Number 44 - Friday, November 9, 2007

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a periodical newsletter from
MARS HILL AUDIO

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Intel Deep Inside
For several years, Christine Rosen has been writing a series of articles for The New Atlantis about the technologies of everyday life. Treating everything from how computer games affect our sense of personal identity ("Playgrounds of the Self") to the effects of the proliferation of images in our everyday experience, mediated by PhotoShop, Powerpoint, and other technologies ("The Image Culture") to the effect of online dating services to how people think about love ("Romance in the Information Age"), Rosen has skillfully scrutinized how new ways of mediating space, time, and relationships are not simply new ways of accomplishing venerable ends, but, all too often, remarkably new practices with deep effects on the soul. (While you're reading her work, don't miss "Our Cell Phones, Ourselves" and "Are We Worthy of Our Kitchens?") Rosen has a perceptive sense of how technologies are never simply tools, serving also as talismans, metaphors, and templates for living. By conferring the ability to do something, technologies often convey a sense of a need to do something. And we rarely examine how both the need and the doing have rearranged our sense of who we are and how we might live well. We are all aware of the benefits of these new abilities, but rarely do we survey the possible (and often likely) liabilities. [Read more about Christine Rosen's latest article on social networking websites]

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"Every group regarding itself as emancipated is convinced that its predecessors were fearful of reality. It looks upon euphemisms and all the veils of decency with which things were previously draped as obstructions, which it, with superior wisdom and praiseworthy courage, will now strip away. Imagination and indirection it identifies with obscurantism; the mediate is an enemy to freedom."

--Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (1948)

Here's What
You're Missing

Volume 87 of the MARS HILL AUDIO Journal included interviews with: John Witte, Jr. on law & religion; Steven Keillor on history & divine judgment; Philip Bess on New Urbanism and natural law; Scott Cairns on words & poetry; and Anthony Esolen on ironies of faith. Volume 88 (now being edited) will include an interview with Steve Talbott about his book Devices of the Soul: Battling for Our Selves in an Age of Machines, a conversation with Diane Pavlac Glyer, about her book The Company They Keep: C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien as Writers in Community, and a number of interviews about the joys of a cappella singing and the blessing of the human voice.

Other guests in the wings for future issues include Fred Turner talking about From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism; Michael P. Schutt on Redeeming Law: Christian Calling and the Legal Profession; and some conversations about Alexis de Tocqueville and individualism.

If you'd like to subscribe to our Journal, see our subscription page. If you've never heard the Journal, you can request a free sample edition on CD by calling or e-mailing us, or you can download an MP3 version of the Sample Edition here. Subscriptions to the Journal are available on CD, MP3 download, or cassette. If you subscribe online to the MP3 editiion, you could be listening to Volume 87 in minutes. If you have questions about how our MP3 system works, look here.

Badly Calibrated Compass

If you haven't already, you'll soon be hearing a lot about a movie opening on December 7. The Golden Compass is based on the first book in the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman. These books (in the words of the New Yorker) "may be the first fantasy series founded upon the ideals of the Enlightenment," and like the philosophes, Pullman is a self-identified enemy of Christianity. Irritated by all things religious, Pullman reserves special venom for fellow Oxford don C. S. Lewis, whose Narnia series Pullman judged "one of the most ugly and poisonous things I've ever read." The current issue of Audition, our free podcast, has much more about Pullman and his books. Our website also has information about articles on Pullman's brilliant yet terribly misguided imagination.

New Listening

At the center of C. S. Lewis's diagnosis of the disorders of modern culture was his critique of conventional assumptions about the imagination. Modernity, with its scientistic bent, divorced reason from imagination. Lewis once observed that "reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning." By severing reason from imagination, modern cultures have thus abandoned meaning. It is a telling recognition of the centrality of the imagination in Lewis's thought that the subtitle of one of the most perceptive books about Lewis in decades is The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis. When Ken Myers talked with the author of this book, Alan Jacobs, the main theme of their conversation was imagination. That interview (featured on Volume 77 of our Journal) has just been released as a MARS HILL AUDIO Conversation, available on CD or as an MP3 download. Look here for more information about Alan Jacobs on The Narnian.

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