Number 51 - Wednesday, April 15, 2009

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a periodical newsletter from
MARS HILL AUDIO

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What We’re Reading

Your Subscription Information

Before and after Economics
As a follow-up to some of the themes raised by guests on Volume 95 of the Journal, listeners may want to read a piece by political theorist Mark T. Mitchell (author of Michael Polanyi: The Art of Knowing). Published on the Front Porch Republic, an online intellectual cooperative dedicated to exploring the place of place in our lives, Mitchell’s article (“The Dismal Science vs. Community”) is a discussion of a book by Harvard economist Stephen A. Marglin.
    Marglin’s book, The Dismal Science: How Thinking Like an Economist Undermines Community (Harvard University Press, 2008), examines ways in which economics—like all sciences—presents a limited picture of human nature and human well-being, concealing more about the kinds of creatures we are than it reveals. . . . [Read more about Mark Mitchell and Stephen Marglin]

Digital Equality and the Untuning of the World
Lee Siegel’s most recent book, Against the Machine (Spiegel & Grau, 2008), is a pointed exploration of themes MARS HILL AUDIO addresses frequently: the centrality of the sovereign self in modern culture (and the dehumanizing effects of that sovereignty), the way technologies rearrange social relationships without our noticing the changes (or their consequences), and the erosion of forms of cultural authority. These are concerns that have emerged in other essays by Siegel, who has contributed regularly for the last decade to The New Republic, The Nation, and Slate. In this book, subtitled Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob, Siegel’s concerns about the consequences of cultural carelessness seem more closely defined, if sometimes overstated. . . .
[Read more about Lee Siegel’s concerns about radical equalitarianism and the loss of cultural authority]

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What’s Coming Your Way

New Audio Anthology on the
Rich Rewards of Reading

Volume 96 of the Journal is currently being edited. The guests on that issue include:

• Richard Stivers on The Illusion of Freedom and Equality

• Kiku Adatto on Picture Perfect: Life in the Age of the Photo Op

• John R. Betz on After Enlightenment: The Post-Secular Vision of J. G. Hamann

• David K. Naugle on Reordered Love, Reordered Lives: Learning the Deep Meaning of Happiness

• David A. Smith on Money for Art: the Tangled Web of Art and Politics in American Democracy

Guests slated for coming issues include:

• Stanley Fish on Save the World on Your Own Time

• Mark Noll on The Future of Christian Learning

• Roger Lundin on Believing Again: Doubt and Faith in a Secular Age

“The primacy of the word, of that which can be spoken and communicated in discourse, is characteristic of the Greek and Judaic genius and carried over into Christianity. The classic and the Christian sense of the world strive to order reality within the governance of language. Literature, philosophy, theology, law, the arts of history, are endeavors to enclose within the bounds of rational discourse the sum of human experience, its recorded past, its present condition and future expectations. The code of Justinian, the Summa of Aquinas, the world chronicles and compendia of medieval literature, the Divina Commedia, are attempts at total containment. They bear solemn witness to the belief that all truth and realness—with the exception of a small, queer margin at the very top—can be housed inside the walls of language.”

So George Steiner observed in an essay from the 1960s entitled “The Retreat of the Word.” Steiner believed that we were living in a time in which confidence about the capacity of langauge had been in decline for some time. In fact, the modern assumption that only science can provide true knowledge—and that such knowledge is mathematical, not verbal—is the initial prejudice that instigates the weakening of what Steiner elsewhere calls the covenant between Word and World.

If Steiner is right, then a decline of interest in intense engagement with words—which is one of the things reading provides—is not just a cosmetic consequence of TV or YouTube. A culture’s commitment to literacy is a way of sustaining confidence in the Word-centered coherence of Creation, and so the culture of the Church has always been hospitable to literacy.

In a broader cultural setting that is increasingly indifferent to the Word and to words, such hospitality is more difficult to sustain. But this is just the sort of counter-cultural practice and witness to which the Church must commit herself.

In the hopes of encouraging such commitment, we’ve just released a new MARS HILL AUDIO Anthology, “On Books and Reading,” which examines the extent and the consequences of the current epidemic of aliteracy: for individuals, for social health, and for the life of the Church. Host Ken Myers and his guests (including Sven Birkerts, Eugene Peterson, and Dana Gioia) explore the many blessings afforded by reading, especially the habits of cultural and personal engagement that reading sustains.

Of course, we’re biased, but we think that the conversations on this Anthology are an excellent way to alert pastors, teachers, and parents to the grave consequences of the current decline of interest in reading. Read more about this Anthology here.

Ken Myers in Wheaton

On Saturday, April 25, Ken Myers will speak at Bethel Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Wheaton, Illinois. The title of his lecture is “In the Image of Our Devices: How Technologies Shape Our Understanding of the Human.” For more information and for directions to the church, see www.bethelopc.org.

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