Podcasts about mars hill audio journal

Ken Myers is the founder of the Mars Hill Audio Journal, a quarterly audio periodical that features his interviews with a wide-ranging slate of writers and thinkers, from the well-known and popular to the relatively obscure. Whether discussing medications with a clinical psychiatrist or the music of Bach with a biographer, Ken is continually circling the interests and questions that have fueled his project for thirty years now; questions like, “what is a good life,” “what is a healthy culture,” “what is the shape and order of creation,” and “what might we as Christians most benefit from focusing our attention on?” 

Confessional Protestants are again NOT in the news thanks in part to a new survey that breaks the white Protestant world in the U.S. down into either evangelical or mainline Protestant camps. Korey Maas, Miles Smith, and D. G. Hart (aka Bob Dole) aimed at using the recent headlines surrounding those survey results to consider what the Protestant equivalent would be to the Roman Catholic intellectual landscape that Ross Douthat outlined in First Things. As it turned out, discussion of the value, plausibility, and deficiency of evangelical as descriptor took more time than planned. But the creation of the so-called evangelical mind, it could well be, is responsible for a failure to recognize the contributions of confessional Protestants. Equally plausible is the possibility that confessional Protestants themselves have lost touch with the intellectual tradition (authors, curricula, academic disciplines) that were the backdrop for the scholars and pastors who produced the Protestant confessions. In which case, if Roman Catholics present a thicker intellectual tradition than Protestants, the reason could be that their institutions have kept their intellectual traditions alive better than Protestants who may have been tempted to throw their intellectual energies into the evangelical mind. Along the way the interlocutors referred to Miles Smith's recent essay on evangelical elites and to the range of Christian writers and scholars that Ken Myers hosts on the Mars Hill Audio Journal.

On today's episode, Fr. Myles interviews Ken Myers, host of the Mars Hill Audio Journal. They discuss the topic of music, beauty, and objective reality. You can learn more from Ken's about music at Cantica Sacra. You can send your feedback and questions to thesacramentalists@gmail.com or reach out to us on Twitter @sacramentalists. If you want to dive deeper and enjoy dialoguing with others about content on the Sacramentalists, check out our Facebook discussion group here. Be sure to join our Communion of Patreon Saints for only $5 a month!

You can listen to the newsletter by clicking the play button above or you can click the “Listen in Podcast app” link and follow the directions to open this feed in your podcast app. Currently, you may find the feed on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and Spotify.Some of you reading this know that one of the questions I like to ask is, “What frames what?” I ask this question in order to get at the often-unrecognized ideas, beliefs, and values in the background that shape the ways we think. Because we rarely think about them, we often refer to them as assumptions, and yet these framing ideas have tremendous consequences for how we talk and how we live. They are also typically embedded deep down in our practices. Lately, I've been asking myself this question again and find myself especially concerned about the ways that social media have come to frame our most important discussions about life, including important issues of race and justice.In recent newsletters, Mike Sacasas has been exploring our digital framework in his usual understated but insightful manner and raising good questions in the process. “What does it mean to speak and act responsibly in these times?” he asked a couple months ago. “How does one love one's neighbor on a social media platform?” I know Mike well enough to know that this was not a rhetorical question. He meant it, and so do I. While it is easy to speak up on social media and easy to feel good about saying the right thing, it is much harder really to know how to love one's neighbor. One hopes that the net effect of all our talk on social media will turn out to be positive, but I do wonder, and I am concerned. As Mike has taught me, digitized media encourage and reward certain behaviors, and inversely, they discourage and punish other behaviors. They reward the immediate, quick condemnation of what's wrong in the world, and they encourage simplistic solutions. They discourage the thoughtful silence in which one might listen, learn, and reflect before speaking. As Mike observed, “social media demands something of us, but it is not thought. It demands a reaction, one that is swift, emotionally charged, andin keeping with the affective tenor of the platform. In many respects, this entails not only an absence of thought but conditions that are overtly hostile to thought.”Recently, one of our alumni made a similar observation about his own attempt to respond thoughtfully to the racial injustices that he was finding deeply troubling, “What I thought I was doing was trying to understand the problem in the deepest possible way,” he wrote, but “my reactions made me appear as though I didn't care as much about racial problems as others did.” By daring to think before he spoke, hefound himself subject to the media watchdogs who are making their lists and posting them twice. In a way that curiously parallels the pharisaical tendency for Christians to distinguish themselves from “sinners” by making judgments based in appearance, the discourse of social media lures us into a shallow judgmentalism that allows us to condemn others and feel good about ourselves.The great danger here is that what might be called hash-tag culture tempts us to think that by saying the right things on our Facebook page or Instagram, we have fulfilled our responsibility and done our part. This is a serious problem. Our digitized world narrows our vision for seeking justice and doing good. It blinds us to the fact that genuine progress on any important issue requires quiet thoughtfulness, listening, learning, and patient, persistent action. As another of our alumni wrote me, “I, too, have struggled with how to respond during this time” because these issues are ones that “I have been thinking about and responding to for as long as I can remember. I've felt troubled that the influx of responses on social media might be another reason for people to quickly forget about the deep need for reconciliation in just a few months when the next thing arrives. I'm grateful that more attention has been brought to racial reconciliation in the past few months, but I'm concerned that it will pass away without many people finding their lives or perspectives much changed.” She concluded, “That's deep, slow work.” It takes patience, persistence, and time.In Mike's discussion of these issues, he has often focused on what he calls “the temporal structures of social media.” Noting that “the patterns of digitally mediated reality can overwhelm other modes of perception, temporality, and place,” he has encouraged us to extend our temporal horizon beyond the short-lived temporal frame assumed by social media. “The effect of our digital media ecosystems is consistent,” he writes. “The focus is inexorably on the fleeting present. The past has no hold, and the future does not come into play.” Elsewhere Mike has observed that “The element of time is an often unperceived factor in our anxiety about figuring out what should be done. At what temporal scale ought we to be thinking?” he asks. “Or, better, at what temporal scales, plural, ought we to be thinking? What are the proper temporal horizons framing our moment?” As Mike puts it, “Without minimizing the need … to act justly and responsibly in the moment, we should also consider expanding the temporal horizons within which our thinking and acting must unfold. We should consider not only what we must do about what is happening right now, we should also consider what we must do with a view to the next year, the next decade, perhaps even the next century…. Within this longer frame of time, more meaningful actions also come into view. If I am fixated on the moment, and my circumstances, as is often the case, afford me no obvious way of acting in the present crisis, then I might conclude there is nothing for me to do at all.” Even worse, I would add, if we allow our digitized world to frame our understanding of justice, we might think that by posting incessantly on our social media, we will have fulfilled our responsibility and done all we need do.Personally, I am far less interested in knowing what any of us posted on our social media in the days immediately after the death of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia, or of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, or of George Floyd Jr. in Minneapolis, than I am in what initiatives we were taking six months or a year before Ahmaud's death, or what any of us will be doing six months or a year from now. It is all too easy for us to jump in with “Pavlovian alacrity” and say something that will leave us feeling good aboutourselves. It is far more demanding to do something that will never get into the news and never be broadcast on social media but will actually do some good somehow—or at least have the potential to do so.When Richard Spencer visited the campus of the University of Florida a few years ago, I made the personal decision that it is not enough just to be right about what's wrong. Being right about what is wrong is important, but I do want to encourage us not simply to join the chorus and think that we have done what needed to be done. Being right about what's wrong is easy, and if that is all we care about, we need only keep on posting. If, however, we want to see hearts and minds and practices and structures changed, we will need to do more than what our social media asks of us. We will have to swim against the current and give a place to silence, to listening and learning, to thought and action and do so in ways that are marked by patience and persistence. Action will probably include words at some point, but social media may or may not provide the right platform for those words, and when it is time to utilize the internet, our digital media need not set the pace or dictate the terms of our engagement.Dr. Richard V. HornerExecutive DirectorStudy Center ResourcesPlanning for the fall semester at the study center has been underway for some time now, and, while the health crisis is posing formidable challenges, we are quite pleased with what we will be offering. Here's a quick preview. You can be looking forward to two director's classes, taught by Dr. Horner and Mike Sacasas respectively, and offered both in a limited in-person format and via Zoom. The Dante read group will resume, and we will be launching another reading group, Readings in the Christian Imagination, which will meet twice a month via Zoom. In addition, this newsletter will be a hub for our digital presence. Along with twice-monthly essays you can expect twice monthly conversations with Dr. Horner and Mike Sacasas, audio of the director's classes, and occasional interviews with scholars and writers of interest to our community. We certainly encourage you to pass along a link to the newsletter to those you know who would value the center's work, especially as so many our offerings will be available to those beyond the Gainesville community. Recommended Reading— Matt Stewart interviews Ken Myers on the occasion of the (near) 30th anniversary of the Mars Hill Audio Journal, an unparalleled resource for thoughtful Christian engagement with culture:As to conversation, there's a lot of research to suggest that many habits of mediated communication diminish the capacity for immediate—and loving—communication. From the beginning, I've tried to provide a model for loving conversations (although I'm usually not face-to-face with my guests). I've come to appreciate—thanks largely to Oliver O'Donovan—the centrality of communication in all its forms to our social existence. I'd already been persuaded that love is at the heart of our lives, as it is in the life of God as Trinity. Communication and community and common good: all these things are intertwined. So “communications media” need to be attentive to that kinship.— Micah Latimer-Dennis presents ten theses on digitally mediated worship:As communities ease into gathering for worship again, for some churchgoers the risk will be too great. Alongside the traditional, in-person option churches will offer a “virtual” option for participating. It seems likely that when the last wave of infection has finally broken, many churches will maintain this option. It would benefit us to consider what that change will mean for worship. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

Pastor Mark Bertrand has turned to the Psalms for his sermon texts during the global pandemic, and he joins Mike Schutt to discuss insights and encouragement from this rich source. You'll be encouraged as Mark explores how the "Songbook of the Church" speaks to us about lessons in crisis, sources of hope in trial, and the joys inherent in the life of faith. J. Mark Bertrand is the pastor of Grace Presbyterian Church in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. He is also a novelist and author, and he teaches on the Worldview Academy faculty. His crime noir works are Back on Murder, Pattern of Wounds,and Nothing to Hide. His book [Re]Thinking Worldview: Learning to Think, Live, and Speak in this World (Crossway 2007) is a great primer on Christian thought and action. He blogs at the world-renowned Bible Design Blog, sharing thoughts and photos on a multitude of design issues. His real claim to fame is that he was interviewed by Ken Myers on Mars Hill Audio Journal, volume 90, which also features Mike Schutt discussing Redeeming Law.  Mark was also a guest on Episode 46 of Cross & Gavel, one of the most popular episodes in the podcast's history. More recently, he joined Mike to discuss the "New Moralism" in Episode 70 and law and government on Episode 73.  Cross and Gavel is a project of Trinity Law School and Christian Legal Society.

This episode features an address by Ken Myers, host of the long-running Mars Hill Audio Journal, a bimonthly audio magazine that "encourag[es] conversations about faith, faithfulness, and culture." Mr. Myers is also the author of All God's Children and Blue Suede Shoes: Christians and Popular Culture (Crossway redesign edition, 2012). Earlier in his career, he was the arts and humanities editor for NPR's Morning Edition. Ken Myers presented this address in April 2019 at a Christ and Culture lecture event sponsored by the Gospel Alliance of Maine. His remarks have been condensed for this podcast. If you have a comment or question about the Notable Speeches podcast, email feedback@notablespeeches.com.

It may be commonplace to say that God has instituted various governments and has delegated His authority to them in various ways, but speaking, for example, about the "government" of a family seems strange today. And even a bit scary. Mark Bertrand says that we in the Church are pretty good at targeting failures of government when it comes to the state, but we need to do a much better job of thinking about governing well in the church and the family. What might that look like? How to think well about it? And who says, anyway? At one point, Mark suggests that listeners might be shouting "Hey, these guys are advocating theocracy! Or a bunch of little theocracies within a theocracy!" Are they?  Listen in and find out. Join Mark and C&G host Mike Schutt as they talk at length about the authority and roles of various governments in today's world and the resources available to help them govern well. Would the state be changed if other institutions-- family, church, state, corporations, universities-- were governed well? Are these governments dependent on one another? Walk through the discussion with them as they suggest that what the Bible envisions is "a community of governments with overlapping authority . . . all backstopped by divine revelation." We think you'll find this an encouraging and informative discussion.  J. Mark Bertrand is a novelist and pastor living in South Dakota. His crime noir works are Back on Murder, Pattern of Wounds, and Nothing to Hide. His book [Re]Thinking Worldview:Learning to Think, Live, and Speak in this World (Crossway 2007) is a great primer on Christian thought and action, and he serves on the faculty of Worldview Academy. He blogs at the world-renowned Bible Design Blog, sharing thoughts and photos on a multitude of design issues. His initial claim to fame was that he was interviewed by Ken Myers on Mars Hill Audio Journal, volume 90, which also features Mike Schutt talking about Redeeming Law.  Mark was also a guest on Episode 46 of Cross & Gavel, the most downloaded episode in the podcast's history. More recently, he joined Mike to discuss the "New Moralism" in Episode 70.  Cross and Gavel is a project of Regent University School of Law and Christian Legal Society. We value your comments. And if you enjoy the show, please rate us on iTunes.  

Mark Bertrand says that the world he "had been led to fear growing up in the Church is not actually the world we live in." It turns out that the moral relativism that we feared would turn the world to anarchy and chaos never materialized. Much of what we feared actually came to pass, just not in the way we thought it would. The new world has turned out to be a world that loves "the social gospel, but without the gospel," to paraphrase Joseph Bottum.  Mark talks with host Mike Schutt about this strange turn of events. We now live in the midst of "an irreligious culture" that still "behaves in fundamentally religious ways." As Mark says, "The moralist of today is the irreligious offspring of the mainline Protestants who dominated the society of yesteryear." How did we get here, and what are thoughtful Christians to make of this state of affairs? It seems the best way to respond to the New Moralism is likely not to return to the Old Moralism. But what role does the Church have to play in all of this?   J. Mark Bertrand is a novelist and pastor living in South Dakota. His crime noir works are Back on Murder, Pattern of Wounds, and Nothing to Hide. His book [Re]Thinking Worldview:Learning to Think, Live, and Speak in this World (Crossway 2007) is a great primer on Christian thought and action, and he serves on the faculty of Worldview Academy. He blogs at the world-renowned Bible Design Blog, sharing thoughts and photos on a multitude of design issues. His initial claim to fame was that he was interviewed by Ken Myers on Mars Hill Audio Journal, volume 90, which also features Mike Schutt talking about Redeeming Law.  Mark was also a guest on Episode 46 of Cross & Gavel, the most downloaded episode in the podcast's history.  Cross and Gavel is a project of Regent University School of Law and Christian Legal Society. We value your comments. And if you enjoy the show, please rate us on iTunes. 

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 with the truth. Truth is prior to freedom. A choice is not authentically free if it is not in accord with what is true and good. By contrast, the assumption in the liberal idea of freedom as assumed by the Constitution and defended by the state is that freedom is prior to truth. One of the consequences of Craycraft’s argument — which is similar to arguments made by many other constitutional lawyers, philosophers, and theologians — is that the actions of the government in recent years that are perceived as an erosion of religious freedom are in fact the fulfillment of latent assumptions underlying our Constitutional order. In this fifth feature of our series on political theology, Kenneth Craycraft, Jr. contrasts the assumptions about religious liberty held by Locke, Jefferson, and others with a view maintained by many Christian theologians and philosophers. This feature is hosted by Ken Myers, producer of the MARS HILL AUDIO Journal. For more information, visit our website at marshillaudio.org.  

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, significant to us only insofar as we can act upon it and manipulate it to our advantage. In his article, Hanby argues that this is a deeply technological way of viewing the world that ultimately offers little guidance for political order. In this fourth feature of our series on political theology, Michael Hanby discusses what he means when he says that liberalism is fundamentally technological in its assumptions. This feature is hosted by Ken Myers, producer of the MARS HILL AUDIO Journal. For more information, visit our website at marshillaudio.org.  

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 our political possibilities offers Christians “a rare opportunity to take stock and ask some basic questions about our polity.” He proceeds to list a dozen or so questions we should be asking far beyond who to vote for in November: “Are gay marriage and legalized abortion deviations from American values, or expressions of them? Can we disentangle the two strains of liberalism? Can we defend free markets without endorsing free love? What does ‘freedom’ mean? . . . Can politics be humane without recognizing that human beings are souls? Are campaigning and voting the be-all and end-all of Christian political action, or are we better off diverting some of those dollars and hours to less flashy projects that have the potential to leaven political culture over the long haul?” This feature is hosted by Ken Myers, producer of the MARS HILL AUDIO Journal. For more information, visit our website at marshillaudio.org.  

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 theology, moral philosopher Oliver O’Donovan (The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology) discusses the Church’s historic belief that governments are an expression of God’s rule, that the reality of the kingdom of God is a necessary point of reference if we are to understand politics correctly. This feature is hosted by Ken Myers, producer of the MARS HILL AUDIO Journal. For more information, visit our website at marshillaudio.org.

Does it matter how we "experience" the the Bible? Do we encounter it as a reference work, in which we look up stuff, or as a text in which to immerse ourselves? C&G guest Mark Bertrand believes that these are important questions. Bertrand says that the Bible involves one of the most important-- and most challenging-- design projects in history. Design decisions create or remove barriers to entering into the text, and often traditional design choices actually hinder our reading and interpretation. These are significant  issues, to say the least. Join Mark and host Mike Schutt as they discuss Bible design and its implications, and you'll find out, among other things, whether St. Paul will be offended if we remove the verse numbers from our Bibles, whether Jesus actually spoke only in red, and whether you are more holy if you read the Bible on see-through pages. J. Mark Bertrand is a novelist living in South Dakota. His crime noir works are Back on Murder, Pattern of Wounds, and Nothing to Hide. His book [Re]Thinking Worldview is a great primer on Christian thought and action, and he serves on the faculty of Worldview Academy. He blogs at the world-renowned Bible Design Blog, sharing thoughts and photos on a multitude of design issues. His initial claim to fame was that he was interviewed by Ken Myers on Mars Hill Audio Journal, volume 90, which also features Mike Schutt talking about Redeeming Law.  Mike Schutt is host of Cross & Gavel Audio, a project of the Christian Legal Society and Trinity Law School. 

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 with North America as part of a divine plan to spread republican civilization. In 1846 the overwhelmingly Protestant United States went to war against Mexico, a country that barred all religions save Roman Catholicism. Fighting Mexico forced Americans to negotiate in new ways the deep interconnectedness among race, religion, and republicanism. This process revealed the universality of a peculiarly American anti-Catholicism that heretofore most Americans had unreflectively relegated to an evangelical Protestant subculture. This unifying discourse, which was most fully developed and popularized by Lyman Beecher and thus in this book is called the ‘Beecherite Synthesis,’ transcended section, religious denomination, and political affiliation. It proved to be the most important means of extracting transcendent meaning from the experience of the war.” This issue of AUDITION features a portion on an interview with John Pinheiro, the full version of which will be heard in a future edition of the MARS HILL AUDIO Journal.

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 mode of preaching in the case of music. The problem is, of course, particularly when you get to the graphic arts, is that you have to be concrete, and in being concrete, you’re always saying both more and less than what the original message is.” This issue of Audition features an excerpt from that interview, to be featured on a forthcoming volume of the MARS HILL AUDIO Journal.

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.

Adam S. McHugh is an author, ordained Presbyterian minister, spiritual director, chaplain, speaker, and retreat leader. He is the author of Introverts in the Church: Finding Our Place in an Extroverted Culture (InterVarsity Press, 2009).
Adam has a wide variety of ministry experience, including stints at Trinity United Presbyterian Church in Santa Ana, CA, and Irvine Presbyterian Church in Irvine, CA. He served for 3 years on the staff of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship at the Claremont Colleges, as well as for 2 years as a hospice chaplain with Vitas Hospice in Covina, CA. Adam received his spiritual direction certification through the Spirituality Center of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.
Adam has been published in The Christian Century, The Washington Post, RELEVANT Magazine, Jesus Creed, Ministry Today, Patheos, and the Ooze, and has been featured in USA Today, Psychology Today, and the Huffington Post. He has been a guest on Mars Hill Audio Journal, InterFaith Voices, and Moody Prime Time America, among many other programs.
Hailing originally from Seattle, Adam has a B.A. from Claremont McKenna College and a Masters of Divinity and Masters of Theology in New Testament from Princeton Theological Seminary

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 Berry. Berry's article, "Faustian Economics: Hell Hath No Limits," identifies the destructive (yet perennially attractive) Gnostic tendency to assume that limits are bad and always in need of breaking, a tendency implicated in many forms of cultural disorder.Finally, Myers previews a new audiobook published by MARS HILL AUDIO, called The Passionate Intellect: Incarnational Humanism and the Future of University Education, by Norman Klassen and Jens Zimmermann.[NOTE: To save this podcast as an MP3 file, right-click or (for Mac users) Control-click on the link below and select the saving option your browser offers.]

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 return to the US, he began to exhibit his paintings in New York City, while continuing to show in Tokyo, and was honored in 1992 as the youngest artist ever to have had a piece acquired by Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo." In this Audition interview, Fujimura talks about the intertwining of his life, his painting, and his faith. Fujimura is also a guest on volume 90 of the MARS HILL AUDIO Journal, an interview in which he talks about the importance of reading as a way of cultivating engagement with the world.Also featured on this podcast is Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. Gioia discusses the NEA Report To Read or Not To Read, which was released last year and which is the subject of in-depth discussion on the latest issue of the MARS HILL AUDIO Journal.

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 characters but a different story line. This narrative device allows Pullman a polemical platform to offer opinions about history as we know it without coming out and stating his convictions starkly.In 2000, MARS HILL AUDIO's Ken Myers talked with literary critic Alan Jacobs about Pullman’s trilogy and the ideas it advances. In that interview, Jacobs explained exactly how Pullman pursues his project of undermining Christian belief, as well as some of the other disturbing tendencies of these creative books. Originally presented on the MARS HILL AUDIO Journal, a longer version of that interview is offered in this issue of Audition.[NOTE: To save this podcast as an MP3 file, right-click or (for Mac users) Control-click on the link below and select the saving option your browser offers.]

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-centuury thinkers saw modern business corporations as proponents of a more communal shape to public life. Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn (Syracuse University) raises some probing questions about how television shapes moral understanding in children. Christopher Shannon (Christendom College) compares how medical institutions interpret the meaning of suffering with the Christian tradition's interpretation (aided by the writing of Ivan Illich).Each of these guests has been featured on a past issue of the MARS HILL AUDIO Journal; when heard together, the resonance implied among their diverse concerns become more evident.

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 Audition.A separate portion of this interview was featured on Volume 84 of the MARS HILL AUDIO Journal, which is available for purchase in an MP3 download edition.Other guests on the Journal who have addressed the issue of secularization include Steve Bruce, Zygmunt Bauman, Edward Norman, and Harry Blamires.

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: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis) details how C. S. Lewis was more open-minded than his Victorian atheistic teachers, and how that open-mindedness left room for Lewis to become a Christian (from the MARS HILL AUDIO Journal, volume 77)Thanks for listening!

Audition is the new podcast produced by MARS HILL AUDIO. Hosted by Ken Myers, this first issue includes an exclusive interview with theologian and bioethicist Nigel Cameron on how bioethical issues are discussed in public debate. It also features excerpts from interviews that can be heard on current and future issues of the MARS HILL AUDIO Journal. Guests and topics include: • Cultural historian Stephen McKnight on the religious beliefs of Sir Francis Bacon • Biologist Tim Morris on why Creation and Redemption have to be seen as part of the same story • Music historian Calvin Stapert on how Mozart's music conveys a sense of the goodness of Creation • Orthodox theologian and master gardener Vigen Guroian on how the senses convey the transcendent • Humanities professor Paul Valliere on why Orthodox thought on politics differs from that in the Western churches • Law professor Russell Hittinger on the origins of the idea of "society" in Catholic social thought • Historian Mark Noll on how Protestants flourished in America by not asking some important questions • Journalist Stephen Miller on his book, Conversation: A History of a Declining Art. New issues of Audition will be produced at the end of every month, and will contain material from the MARS HILL AUDIO archives, from forthcoming products, and unique interviews on timely cultural issues. Thanks for listening!