Audition

In Democratic Faith (Princeton University Press, 2005), political theorist Patrick Deneen examined what he saw as a state of crisis and a sense of quiet desperation underlying much of contemporary democratic theory. At the end of this month, St. Augustine's Press will publish a collection of Deneen's essays entitled Conserving America?: Essays on Present Discontents. In those essays, Deneen advances the case that our discontent, anxieties, and uncertainties are due to problems in the basic liberal principles embedded in the American Constitutional order. In a lecture given in 2010 examining the relationship between community, culture, and liberalism, Deneen offered this summary of the origins and nature of classical liberalism. Liberalism begins with the political philosophy of Hobbes, with refinement by John Locke, with the idea that humans by nature are naturally free and equal. These thinkers sought to describe the natural human condition to be one of autonomous and whole individuals who hav

Attorney Kenneth Craycraft, Jr. is the author of The American Myth of Religious Freedom (Spence Publishers, 1999). In that book, Craycraft argued that the protection for religious freedom guaranteed in the Constitution is not as vigorous as many believers may hope. The underlying assumptions in 18th-century Anglo-American thought about the nature of freedom, of political authority, and of religion itself were even then predisposed to favor the interests of the state over religious claims if they came into conflict. Craycraft observes that the liberal understanding of religious liberty is the freedom of individuals to choose from among a profusion of faiths. Religious liberty is thus just one expression of the fundamental fact of human nature and dignity as understood by liberalism: that we are beings with the capacity to make choices. Some religions, however, hold to the conviction that the most fundamental fact about us is that we are creatures made to glorify God and to live in accordance wit

In an article entitled "A More Perfect Absolutism" published in the October, 2016 issue of First Things, philosopher Michael Hanby observed that: "It is part of the absurdity of American life that we decide questions of truth under the guise of settling contests of rights. Which means that we decide questions of truth without thinking deeply or even very honestly about them." One reason this deciding process is a particularly American convention is that Americans "have no common faith, history, or culture outside the decision to found the nation on eighteenth-century philosophical principles, we have always looked to politics and the law to perform the work of faith, culture, and tradition in giving us an identity as a people." But what happens when politics that are all we know fails us? Unfortunately, those eighteenth-century philosophical principles (i.e. political liberalism) are deeply committed to certain metaphysical assumptions about nature. These assumptions treat nature as merely material stuff, sig

"Our public life is rife with discontent." So claims political philosopher Michael Sandel, in his 1996 book Democracy's Discontent: American in Search of a Public Philosophy. Sandel identifies two prominent symptoms of that discontent. "One is the fear that, individually and collectively, we are losing control of the forces that govern our lives. The other is the sense that, from family to neighborhood to nation, the moral fabric of community is unraveling around us." Sandel's book examines the ideas of liberty that have spawned what he calls "unencumbered selves," atomistic individuals with no abiding sense of responsibility, duty, or binding attachments. The political mechanism that encourages this care-free sensibility is what Sandel calls the "procedural republic," the product of a view of the state that envisions government as a guarantor of rights and fairness, scrupulously indifferent to questions of truth or goodness. This issue of Audition includes excerpts from a 1996 interview with Sandel in which

In the second of a MARS HILL AUDIO series of special interviews examining politics and theology, theologian Peter J. Leithart (Between Babel and Beast: America and Empires in Biblical Perspective) discusses some of the issues raised explicitly during the current presidential campaign and the failure of many voters and observers to ask how the explosive mood of the present moment reveals deep problems in American political culture. In a recent on-line commentary, Leithart observed that "contemporary political culture is the product of a convergence of two strains of liberalism: a leftist cultural libertarianism that took off during the 1960s and 1970s, and a rightwing free-market liberalism that reached its apogee with the Reagan-Thatcher alliance." Leithart continued: "Though they come from opposite ends of the political spectrum, both strains of liberalism are founded on a concept of freedom as the emancipation of individual choice." Leithart suggested that the sense of dismay many currently have about

The campaign leading up to the presidential election of 2016 has been an unsettling season for many Americans. Against the disturbing backdrop of social and cultural fragmentation, the two principal candidates for the office seem to be equally divisive, so that whoever wins in November, we are certain to be living through a time of further discord and discontent. Is what we're living through a sign of the failure of our political structures, or is it the logical outcome of a system with critical design flaws? Does a more hopeful future require the radical revision of some basic beliefs about the public life: about the relationship between state and society, about the purposes of government, and about how the ordering of temporal affairs accounts for the full reality of what we are as human persons? These and other relevant questions are finally theological questions, even if they aren't always acknowledged as such. In the first of a MARS HILL AUDIO series of special interviews that discuss politics and t

In his book, Missionaries of Republicanism: A Religious History of the Mexican-American War, historian John Pinheiro argues that much of the enthusiasm for the war was tied up with an array of disparate theological and nationalistic convictions. Many Evangelical Protestants (including such celebrated figures as Presbyterian Lyman Beecher, a Temperance activist and father of Harriet Beecher Stowe) believed that God’s purposes for America included the development of and transmission of the virtues of Republican government. These activists and their followers believed that Roman Catholic teaching and practice, in being opposed to republicanism, was thus contrary to God’s purposes in history. Pinheiro writes: “The religious history of the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848 is the story of how anti-Catholicism emerged as integral to nineteenth-century American identity as a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant republic. Americans had long wondered whether Providence had blessed them

Since 2006, theologian Richard Viladesau has been working on a multi-book project that has been exploring the meaning of the cross of Christ in Christian theology and in the artistic expressions of faith. The first book in this series (all published by Oxford) was The Beauty of the Cross: The Passion of Christ in Theology and the Arts from the Catacombs to the Eve of the Renaissance. The second, published in 2008, was The Triumph of the Cross: The Passion of Christ in Theology and the Arts from the Renaissance to the Counter-Reformation. The third book, published this year, is The Pathos of the Cross: The Passion of Christ in Theology and the Arts—The Baroque Era. In an interview with Ken Myers for the MARS HILL AUDIO Journal, Vilasdeau explained: “The arts were used as kind of illustrations or as kind of proclamations . . . for the service of God. The main intent was to serve as a mode of preaching, a visible mode of preaching in the case of the graphic arts or an auditory mod

In her recent book, A Little Manual for Knowing, Esther Lightcap Meek writes: “Knowing is a pilgrimage. It requires taking personal responsibility, born of love, to pledge allegiance to what we do not yet know. . . . Knowing is a gift. Epiphany comes as a surprising encounter, equal parts knowing and being known.” On this podcast, Meek talks with Ken Myers about how the conventional understanding of the difference between “objective” and “subjective” doesn’t do justice to the way we know the world as engaged subjects. This is an excerpt of a longer conversation with Esther Lightcap Meek that will appear on a forthcoming issue of the MARS HILL AUDIO Journal.

This issue of Audition features commentary by MARS HILL AUDIO host Ken Myers about recent on-line essays by political theorist Patrick Deneen. The four essays discussed were posted on Deneen's blog, What I Saw in America, and they each offered perspective on our current economic crisis gleaned from classical political philosophy. The essays were titled: "Abstraction," "Political Philosophy in the Details," "Whack a Mole," and "Democracy in America." Also referenced in Myers's comments is the 1976 book by sociologist Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. Patrick Deneen, associate professor of government at Georgetown University, was also a guest on Volume 91 of the MARS HILL AUDIO Journal; a portion of that interview may be heard here. In this interview, Deneen and Myers discuss the thought of Wendell Berry, whom Deneen describes as a "Kentucky Aristotelian."Ken Myers also comments on an article from the May 2008 issue of Harper's by Wendell B

This issue of Audition features an interview with Japanese-American painter Makoto Fujimura. A reproduction of one of Fujimura's distinctive paintings is displayed to the right. The following biographical material is from the artist's website:"Makoto Fujimura was born in 1960 in Boston, Massachusetts. Educated bi-culturally between the US and Japan, Fujimura graduated from Bucknell University in 1983, and received an M.F.A. from Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music with a Japanese Governmental Scholarship in 1989. His thesis painting was purchased by the university and he was invited to study in the Japanese Painting Doctorate program, a first for an outsider to this prestigious traditional program. "It was during the six and a half years of studying in Japan that Fujimura began to assimilate the combinations of abstract expressionism explored in the US with the traditional Japanese art of Nihonga. Upon his ret

In an interview with a Washington Post reporter in 2001, writer Philip Pullman candidly remarked, "I'm trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief." The occasion for the interview was the publication of the third book in Pullman's fantasy trilogy, His Dark Materials.The first book of that trilogy, The Golden Compass, has now been made into a movie, which will open on December 7th. (It's ironic that the distributors of The Golden Compass hope their film will make more money by opening in the Season of the birth of the One who is the basis of Christian belief.) The trailers for the film suggest that Pullman's suspicion of authority (and hence his antipathy toward the Church and her Lord) will not be abandoned as the book makes the transition to a film.Whatever his other attributes, Philip Pullman is clearly a remarkably gifted writer. His powerful story takes place in a world similar to ours but with a significantly different history, an alternate universe with a similar cast of historical chara

This issue of Audition is a free preview of a new series of programs being produced by MARS HILL AUDIO. The series, Dialogues on Justice and Judges, will look at recent and upcoming Supreme Court rulings, attending to how they represent ideas about law, justice, identity, freedom, community, and other social and cultural concepts.In this first episode, "Jurisprudence and the Roberts Court," Ken Myers, Executive Producer of MARS HILL AUDIO, interviews four legal experts who give an initial assessment of the tenure of Chief Justice John Roberts, looking specifically at the changes in the confirmation process of justices and the tendency of the Court to take on the role of legislator, especially in cases related to civil rights. The guests on the podcast are Douglas Kmiec, Professor of Law at Pepperdine University; Michael Uhlmann, Visiting Professor of Political Science at Claremont Graduate University; Terry Eastland, Publisher of The Weekly Standard; and Ed Whelan, President of the Ethics and Public

This special issue of Audition features interviews with five cultural historians, each reflecting on how assumptions of the meaning of "the human person" has shaped some aspect of the American experience. They are all interested in how particular understandings of human nature have influenced American history, and how the distinctive shape of American history has shaped understanding of the meaning of human nature and the contours of human flourishing.Each of these thinkers contributed an essay to the anthology Figures in the Carpet: Finding the Human Person in the American Past (Eerdmans). In conversation with Ken Myers on this podcast, Wilfred M. McClay (University of Tennessee at Chattanooga) discusses the differences between the terms "self" and "person." Eric Miller (Geneva College) recounts how Christopher Lasch's insightful books and essays exposed dehumanizing patterns in American cultural life. Eugene McCarraher (Villanova University) explains how many early 20th-centuur

The most influential social thinkers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries all believed that religion was an outdated preoccupation which maturing, progressing societies would eventually abandon. This assumption, often called the secularization hypothesis, was held by most sociologists through most of the 20th century.One sociologist who believed early on that the story of the place of religion in modern societies was a little more complicated and variable than most of his colleagues allowed for was David Martin. Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, Dr. Martin has long insisted that the fate of religion in modern societies has been dramatically different in different countries.In 2005, a collection of essays by Martin called On Secularization: Toward a Revised General Theory was published by Ashgate Press. That book was the occasion for a conversation between David Martin and MARS HILL AUDIO host Ken Myers, much of which is presented in this issue of Aud

The meaning of the human and the meaning of the spiritual are the big themes on this issue of Audition. First, we hear an excerpt from Yuval Levin's penetrating essay, "The Moral Challenge of Modern Science," which maintains that science is not, as many claim, just a set of neutral tools. Then part of a chapter from Nigel Cameron's provocative book Are Christians Human? An Exploration of True Spirituality is featured. The section excerpted asks the question "Was Jesus human?" and looks at ways in which Jesus' humanity is often implicitly denied even while explicitly affirmed. Finally, we hear a long section from the audio documentary Best-Selling Spirituality: American Cultural Change and the New Shape of Faith. What's behind the contemporary affirmation of "spirituality" at the expense of "religion"? Ken Myers hosts this exploration of how contemporary culture is shaping how people think about the meaning of faith.For more information about these and other audio produc

P. D. James's dystopian novel The Children of Men was the basis for a film opening on Christmas Day in the U.S. On this issue of Audition, Ken Myers talks with Ralph Wood and Alan Jacobs about the power and meaning of James's fiction, specifically of the themes raised in the bleak (but finally hopeful) story now adapted for the screen by Alfonzo Cuaron. A 1980 interview with P. D. James is also featured, in which she talks about why evil characters are more interesting than good ones, and why mysteries need murders.

On this issue of Audition, we feature a number of interviews about Christian novelists, poets, and mythmakers.- Alan Jacobs (What Became of Wystan: Change and Continuity in Auden's Poetry) tells us about how W. H. Auden's conversion to Christianity affected his poetry (an excerpt from The Public Poetry of W. H. Auden)- Ralph Wood (The Gospel according to Tolkien: Visions of the Kingdom in Middle Earth) talks about J. R. R. Tolkien's view of language, and the dangers of a society that debases language (an excerpt from Maker of Middle Earth)- Susan Srigley (Flannery O'Connor's Sacramental Art) explains how Flannery O'Connor's fiction reveals her incarnational view of life (excerpt from Hillbilly Thomist: Flannery O'Connor and the Truth of Things)- Thomas Howard (Narnia and Beyond: A Guide to the Fiction of C. S. Lewis) describes how myth differs from the modern novel, and what is lost when the gods disappear from our stories (excerpt from Till We Have Faces and the Meaning of Myth)- Alan Jacobs (The Narnian: Th

This installment of Audition features interviews with the following guests:-- Leon Kass, on the people who shaped his thinking on bioethics and the meaning of the human-- Bernard Lewis, on how Islamic antipathy toward the West has been simmering since the late 17th century-- Thomas de Zengotita, on how the proliferation of signs and messages aimed to encourage us to buy things affect us in other waysAlso featured is an excerpt from the essay, "Shop Class as Soulcraft," by Matthew B. Crawford.Each of these interviews is part of much longer MARS HILL AUDIO programs which are now available as MP3 downloads.Thanks for listening!

This edition of Audition includes excerpts from five MARS HILL AUDIO interviews:--- Russell Hittinger, on ways in which modern democracies exclude public discussion about the view of human nature and human personhood on which democracy is founded--- Michael Aeschliman, on how C. S. Lewis opposed both subjectivism and scientism in arguing for the nature of the rationality of Creation--- Sir John Polkinghorne, on how science and theology are both best pursued "from the bottom up," taking the reality of Creation and our experience of it seriously--- Richard Gelwick and Thomas Torrance, on how Michael Polanyi's insights into the nature of scientific discovery provide a rich resource for theology--- Vigen Guroian, reading from his book, Inheriting Paradise: Meditations on GardeningEach of these interviews is part of much longer MARS HILL AUDIO programs which are now available as MP3 downloads.Thanks for listening!