Number 48 - Friday, October 10, 2008

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a periodical newsletter from
MARS HILL AUDIO

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What We’re Reading

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Liberalism and limits
On his blog, political theorist Patrick Deneen (author of the 2005 book Democratic Faith) has recently been placing the Wall Street meltdown in a larger cultural perspective that is absent from most media diagnoses and from the comments of politicians, whose handlers and PR experts forbid them from ever saying anything critical of the dominant trends of our cultural moment. . . . [Read more about Patrick Deneen’s discussion of some of the fundamental mistakes of classic liberalism]

A Devilish temptation
For some time now, I have been growing in my understanding of how many cultural disorders are related to hatred of limits. The aspiration to limitlessness was embedded in the first temptation and the original sin, it informed the earliest docetic and Gnostic heresies, and it inspired the founding intellects of modernity. Many sincere Christians still have some sense that being limited is an effect of sin, rather than a condition of the Creation. . . . . [Read more from Ken Myers on a theology of limits, and about Wendell Berry’s description of “Faustian economics”]

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Thinking Christianly about
the University

Committed as we are to exploring the cultural consequences of our duty to love God and neighbor, MARS HILL AUDIO has consistently paid a great deal of attention to the unique cultural role of higher education. Today’s institutions of higher education are increasingly confused about their mission. The postmodern university is not only post-Christian, it is post-humanist, and for the same reasons. Humanism, after all, is the product of a culture that believed in the Incarnation.

Because understanding the proper place of higher education in our lives and in our society is so strategically central to our mission, we decided to produce an audio version of a recent book called The Passionate Intellect: Incarnational Humanism and the Future of University Education. The book’s authors, Norman Klassen and Jens Zimmermann, argue that the Incarnation is, after all, the only reliable foundation on which to build a properly humanistic education. “Christians are supposed to be the paradigm for a new humanity founded by Christ and inaugurated by his resurrection from the dead, a decisive event signaling the reconciliation of humanity to God and anticipating the full redemption of God’s creation.”

Ronald P. Mahurin, vice president of the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities, has commended this book warmly. “Christian students and faculty will find this book an immense resource in their collective task of ‘taking every thought captive’ to Christ.”

We agree, and hope you’ll read more about this book online, and consider purchasing it for yourself, for college students, or for a favorite teacher.

What’s Coming Your Way

Volume 92 of the Journal is on the way to CD and cassette subscribers (MP3 subscribers have had access to it for a few weeks now). The guests on that issue will include:

Richard M. Gamble on The Great Tradition: Classic Readings on What It Means to Be an Educated Human Being

Peter Leithart on Solomon among the Postmoderns

Craig Holdrege on Beyond Technology: The Barren Promise of Genetic Engineering

Stephen J. Nichols on Jesus in America: A Cultural History from the Puritans to The Passion of the Christ

Jake Halpern on Fame Junkies: The Hidden Truths behind America's Favorite Addiction

Bill Vitek on The Virtues of Ignorance: Complexity, Sustainability, and the Limits of Knowledge

Guests slated for Volume 93 include Alan Jacobs on Original Sin: A Cultural History; James A. Herrick on Scientific Mythologies: How Science and Science Fiction Forge New Religious Beliefs; and Sheila O’Connor-Ambrose on Elizabeth Fox-Genovese’s Marriage: The Dream That Refuses to Die; Jeremy Begbie on Resounding Truth: Christian Wisdom in the World of Music; Robert C. Roberts on Spiritual Emotions: A Psychology of Christian Virtues; and Allan Carlson on Conjugal America: On the Public Purposes of Marriage.

The Passionate Intellect was written primarily to inform Christian college students about the meaning of higher education. It is available on CD ($26) or as an MP3 download ($14). Learn more here.

Ralph C. Wood in Nashville

The Fall 2008 Humanitas Forum on Christianity and Culture will be held on October 24 and 25 at St. George’s Episcopal Church in Nashville, Tennessee. The speaker will be Dr. Ralph C. Wood, who has been a guest on the MARS HILL AUDIO Journal six times. (To hear part of a 2001 interview with Dr. Wood on J. R. R. Tolkien’s view of language, click here.)

At this Forum—entitled C. S. Lewis on Love, Desire, and the Demonic—Dr. Wood will use two of C. S. Lewis’s books, The Screwtape Letters and The Four Loves, to help us recover a healthy understanding of three important facets of Christian spirituality—love, desire, and the demonic.

The art of spiritual warfare has rarely been described as insightfully as it has been in the writing of C. S. Lewis.  The genius of his work lies in his ability to dissect the spiritual distractions and distortions of our modern age.  Lewis worries that ours is a superficial age because it is concerned chiefly with appearances and feelings.  As a corrective, Lewis encourages serious thinking that is grounded in good theology.  But his appeal is not limited to our minds.  Rather, Lewis “serves as a confessor of Christian faith who engages the whole of our humanity—our imaginations as well as our minds,” according to Dr. Wood.

Dr. Ralph C. Wood is University Professor of Theology and Literature at Baylor University in Waco, Texas.  Dr. Wood has given numerous lectures at major universities and churches across the U. S. and Canada on theological topics as well as on writers such as C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Flannery O’Connor, and Walker Percy.  He is the author of several books, including The Gospel According to Tolkien: Visions of the Kingdom in Middle-earth and Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South.  He is currently working on a book on G. K. Chesterton.

For more information about this event, consult the website of The Humanitas Forum.

“St. Augustine described the academic culture he entered as a young man as ‘a caldron of illicit loves’ (Confessions 3.1). Today’s university environment—as Tom Wolfe’s recent novel I am Charlotte Simmons has shown—is no different, perhaps even worse! How can a Christian student not only keep from being boiled alive but even thrive in their challenging college contexts? One answer is Mars Hill Audio! It’s not a cure-all, but a subscription to the bimonthly audio journal and exposure to other MHA products will go a long way to helping students become critical, coherent, Christian thinkers who hold fast to their confession of faith and serve as ambassadors of God’s kingdom with integrity on their campuses. Students shouldn't go to college or grad school without Mars Hill Audio in their backpacks!”

—David Naugle, professor of philosophy, Dallas Baptist University, and author of Reordered Love, Reordered Lives: Learning the Deep Meaning of Happiness (Eerdmans, Fall 2008)

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