoided utopianism and apocalypticism.
58 minutes.
Leo Strauss (1899-1973) was one of the most influential political philosophers of the twentieth century. In this essay, Richard Sherlock explores the significance of Strauss’s methodology, focusing on how he understood the communication of ideas in classical and modern thought about political order. Strauss’s deep, insightful readings and profound respect for the writers of seminal works manifested a powerful apologetic for the idea of “classic natural right,” even as his intellectual esotericism masked a critical gap in his political philosophy.
This article was originally published in Modern Age, Summer 2006. Read by Ken Myers. 36 minutes.
In this Anthology, Mark Noll (The Future of Christian Learning) describes why serious Christian learning requires a confidence that the Gospel has broad social and intellectual consequences. Norman Klassen and Jens Zimmermann (The Passionate Intellect: Incarnational Humanism and the Future of University Education) explain why the term “Christian humanism” is especially apt in describing the aims of Christian higher education. James K. A. Smith (Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation) develops the idea that education is more about formation than information, and that we are formed by our participation in liturgies, whether at church or at the mall.
78 minutes.
Barry Sanders, author of A is for Ox, discusses teaching in the age of technology, the effects of literacy on society, and the links between illiteracy and violence. Sanders believes literacy is impossible without an oral phase of community of memory, from which the memory, conscience, and sense of self develop.
54 minutes.
In this Anthology, Ken Myers speaks with guests John McWhorter, Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, and Craig Gay about our world’s linguistic ailments. They recognize the power of language to enrich our relationship with God, with each other, and with all of Creation and suggest habits rooted in recognition of the glorious possibilities of words lovingly and thoughtfully employed.
65 minutes.
In this essay, literary scholar 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. The greatest apologetic challenge for Lewis was not so much responding to arguments, as it was persuading an audience whose horizon had been radically altered and shaped by modernity that that which was esteemed and revered in the pre-modern imagination was in fact desirable. The modern imagination seeks meaning in self-liberation, in the quest, in self-authenticating experimentation. By contrast, the world that Lewis presents is that of a finely choreographed dance, one in which perfect freedom is achieved when the individual listens to the music that precedes him and after mastering the steps joins the rest of the cosmos in a dance that he did not create, but which was nevertheless made for him.
This article was originally published in Modern Age, Fall 1978. Read by Ken Myers. 41 minutes.
C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces is, in his own words, “a myth retold.” Literary critic Thomas Howard explains that Lewis’s decision to tell this story as a myth was informed by the fact that the mythical outlook on the world is fundamentally opposed to the tenets of modernity, for which Lewis had such unrelenting criticism.
50 minutes.
In 2004, theologian Michael Hanby wrote an article for Communio entitled “The Culture of Death, the Ontology of Boredom, and the Resistance of Joy,” in which he described boredom as the “noughting” of the world, a disposition that no longer finds the world captivating and which is incapable of being captivated. In this interview, philosopher R. J. Snell draws from how Hanby uses the verb “noughting” to interpret boredom, and connects it with the capital vice of acedia — or its token symptom, sloth — to help us recognize how this particular vice captures the “mood of our age.” Snell argues that the metaphysical boredom of modernity is sustained by our deeply-held convictions about freedom and contingency, which view the former as necessary and the latter as offensive. Like a sulking child, the slothful prefer to choose nothing rather than accept the neediness and dependency implied by our finite existence. When this slothful posture expands to the metaphysical plane, boredom becomes the very denial of being itself or, in other words, the “noughting” of the world.
48 minutes.
Social networking sites — in widespread use only since 2002 — are changing the shape of relationships for millions of Americans. But how are those changes affecting our understanding and experience of friendship and our sense of personal identity? What happens in personal and social life when we are increasingly connected by weak (and conveniently abandoned) ties? Citing numerous studies by social scientists, Christine Rosen asks: “Does this technology, with its constant demands to collect (friends and status), and perform (by marketing ourselves), in some ways undermine our ability to attain what it promises—a surer sense of who we are and where we belong?”
This article was originally published in The New Atlantis, Summer 2007. Read by Ken Myers. 50 minutes.
Guests on Volume 100
• JENNIFER BURNS on the life and legacy of Ayn Rand, “goddess of the market” and entrenched enemy of altruism
• CHRISTIAN SMITH on the aimless cultural world of emerging adulthood and on how it makes the idea of objective moral order implausible
• DALLAS WILLARD on why it's important to recover the conviction that religious beliefs involve real knowledge
In honor of the five score milestone, part two of the issue features a look back at the beginnings of the Journal and a few special excerpts of conversations with those early guests:
• PETER KREEFT on Lewis, Huxley, and J.F.K. after death
• P. D. JAMES on good and evil in fiction
• JAMES DAVISON HUNTER on culture wars
• PAUL McHUGH on when psychiatry loses its way
• TED PRESCOTT on nudity in art and advertising
• ED KNIPPERS on the powerful presence of the body
• MARTHA BAYLES on pop and perverse modernism
• DOMINIC AQUILA on Christopher Lasch
• GILBERT MEILAENDER on random kindness
• NEIL POSTMAN on technology and culture
• ALAN JACOBS on being maudlin in Madison County
This Volume is also available on CD
Click here to download a pdf file with the contents listing and bibliographic information about this Volume.
Jennifer Burns
"I found that in a lot of the letters people would write to her: 'I no longer feel I have to be my brother's keeper' or 'I understand that I don’t owe other people anything; I can be myself.' Part of that is, I think, why she's attractive to adolescents who are trying to figure out who they are, break free of bonds to other people, and who aren't comfortable with obligations and are striving to become independent and become unique and her work is a sort of tonic for them."
— Jennifer Burns, author of Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (Oxford University Press, 2009)
Jennifer Burns, assistant professor of history at the University of Virginia, discusses her intellectual biography of Ayn Rand. In her biography, Burns examines the early life of Ayn Rand, born Alisa Rosenbaum, in Russia before the Revolution. She traces the life of Rand through her family’s experiences during the Russian Revolution and her later immigration to the United States, a place that in Rand's imagination was filled with glamour, wealth and beauty. She became jaded by the American intellectual elite's friendliness and acceptance of socialism and communism in the late 1920s and 30s, but grew to believe the wider American population had the right views concerning freedom and economics and sought to make herself a literary champion of capitalist freedom for “their side.” Burns describes how Ayn Rand's relationships mirrored her system of ethics as well; she thought the only valuable relationships were those completely freely chosen, eschewing non-voluntary ties and resting relations on individual perceptions of value devoid of emotional considerations. Such beliefs as well as her atheism had a polarizing effect on conservatives around her; Burns discusses how her person and/or work were received by various figures of conservatism over time — figures including Whittaker Chambers, Friedrich Hayek, and Murray Rothbard — as well as their personal interactions. Finally, Burns comments on her intellectual and imaginative influences including Nietzsche and cinema, both of which, from an early age, she was greatly impressed by. ⇧
• • •
Christian Smith
"The dark side, the Nietszchean side of postmodernism hasn't settled in and it's in large part, in my viewpoint, because the promise of mass consumerism of living a happy life of collecting possessions, and having friends around those possessions, and having a good life and a beautiful spouse and beautiful kids, and parties with alcohol; all of that is extremely appealing to emerging adults, and they haven't failed at that. Those that will eventually fail have not yet failed and so there's a tremendous amount of optimism about where their futures are going, even paradoxically while they have very little optimism about the state of the larger world . . ."
— Christian Smith, author of Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults (Oxford University Press, 2009)
Sociologist Christian Smith discusses his book Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults, the sequel to his earlier book, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers. This study follows up on the same cohort of American young people who were teenagers when described in Soul Searching. Sociologists have come to describe this new life stage occurring after the teenager stage but before young adulthood when the subject is typically between 18-29 years of age as “emerging adulthood." Smith characterizes this period of emerging adulthood as being a time of exploration, opportunity, transience, confusion, openness and experimentation. Developing out of changes in the social, educational and economic structure of society, it is accompanied by new and particular expectations and norms. Emerging adults realize that some time in the future they will have to settle down, but now is the time for doing whatever they want to do and exploring different things, trying to have fun, and managing all the transitions they are facing while keeping their options open. But they face these choices and experiences in life without the aid of concrete and authoritative cultural forms, structures and pathways; instead, they operate out of vague and amorphous scripts largely disconnected from a sense of objective moral reality beyond themselves. With the loss or deep skepticism of belief in objective moral order, the emerging adult tends to lack motivation for anything apart from their subjective interests. Most, though not all, of these cultural forces shaping the emerging adults tend to work against a settled membership and life in a tradition or church community. The interview ends with a discussion of the various subgroups within emerging adults documented in Smith's study. ⇧
• • •
Dallas Willard
"Religion has always presented itself as knowledge of reality based on experience and thought, no matter which religion. And certainly that was true of the Christian religion up through the middle of the 1900s."
— Dallas Willard, author of Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge (HarperOne, 2009)
Dallas Willard discusses the truth of spiritual knowledge and its epistemological validity in this segment of the Journal. His book, Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge, arose in response to interactions he had with a wide range of business, legal and political leaders which revealed their skepticism of the validity of religious, spiritual or ethical knowledge; as opposed to publicly valid knowledge, spiritual claims were seen as mere subjective traditions or opinions divorced from objective reality. He traces this skeptical belief in the U. S. back to the desire of liberal Christian theologians to protect Christianity from what they believed to be threatening developments in science, and the desire of conservative Christian theologians to emphasize the importance of understanding faith as a gift and not rational knowledge — a dichotomy Willard does not see any reason to accept. He describes in detail how this false dichotomy had led to great distortions in the understanding and practice of faith among everyday Christians and in churches, forcing believers to understand themselves as "committing" to essentially irrational claims. This sort of irrationalism leads to damaging consequences, including a loss of authority and the reduction of truth to the imposition of will and desire. ⇧
• • •
Peter Kreeft
November 22, 1963, is certainly best remembered as the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. Philosopher Peter Kreeft of Boston College found it interesting that two other notable figures of the twentieth century died on the same November day: authors C. S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley. Kreeft, who had long been fascinated with the writing of Socratic dialogue, wrote a post-death dialogue among Kennedy, Lewis, and Huxley in his book Between Heaven and Hell. Far from being a difficult task, Kreeft said the writing of the book was the easiest and most pleasurable writing he's done. ⇧
• • •
P. D. James
Mystery writer P.D. James talks about mystery as a genre and the way her own religious leanings influence her fiction. Detective stories remain popular, according to James, because they require that readers use their human reason and ingenuity to solve problems, and because they rest upon a conviction that murder is a great irreversible crime and is always evil. James also reflects on why writing about good and virtuous characters is more difficult than writing about evil and wicked villains. She describes herself as a religious person who is aware that there is more to life than this world; in her novel Innocent Blood she explores what she calls "the great religious questions" of guilt and repentance, sin and redemption. ⇧
• • •
James Davison Hunter
In Culture Wars, sociologist James Davison Hunter argues that public policy debates over issues in law, art, family, and education are more than political battles. Hunter claims that they evidence a struggle for cultural authority between two groups which hold conflicting moral visions. Cultural conservatives believe that moral authority derives from transcendent sources. Cultural progressives reject static ideas about truth in favor of openness, relativism, and pluralism. But progressives are not amoral or secular, according to Hunter. In fact, they are equally zealous about their view of reality and seek the cultural authority to shape the norms and mores of public life according to this view. Hunter also explains how media technologies exacerbate the tension by reducing public discourse to sound bites. ⇧
• • •
Paul McHugh
"Sometimes the sterner virtues of, well, being truthful, being just, have to come along with the kindness and support virtues. Psychotherapists sometimes have to use judgment even when they can be accused of being judgmental, since certain kinds of behavior are — in themselves — destructive to the person, their future, and the people around them."
— Paul McHugh
Psychiatrist Paul McHugh discusses how he is trying to reform psychiatry and why a new system would be helpful for therapists and patients. McHugh is author of The Mind Has Mountains: Reflections on Society and Psychiatry. He states that the current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is akin to Roger Tory Peterson's field guide for birds, which identifies what warblers look like and how to tell them apart but does not address how they came into being or what factors have contributed to their development; the DSM identifies symptoms of diseases without addressing their causes. McHugh explains why psychiatry ought to categorize mental disorders in ways which account for their causes. If psychiatrists know which type of depression their patients have and what is causing it, for example, they will have a better understanding of how to heal the depression and not just its symptoms, and they will also know of which sorts of virtues their patients are in need. ⇧
• • •
Ted Prescott
Professor and sculptor Ted Prescott traces the history of nudity in art from the Greco-Roman period through the Renaissance, and to the current trends in modern advertising. According to Prescott, the difference between the depiction of the body in art and in advertising has to do with the ends the two disciplines hope to achieve. Advertisements, as opposed to art, use nudity to attract potential consumers to products. While advertisements can be artistically and aesthetically pleasing, their primary purpose is to convince people of their need for the product. The body becomes, according to Prescott, "a stylized piece of furniture on which to hang a product." ⇧
• • •
Ed Knippers
Painter Ed Knippers discusses how the Christian doctrines of the Incarnation and the Lord’s Supper influence his painting. In his fleshy portraits of biblical characters, Knippers attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. Knippers insists that physicality is a gift from God that must be appreciated but not worshipped. The artist’s challenge is to strike the balance between these polar interpretations of the flesh. ⇧
• • •
Martha Bayles
Martha Bayles discusses her book on popular music, Hole in Our Soul, in which she examines how modernist notions about science and the nature of truth have led to a loss of beauty and meaning in art. Bayles explains how the increasing emphasis on empirical data as the only measure of truth relegated both religion and art to the purely subjective sphere. This development paved the way for “introverted” modernism, a movement that disconnected art from any accountability to reality, preferring to celebrate art for art's sake. Bayles's book focuses on the reaction against this elitist trend that began with Dadaism after World War I and reached its apex with the music of Janis Joplin in the late 1960s. For “perverse” modernists, art is a means for shocking people, according to Bayles. ⇧
• • •
Dominic Aquila
Social critic Christopher Lasch was deeply concerned about the individual and social consequences of what he dubbed "the culture of narcissism." Professor Dominic Aquila, who studied with Lasch, explains how Lasch’s concern about self-absorption informed his critique of the state of American art and music in America. Lasch argued that art lost its reference point when it became separated from work or craftsmanship. Now that the arts are funded by the government or corporations, artists are no longer artisans, and their work has become increasingly self-referential, according to Lasch. This minimalism represents the loss of an artistic vocabulary. The artist’s inability to articulate anything of substance mirrors the widespread nihilism and faithlessness that troubled Lasch toward the end of his career. ⇧
• • •
Gilbert Meilaender
Ethicist Gilbert Meilaender compares the popular slogan "Practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty” with classical and Christian ideas about virtue. This "bumper sticker morality" emphasizes impulsiveness over against the Aristotelian notion that virtues are habits of behavior that must be intentionally developed through discipline. Whereas Christian charity is grounded in a larger understanding of human beings and their relationship to God and one another, randomness resists connection with a broader ethical theory. Meilander also reminds us that true kindness requires a willingness to discipline and even wound. ⇧
• • •
Neil Postman
In his book Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, New York University communications theorist Neil Postman argues that technologies alter the way we think about the world. Postman asserts that Americans are now living in a "technopoly:" a culture in which technology has become sovereign over traditional modes of human association and social values. Rather than serving as a tool which helps solve specific problems, technology has become an end in itself: invention for the sake of invention. While Postman recognizes that inventions often confer benefits, he warns that they also limit possibilities (for example, one can no longer buy a Honda Accord without power windows). Technologies, according to Postman, are Faustian bargains: they giveth, but they also taketh away. ⇧
• • •
Alan Jacobs
Literary critic Alan Jacobs reviews Robert James Waller's The Bridges of Madison County. This rendition of Erich Segal’s Love Story is predicated on the assumption that one should not think, only feel. Such excessive sentimentality encourages the reader to suspend judgment and reflection in order to indulge deliberately in emotion for its own sake. Jacobs contends that reflection reinforces and strengthens true emotions while exposing those feelings that are shallow and disingenuous. Sentimentalists such as Waller try to avoid this truth by keeping people from asking questions and by calling those who do insist on reflection "cynics." Jacobs counters that Waller's shameless manipulation of his readers' emotions is the ultimate act of cynicism. ⇧
Guests on Volume 100
• JENNIFER BURNS on the life and legacy of Ayn Rand, “goddess of the market” and entrenched enemy of altruism
• CHRISTIAN SMITH on the aimless cultural world of emerging adulthood and on how it makes the idea of objective moral order implausible
• DALLAS WILLARD on why it's important to recover the conviction that religious beliefs involve real knowledge
In honor of the five score milestone, part two of the issue features a look back at the beginnings of the Journal and a few special excerpts of conversations with those early guests:
• PETER KREEFT on Lewis, Huxley, and J.F.K. after death
• P. D. JAMES on good and evil in fiction
• JAMES DAVISON HUNTER on culture wars
• PAUL McHUGH on when psychiatry loses its way
• TED PRESCOTT on nudity in art and advertising
• ED KNIPPERS on the powerful presence of the body
• MARTHA BAYLES on pop and perverse modernism
• DOMINIC AQUILA on Christopher Lasch
• GILBERT MEILAENDER on random kindness
• NEIL POSTMAN on technology and culture
• ALAN JACOBS on being maudlin in Madison County
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.
Jennifer Burns
"I found that in a lot of the letters people would write to her: 'I no longer feel I have to be my brother's keeper' or 'I understand that I don’t owe other people anything; I can be myself.' Part of that is, I think, why she's attractive to adolescents who are trying to figure out who they are, break free of bonds to other people, and who aren't comfortable with obligations and are striving to become independent and become unique and her work is a sort of tonic for them."
— Jennifer Burns, author of Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (Oxford University Press, 2009)
Jennifer Burns, assistant professor of history at the University of Virginia, discusses her intellectual biography of Ayn Rand. In her biography, Burns examines the early life of Ayn Rand, born Alisa Rosenbaum, in Russia before the Revolution. She traces the life of Rand through her family’s experiences during the Russian Revolution and her later immigration to the United States, a place that in Rand's imagination was filled with glamour, wealth and beauty. She became jaded by the American intellectual elite's friendliness and acceptance of socialism and communism in the late 1920s and 30s, but grew to believe the wider American population had the right views concerning freedom and economics and sought to make herself a literary champion of capitalist freedom for “their side.” Burns describes how Ayn Rand's relationships mirrored her system of ethics as well; she thought the only valuable relationships were those completely freely chosen, eschewing non-voluntary ties and resting relations on individual perceptions of value devoid of emotional considerations. Such beliefs as well as her atheism had a polarizing effect on conservatives around her; Burns discusses how her person and/or work were received by various figures of conservatism over time — figures including Whittaker Chambers, Friedrich Hayek, and Murray Rothbard — as well as their personal interactions. Finally, Burns comments on her intellectual and imaginative influences including Nietzsche and cinema, both of which, from an early age, she was greatly impressed by. ⇧
• • •
Christian Smith
"The dark side, the Nietszchean side of postmodernism hasn't settled in and it's in large part, in my viewpoint, because the promise of mass consumerism of living a happy life of collecting possessions, and having friends around those possessions, and having a good life and a beautiful spouse and beautiful kids, and parties with alcohol; all of that is extremely appealing to emerging adults, and they haven't failed at that. Those that will eventually fail have not yet failed and so there's a tremendous amount of optimism about where their futures are going, even paradoxically while they have very little optimism about the state of the larger world . . ."
— Christian Smith, author of Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults (Oxford University Press, 2009)
Sociologist Christian Smith discusses his book Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults, the sequel to his earlier book, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers. This study follows up on the same cohort of American young people who were teenagers when described in Soul Searching. Sociologists have come to describe this new life stage occurring after the teenager stage but before young adulthood when the subject is typically between 18-29 years of age as “emerging adulthood." Smith characterizes this period of emerging adulthood as being a time of exploration, opportunity, transience, confusion, openness and experimentation. Developing out of changes in the social, educational and economic structure of society, it is accompanied by new and particular expectations and norms. Emerging adults realize that some time in the future they will have to settle down, but now is the time for doing whatever they want to do and exploring different things, trying to have fun, and managing all the transitions they are facing while keeping their options open. But they face these choices and experiences in life without the aid of concrete and authoritative cultural forms, structures and pathways; instead, they operate out of vague and amorphous scripts largely disconnected from a sense of objective moral reality beyond themselves. With the loss or deep skepticism of belief in objective moral order, the emerging adult tends to lack motivation for anything apart from their subjective interests. Most, though not all, of these cultural forces shaping the emerging adults tend to work against a settled membership and life in a tradition or church community. The interview ends with a discussion of the various subgroups within emerging adults documented in Smith's study. ⇧
• • •
Dallas Willard
"Religion has always presented itself as knowledge of reality based on experience and thought, no matter which religion. And certainly that was true of the Christian religion up through the middle of the 1900s."
— Dallas Willard, author of Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge (HarperOne, 2009)
Dallas Willard discusses the truth of spiritual knowledge and its epistemological validity in this segment of the Journal. His book, Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge, arose in response to interactions he had with a wide range of business, legal and political leaders which revealed their skepticism of the validity of religious, spiritual or ethical knowledge; as opposed to publicly valid knowledge, spiritual claims were seen as mere subjective traditions or opinions divorced from objective reality. He traces this skeptical belief in the U. S. back to the desire of liberal Christian theologians to protect Christianity from what they believed to be threatening developments in science, and the desire of conservative Christian theologians to emphasize the importance of understanding faith as a gift and not rational knowledge — a dichotomy Willard does not see any reason to accept. He describes in detail how this false dichotomy had led to great distortions in the understanding and practice of faith among everyday Christians and in churches, forcing believers to understand themselves as "committing" to essentially irrational claims. This sort of irrationalism leads to damaging consequences, including a loss of authority and the reduction of truth to the imposition of will and desire. ⇧
• • •
Peter Kreeft
November 22, 1963, is certainly best remembered as the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. Philosopher Peter Kreeft of Boston College found it interesting that two other notable figures of the twentieth century died on the same November day: authors C. S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley. Kreeft, who had long been fascinated with the writing of Socratic dialogue, wrote a post-death dialogue among Kennedy, Lewis, and Huxley in his book Between Heaven and Hell. Far from being a difficult task, Kreeft said the writing of the book was the easiest and most pleasurable writing he's done. ⇧
• • •
P. D. James
Mystery writer P.D. James talks about mystery as a genre and the way her own religious leanings influence her fiction. Detective stories remain popular, according to James, because they require that readers use their human reason and ingenuity to solve problems, and because they rest upon a conviction that murder is a great irreversible crime and is always evil. James also reflects on why writing about good and virtuous characters is more difficult than writing about evil and wicked villains. She describes herself as a religious person who is aware that there is more to life than this world; in her novel Innocent Blood she explores what she calls "the great religious questions" of guilt and repentance, sin and redemption. ⇧
• • •
James Davison Hunter
In Culture Wars, sociologist James Davison Hunter argues that public policy debates over issues in law, art, family, and education are more than political battles. Hunter claims that they evidence a struggle for cultural authority between two groups which hold conflicting moral visions. Cultural conservatives believe that moral authority derives from transcendent sources. Cultural progressives reject static ideas about truth in favor of openness, relativism, and pluralism. But progressives are not amoral or secular, according to Hunter. In fact, they are equally zealous about their view of reality and seek the cultural authority to shape the norms and mores of public life according to this view. Hunter also explains how media technologies exacerbate the tension by reducing public discourse to sound bites. ⇧
• • •
Paul McHugh
"Sometimes the sterner virtues of, well, being truthful, being just, have to come along with the kindness and support virtues. Psychotherapists sometimes have to use judgment even when they can be accused of being judgmental, since certain kinds of behavior are — in themselves — destructive to the person, their future, and the people around them."
— Paul McHugh
Psychiatrist Paul McHugh discusses how he is trying to reform psychiatry and why a new system would be helpful for therapists and patients. McHugh is author of The Mind Has Mountains: Reflections on Society and Psychiatry. He states that the current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is akin to Roger Tory Peterson's field guide for birds, which identifies what warblers look like and how to tell them apart but does not address how they came into being or what factors have contributed to their development; the DSM identifies symptoms of diseases without addressing their causes. McHugh explains why psychiatry ought to categorize mental disorders in ways which account for their causes. If psychiatrists know which type of depression their patients have and what is causing it, for example, they will have a better understanding of how to heal the depression and not just its symptoms, and they will also know of which sorts of virtues their patients are in need. ⇧
• • •
Ted Prescott
Professor and sculptor Ted Prescott traces the history of nudity in art from the Greco-Roman period through the Renaissance, and to the current trends in modern advertising. According to Prescott, the difference between the depiction of the body in art and in advertising has to do with the ends the two disciplines hope to achieve. Advertisements, as opposed to art, use nudity to attract potential consumers to products. While advertisements can be artistically and aesthetically pleasing, their primary purpose is to convince people of their need for the product. The body becomes, according to Prescott, "a stylized piece of furniture on which to hang a product." ⇧
• • •
Ed Knippers
Painter Ed Knippers discusses how the Christian doctrines of the Incarnation and the Lord’s Supper influence his painting. In his fleshy portraits of biblical characters, Knippers attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. Knippers insists that physicality is a gift from God that must be appreciated but not worshipped. The artist’s challenge is to strike the balance between these polar interpretations of the flesh. ⇧
• • •
Martha Bayles
Martha Bayles discusses her book on popular music, Hole in Our Soul, in which she examines how modernist notions about science and the nature of truth have led to a loss of beauty and meaning in art. Bayles explains how the increasing emphasis on empirical data as the only measure of truth relegated both religion and art to the purely subjective sphere. This development paved the way for “introverted” modernism, a movement that disconnected art from any accountability to reality, preferring to celebrate art for art's sake. Bayles's book focuses on the reaction against this elitist trend that began with Dadaism after World War I and reached its apex with the music of Janis Joplin in the late 1960s. For “perverse” modernists, art is a means for shocking people, according to Bayles. ⇧
• • •
Dominic Aquila
Social critic Christopher Lasch was deeply concerned about the individual and social consequences of what he dubbed "the culture of narcissism." Professor Dominic Aquila, who studied with Lasch, explains how Lasch’s concern about self-absorption informed his critique of the state of American art and music in America. Lasch argued that art lost its reference point when it became separated from work or craftsmanship. Now that the arts are funded by the government or corporations, artists are no longer artisans, and their work has become increasingly self-referential, according to Lasch. This minimalism represents the loss of an artistic vocabulary. The artist’s inability to articulate anything of substance mirrors the widespread nihilism and faithlessness that troubled Lasch toward the end of his career. ⇧
• • •
Gilbert Meilaender
Ethicist Gilbert Meilaender compares the popular slogan "Practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty” with classical and Christian ideas about virtue. This "bumper sticker morality" emphasizes impulsiveness over against the Aristotelian notion that virtues are habits of behavior that must be intentionally developed through discipline. Whereas Christian charity is grounded in a larger understanding of human beings and their relationship to God and one another, randomness resists connection with a broader ethical theory. Meilander also reminds us that true kindness requires a willingness to discipline and even wound. ⇧
• • •
Neil Postman
In his book Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, New York University communications theorist Neil Postman argues that technologies alter the way we think about the world. Postman asserts that Americans are now living in a "technopoly:" a culture in which technology has become sovereign over traditional modes of human association and social values. Rather than serving as a tool which helps solve specific problems, technology has become an end in itself: invention for the sake of invention. While Postman recognizes that inventions often confer benefits, he warns that they also limit possibilities (for example, one can no longer buy a Honda Accord without power windows). Technologies, according to Postman, are Faustian bargains: they giveth, but they also taketh away. ⇧
• • •
Alan Jacobs
Literary critic Alan Jacobs reviews Robert James Waller's The Bridges of Madison County. This rendition of Erich Segal’s Love Story is predicated on the assumption that one should not think, only feel. Such excessive sentimentality encourages the reader to suspend judgment and reflection in order to indulge deliberately in emotion for its own sake. Jacobs contends that reflection reinforces and strengthens true emotions while exposing those feelings that are shallow and disingenuous. Sentimentalists such as Waller try to avoid this truth by keeping people from asking questions and by calling those who do insist on reflection "cynics." Jacobs counters that Waller's shameless manipulation of his readers' emotions is the ultimate act of cynicism. ⇧
Guests on Volume 101
• JAMES DAVISON HUNTER on how the most prominent strategies of Christian cultural engagement are based on a misunderstanding about how cultures work
• PAUL SPEARS on why Christian scholars need to understand their disciplines in ways that depart from conventional understanding
• STEVEN LOOMIS on why education needs to attend more carefully to non-quantifiable aspects of human experience
• JAMES K. A. SMITH on how education always involves the formation of affections and how the form of Christian education should imitate patterns of formation evident in historic Christian liturgy
• THOMAS LONG on how funeral practices have the capacity to convey an understanding of the meaning of discipleship and death
• WILLIAM T. CAVANAUGH on the distinctly modern definition of “religion” and how the conventional account of the “Wars of Religion” misrepresents the facts in the interest of consolidating state power
This Volume is also available on CD
Click here to download a pdf file with the contents listing and bibliographic information about this Volume.
James Davison Hunter
"'We need to make worldviews more Christian' is the idea here, that ‘if we just do that with enough people and if we get them to take the Christian nature of their worldview seriously and act on it, then we will change the world.' The problem is that perspective is almost completely wrong."
— James Davison Hunter, author of To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World (Oxford University Press, 2010)
Sociologist James Davison Hunter challenges reigning paradigms of cultural change and criticizes their influence on the life of the Church. He talks about how three main groups of Christians have sought to change culture but have failed because they operated under a flawed theory of grass-roots change. Not only have they failed to change culture in meaningful ways, he argues, but those very politicizing populist strategies have served to undermine the sacred character and witness of the Church and the very plausibility of a holy, transcendent God. Hunter argues that because social institutions are central carriers of culture, the abandonment of social institutions (with authority and hierarchy) due to a populist impulse both undermines cultural change and remakes the Church in the image of secular, popular culture rather than the reverse. Hunter argues that the way forward for the Church is by an incarnational "faithful presence" that enters the world not only as individuals, but as institutional communities of people. ⇧
• • •
Paul Spears
"Students are pursuing the academic life not because humans are rational but because they need to get money. And that pretty quickly sours on every human person because there's something intrinsic in all of us, foundational in all of us, that says 'That's not it' and a third-grader knows that."
— Paul Spears, co-author of Education for Human Flourishing: A Christian Perspective (InterVarsity Press, 2009)
Educator Paul Spears discusses ugly trends within education and how a fuller understanding of human beings can aid Christian educators in fostering learning environments that do justice to students. Spears argues that humans, as rational created beings, are meant to develop their minds in pursuit of God’s redemptive purposes for the world, including but not limited to individuals. Spears discusses how various educational pedagogies can train students to deny inevitable failures rather than to learn from them and to see education merely in terms of making money, thereby fostering a sour cynicism and despair. ⇧
• • •
Steven Loomis
"All of those value-based sources of knowledge are very costly to a system that wants to economize through scale."
— Steven Loomis, co-author of Education for Human Flourishing: A Christian Perspective (InterVarsity Press, 2009)
Co-author with Paul Spears, Steven Loomis, discusses how a technical managerial ethos imported from the secular business world reduces education to a flat, standardized set of procedures which ignores the context and the fullness of truth. Education thus follows the rest of secular culture in its drive for efficiency and ease at that cost of messy values and non-quantifiable wisdom. Loomis believes that resisting this tendency within education is a singularly important task for educators who seek to make wise disciples of Christ. ⇧
• • •
James K. A. Smith
"There is a kind of know-how that is embedded in the practices of Christian worship that can inform my thinking about human flourishing in ways that don't just deduce from theological formulations."
— James K. A. Smith, author of Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Baker, 2009)
James K. A. Smith talks about the links between desire, worship, education, and cultural formation. Smith argues that education is and always has been formation of the whole person, involving mores and morals and not just minds, affections and imaginations not just intellects. Smith draws on an earlier Reformational and Kuyperian tradition which understands worldview as more than merely a collection of Christian ideas and propositional content, but instead an entire point of view, a way of thinking of and feeling and experiencing the world that involves more, though not less, than true propositions. It involves true emotions and dispositions and relations as well. Education is formation, formation is discipleship, and discipleship is the mission that Jesus gives his people. ⇧
• • •
Thomas Long
"The best therapy for grief is not psychological comfort; the best assessment of grief is for the loss to be placed in the framework of meaning, and the ritual that acts out what does death mean, what is the future of the dead in Christ, to act that out in a ritual fashion, places our psychological loss in a grand structure of Gospel meaning, and that's what finally gives us the deepest comfort."
— Thomas Long, author of Accompany Them with Singing: The Christian Funeral (Westminster/John Knox Press, 2009)
Thomas Long paints a picture of historic Christian burial practice and discuss both the meaning embodied in the formal ritual and how the practice shapes the people who participate in it. Long then describes how what is done in the Christian funeral has shifted over time to reflect a different portrait of what is going on in death and how the congregation relates to the deceased. He discusses the differences between the historic and contemporary models and argues that while the benefits and goods embodied in the newer model are there and can be learned from, the historic model captures best what is going on in death and the destiny of the dead in Christ. In so doing, the historical model brings comfort to the grief-stricken by placing death within the Gospel narrative in place and time through movement and song. ⇧
• • •
William T. Cavanaugh
""[T]his is not just the way things are: the myth of religious violence is a deeply ideological way of looking at the world and is not, by any means, some kind of neutral description of what's actually out there."
— William Cavanaugh, author of The Myth of Religious Violence (Oxford University Press, 2009)
Theologian William T. Cavanaugh examines the emptiness of the myth of religious violence. He begins by illustrating how the idea of "religion" as modern people understand it was an invention of early modern European thought meant to divide ways of life into the public and the private so as to allow the modern State to isolate, truncate and control the newly-invented private sphere, henceforth called "religion." This development arose out of centuries of struggle between ecclesiastic and civil authorities in Europe for power; when civil authorities gained the upper hand, Cavanaugh argues, they redefined the jurisdiction of the Church to be the newly-constructed private realm while taking the public realm for itself. As the dominance of the modern State grew over the past three centuries, their public political role and the Church's private religious role came to be solidified. Cavanaugh shows that this division between politics and religion has its own creation myth in the so-called "wars of religion" in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a myth that is belied by an examination of the warring parties in that period. He points out that the very fact that Catholics fought other Catholics, Protestants fought other Protestants, and that Protestants joined Catholics to fight other Protestants and Catholics indicates that there was something more going on than warring over theological disputes. That something was the beginning of a centralizing, homogenizing modern State that sought to exert control and bring uniformity over the diverse plurality of medieval locales and provinces, whether Protestant or Catholic, which resisted the growing centralization of the State, whether under Protestant or Catholic control. Cavanaugh argues that the deeply ideological separation of religion and politics has never been neutral but instead reflects a largely Western ideological conceit that is facing growing challenges centering on what is, at best, a tension within the division, and at worst, an incoherence. ⇧
Guests on Volume 101
• JAMES DAVISON HUNTER on how the most prominent strategies of Christian cultural engagement are based on a misunderstanding about how cultures work
• PAUL SPEARS on why Christian scholars need to understand their disciplines in ways that depart from conventional understanding
• STEVEN LOOMIS on why education needs to attend more carefully to non-quantifiable aspects of human experience
• JAMES K. A. SMITH on how education always involves the formation of affections and how the form of Christian education should imitate patterns of formation evident in historic Christian liturgy
• THOMAS LONG on how funeral practices have the capacity to convey an understanding of the meaning of discipleship and death
• WILLIAM T. CAVANAUGH on the distinctly modern definition of “religion” and how the conventional account of the “Wars of Religion” misrepresents the facts in the interest of consolidating state power
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.
James Davison Hunter
"'We need to make worldviews more Christian' is the idea here, that ‘if we just do that with enough people and if we get them to take the Christian nature of their worldview seriously and act on it, then we will change the world.' The problem is that perspective is almost completely wrong."
— James Davison Hunter, author of To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World (Oxford University Press, 2010)
Sociologist James Davison Hunter challenges reigning paradigms of cultural change and criticizes their influence on the life of the Church. He talks about how three main groups of Christians have sought to change culture but have failed because they operated under a flawed theory of grass-roots change. Not only have they failed to change culture in meaningful ways, he argues, but those very politicizing populist strategies have served to undermine the sacred character and witness of the Church and the very plausibility of a holy, transcendent God. Hunter argues that because social institutions are central carriers of culture, the abandonment of social institutions (with authority and hierarchy) due to a populist impulse both undermines cultural change and remakes the Church in the image of secular, popular culture rather than the reverse. Hunter argues that the way forward for the Church is by an incarnational "faithful presence" that enters the world not only as individuals, but as institutional communities of people. ⇧
• • •
Paul Spears
"Students are pursuing the academic life not because humans are rational but because they need to get money. And that pretty quickly sours on every human person because there's something intrinsic in all of us, foundational in all of us, that says 'That's not it' and a third-grader knows that."
— Paul Spears, co-author of Education for Human Flourishing: A Christian Perspective (InterVarsity Press, 2009)
Educator Paul Spears discusses ugly trends within education and how a fuller understanding of human beings can aid Christian educators in fostering learning environments that do justice to students. Spears argues that humans, as rational created beings, are meant to develop their minds in pursuit of God’s redemptive purposes for the world, including but not limited to individuals. Spears discusses how various educational pedagogies can train students to deny inevitable failures rather than to learn from them and to see education merely in terms of making money, thereby fostering a sour cynicism and despair. ⇧
• • •
Steven Loomis
"All of those value-based sources of knowledge are very costly to a system that wants to economize through scale."
— Steven Loomis, co-author of Education for Human Flourishing: A Christian Perspective (InterVarsity Press, 2009)
Co-author with Paul Spears, Steven Loomis, discusses how a technical managerial ethos imported from the secular business world reduces education to a flat, standardized set of procedures which ignores the context and the fullness of truth. Education thus follows the rest of secular culture in its drive for efficiency and ease at that cost of messy values and non-quantifiable wisdom. Loomis believes that resisting this tendency within education is a singularly important task for educators who seek to make wise disciples of Christ. ⇧
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James K. A. Smith
"There is a kind of know-how that is embedded in the practices of Christian worship that can inform my thinking about human flourishing in ways that don't just deduce from theological formulations."
— James K. A. Smith, author of Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Baker, 2009)
James K. A. Smith talks about the links between desire, worship, education, and cultural formation. Smith argues that education is and always has been formation of the whole person, involving mores and morals and not just minds, affections and imaginations not just intellects. Smith draws on an earlier Reformational and Kuyperian tradition which understands worldview as more than merely a collection of Christian ideas and propositional content, but instead an entire point of view, a way of thinking of and feeling and experiencing the world that involves more, though not less, than true propositions. It involves true emotions and dispositions and relations as well. Education is formation, formation is discipleship, and discipleship is the mission that Jesus gives his people. ⇧
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Thomas Long
"The best therapy for grief is not psychological comfort; the best assessment of grief is for the loss to be placed in the framework of meaning, and the ritual that acts out what does death mean, what is the future of the dead in Christ, to act that out in a ritual fashion, places our psychological loss in a grand structure of Gospel meaning, and that's what finally gives us the deepest comfort."
— Thomas Long, author of Accompany Them with Singing: The Christian Funeral (Westminster/John Knox Press, 2009)
Thomas Long paints a picture of historic Christian burial practice and discuss both the meaning embodied in the formal ritual and how the practice shapes the people who participate in it. Long then describes how what is done in the Christian funeral has shifted over time to reflect a different portrait of what is going on in death and how the congregation relates to the deceased. He discusses the differences between the historic and contemporary models and argues that while the benefits and goods embodied in the newer model are there and can be learned from, the historic model captures best what is going on in death and the destiny of the dead in Christ. In so doing, the historical model brings comfort to the grief-stricken by placing death within the Gospel narrative in place and time through movement and song. ⇧
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William T. Cavanaugh
""[T]his is not just the way things are: the myth of religious violence is a deeply ideological way of looking at the world and is not, by any means, some kind of neutral description of what's actually out there."
— William Cavanaugh, author of The Myth of Religious Violence (Oxford University Press, 2009)
Theologian William T. Cavanaugh examines the emptiness of the myth of religious violence. He begins by illustrating how the idea of "religion" as modern people understand it was an invention of early modern European thought meant to divide ways of life into the public and the private so as to allow the modern State to isolate, truncate and control the newly-invented private sphere, henceforth called "religion." This development arose out of centuries of struggle between ecclesiastic and civil authorities in Europe for power; when civil authorities gained the upper hand, Cavanaugh argues, they redefined the jurisdiction of the Church to be the newly-constructed private realm while taking the public realm for itself. As the dominance of the modern State grew over the past three centuries, their public political role and the Church's private religious role came to be solidified. Cavanaugh shows that this division between politics and religion has its own creation myth in the so-called "wars of religion" in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a myth that is belied by an examination of the warring parties in that period. He points out that the very fact that Catholics fought other Catholics, Protestants fought other Protestants, and that Protestants joined Catholics to fight other Protestants and Catholics indicates that there was something more going on than warring over theological disputes. That something was the beginning of a centralizing, homogenizing modern State that sought to exert control and bring uniformity over the diverse plurality of medieval locales and provinces, whether Protestant or Catholic, which resisted the growing centralization of the State, whether under Protestant or Catholic control. Cavanaugh argues that the deeply ideological separation of religion and politics has never been neutral but instead reflects a largely Western ideological conceit that is facing growing challenges centering on what is, at best, a tension within the division, and at worst, an incoherence. ⇧
Guests on Volume 102
• DANIEL M. BELL, JR. on recovering the view that the just war tradition is more about the shaping of character and virtue than a checklist for political leaders
• LEW DALY on how the discussion concerning faith-based initiatives raised larger issues about the identity of social groups in American society
• ADAM K. WEBB on whether the traditional personal and communal virtues in premodern village life must be abandoned for poverty to be alleviated
• STRATFORD CALDECOTT on how denying the reality of beauty is linked to a denial of the coherent meaning of Creation
• JAMES MATTHEW WILSON on Jacques Maritain’s pilgrimage to faith and his subsequent development of a rich philosophy of beauty
• THOMAS HIBBS on the similar projects of painters Georges Rouault (1871-1958) and Makoto Fujimura (b. 1960), and how they each resisted various confusions in modern art
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Daniel M. Bell, Jr.
"For the just war as public policy checklist, character is irrelevant. Anybody can pick up the checklist and use it, and as long as they can check it off, they can claim to be a just warrior. It doesn’t matter if just yesterday, they didn’t care about justice, they didn’t care about their neighbors, they couldn't care less about love and seeking peace. Anybody, any scoundrel can use it."
— Daniel M. Bell, Jr., author of Just War as Christian Discipleship: Recentering the Tradition in the Church rather than the State (Brazos Press, 2009)
Daniel M. Bell, Jr. discusses the just war tradition, a tradition which is often invoked by figures who, upon closer inspection, tend to lack a robust understanding of its history and criteria. Bell observes that the just war tradition, historically, arose out of the Christian community trying to grapple with and understand how the Church, as a community, could love one's neighbor even when it comes to war; he contrasts this historical understanding, rooted in the faith and practice of the Church, with just war theory as a contemporary politician's policy checklist to justify one's decision for war in the context of the modern nation-state and international law. As a public policy checklist, it is detached from the lived Christian moral tradition that sees the questions of war as being in continuity with the everyday ethical questions faced in a particularly Christian communal life of loving one’s neighbor and answered in accordance with the work of the Spirit accomplished in the character of the Christian community living out the faith in practice as disciples of Jesus. Bell argues that just war is not, from this perspective, a tradition that can be coherently or wisely divorced from the ethical life and character of the practicing Church and suddenly invoked on the eve of war by politicians, which is how it is often used today. Bell discusses why this is by drawing upon the recorded experiences of actual soldiers in war and the conditions he observes allowed them to fight justly and refuse the temptations to commit atrocities in the trauma and fear of battle. Bell moves on to discussing the development of the consideration of war as a necessary evil, and suggests that this involves a denial of the doctrine of sanctification. Drawing on early Church writers, Bell discusses how the counterintuitive claim that just war is a form of love even toward our enemies can be understood by modern Christians. ⇧
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Lew Daly
"Can the government, can the welfare state, really take on the total risk of society in ways that it might have to as other structures -- as other risk pooling structures like the family -- are eroded and scattered by the labor market?"
— Lew Daly, author of God's Economy: Faith-Based Initiatives and the Caring State (University of Chicago Press, 2009)
Lew Daly talks about the origins and trajectory of faith-based initiatives and related movements. His book discusses the relationship between faith-based groups, individuals, and the State when it comes to a shared goal of providing public goods; Daly observes how the political and legal framework in the U. S. has a difficult time addressing groups and communities due to the liberalism inherent in it. Since individuals are the only entities with an ontology in a liberal framework, almost all groups can only exist as a arbitrary collection of and have rights that are merely derivative of individuals. Perhaps the only group with an ontology as such is the nation-state, and the consequences of this lack of institutional recognition of groups such as families has been to reduce them to mere contractual relationships and enervate them. Daly suggests that moving towards a recognition of the social ontology of additional groups and communities would be true to life and a fruitful, even necessary, way of moving forward. Daly examines the intellectual genealogy of faith-based initiatives in the works of Abraham Kuyper and Leo XIII. ⇧
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Adam K. Webb
"They didn't want to lose their independence to government cadres anymore than they wanted to lose their independence to big business."
— Adam K. Webb, author of A Path of Our Own: An Andean Village and Tomorrow's Economy of Values (ISI Books, 2009)
Adam K. Webb, Resident Associate Professor of Political Science at the Johns Hopkins Nanjing Centre in China, discusses what he's learned about the possibilities of sustaining community life within the globalization of late modernity. He contrasts many of the values and virtues of local village life in the Peruvian village he studied over the course of a decade with the values inherent in the political and economic forces rural Peru is encountering in the modern world. Villagers have experienced much of urban life in their pursuit for employment, a pursuit which is not total and often finds villagers back in their original communities. Webb comments on the encounter of the village elders with outside modernizers and of the difficulties, possibilities, successes and disappointments. He examines the question of to what extent a certain kind of desirable economic development is compatible with the generational and traditional values of Peruvian villagers, what things can change, and what things do not have to change. His comments range from observations of the social structure of the village to the social and economic incentives contained within the practices of the Peruvian village. Drawing from thinkers like Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton who held to a robust understanding of human nature and flourishing in their thinking about economics, he illustrates possibilities and guidelines for a way forward. ⇧
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Stratford Caldecott
"We were put here in the midst of this beautiful Creation essentially to give thanks, to recognize it as gift, respond to it accordingly, and to live the life of gratitude, thanksgiving, and return which is really the life of love which is rooted in the Trinity as the life of God himself."
— Stratford Caldecott, author of Beauty for Truth's Sake: On the Re-enchantment of Education (Brazos Press, 2009)
Stratford Caldecott reflects on how beauty is linked to the inherent meaning in Creation. He talks about some of the concerns that led him to elaborate on this issue, especially his experiences of nominalism in the education system growing up. He notes that the steady disenchantment of the world has caused people to become insecure when it comes to matters of beauty and faith. If the world is meaningless apart from the meaning we impose on it, then faith and beauty become a matter of will rather than something objective and inherent within the structure of Creation. Caldecott discusses the implications of recovering the true character of Creation as a gift of love for our life of understanding. ⇧
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James Matthew Wilson
"He and his future wife Raissa Maritain effectively made a suicide pact; they said that if this turns out to be true; if the universe is really as empty and merely material as our teachers say it is, then we're going to end it all."
— James Matthew Wilson, author of The Vision of the Soul: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty in the Western Tradition (Catholic University of America Press, 2017)
Literary critic James Matthew Wilson discusses the aesthetics of Jacques Maritain. He begins by describing the curious tendency within the last thirty years to believe that American culture can be restored by means of electoral politics; this observation instigated a series on the relation of aesthetics to rationality and culture in which he discusses the three aspects of beauty in Maritain's aesthetics: integrity, proportion, and clarity. Wilson reviews the life of Maritain and how he came to Christian faith from rationalist materialism; the way in which Maritain came to faith set the trajectory of Maritain's elucidation of the significance of aesthetics and art to understanding reality and living a meaningful life. ⇧
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Thomas Hibbs
"I think both of them are taking seriously this sense of the artist and individuals in our culture as dislocated from the tradition, and so the tradition can’t simply be assumed and enacted, it has to be recovered and refreshed."
— Thomas Hibbs, author of Rouault-Fujimura: Soliloquies (Square Halo Books, 2009)
Thomas Hibbs speaks about the art of painters Georges Rouault and Makoto Fujimura. He was asked to write a pamphlet introducing an exhibit juxtaposing paintings by the two artists, and he comments on the development of the artistic themes within the exhibit, entitled Soliloquies. Fujimura was greatly influenced by Rouault, and both Fujimura and Rouault were influenced by Jacques Maritain. Hibbs notes that much of their work was concerned with how to create art in a world where the symbols and patterns and language describing reality is desiccated by reductive tendencies and forces. Their art answers the question by locating the brokenness and misery of the world within the Passion of Jesus Christ where suffering is revealed to be both truly suffering and beautifully intelligible in the context of God's redemptive purposes and work. ⇧