Psychiatry & the Spirit of the Age
Dr. Paul McHugh, who teaches psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, talks about the ways in which therapists allow themselves to be highjacked by trendy ideas, and leave behind the disciplines of their science.

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The Public Poetry of W. H. Auden
Literary critic Alan Jacobs talks about how W. H. Auden returned to the Church after recognizing that liberal humanism had no answers to the problem of human evil. He also discusses the social themes in Auden's poetry, which avoided utopianism and apocalypticism.

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Church, Community, & History
Robert Wuthnow of Princeton University discusses his book Sharing the Journey. He highlights the advantages and dangers of the small-group movement. Then Richard Lints, professor at Gordon-Conwell Seminary, discusses his book The Fabric of Theology, and the need for a return to an understanding of the importance of theology.

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Edge of Life, Edge of Death
Richard Doerflinger recounts the deliberations of the Human Embryo Research Panel, appointed by the National Institutes of Health. On side two, Richard John Neuhaus, editor of First Things magazine, talks about the legitimization of suicide and euthanasia in a society bankrupt of moral and political coherence.

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On Heroes & Skeptics
On side one, Richard Keyes, of the Massachusetts L’Abri Fellowship, discusses his book about the theme of the heroic in Christianity, True Heroism in a World of Celebrity Counterfeits. On side two, Gene Edward Veith, Jr. investigates postmodernism and its hold on both society and the Church.

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The Quest for the Historical Jung
Scholar Richard Noll discusses his book, The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement, in which he uncovers disturbing information about Carl Gustav Jung and Jungian analysis. Noll highlights the decidedly pagan and occult influences that mark Jung’s thought and work, influences that practitioners and other scholars have generally overlooked or ignored.

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Decadent Immortals: Alan Jacobs on Anne Rice
Literary critic Alan Jacobs muses on the popularity of Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles. Unlike traditional horror stories that portray vampires as blood-sucking fiends, Rice’s books extol the power and freedom that the immortals enjoy. Jacobs explores the moral and literary consequences of this unabashed celebration of decadence.

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Bread & the Hungry Soul
Leon Kass, physician, biologist, and professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago, discusses his book The Hungry Soul, in which he explores how the activity of eating provides clues for understanding human nature and helps guide morality and communal life. Then Brother Peter Reinhart talks about the art of breadmaking as a metaphor for spiritual life.

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The Supreme Court and Abortion
Russell Hittinger, associate professor of theology at Catholic University, talks about the evolution of the Supreme Court’s reasoning about abortion, privacy, and liberty, culminating in the extraordinary views of Planned Parenthood v. Casey.

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The Word Made Scarce
Dr. Barry Sanders (A Is for Ox) chronicles the development of literacy as a cultural force in human history, and explains how it is that, through literacy, we learn to experience regret, guilt, and self-consciousness. He is concerned that television and computer-assisted communication will redefine human experience in dramatic ways.

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Self, Society, & the Diagnosis of Addiction
Sociologist John Steadman Rice maintains that the concept of codependency is rooted in the tenets of “liberation psychotherapy,” a way of thinking about the self that sees all psychological problems as a function of the restrictions placed on individuals by social institutions, especially by the family. Rice asks what kind of society will result if a critical mass of people are converted to an asocial existence.

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Youth Culture & the Church
Mardi Keyes, from the Southborough, Massachusetts branch of L’Abri Fellowship, explains how modern assumptions about the nature of adolescence differ from biblical understanding of human development. She also describes ways in which intergenerational fellowship within the Church can deter many adolescent crises. Then pastor Mark DeVries describes the ideas in his book Family Based Youth Ministry.

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Life Work: On the Christian Idea of Calling
Paul Marshall, author of A Kind of Life Imposed on Man, discusses how society and the Church have understood work throughout history, and what positive ramifications we might expect to see if Christians began to understand their life at work as part of their life in Christ. On side two Os Guinness, author of The Call, explains how vocation and identity have lost their theological moorings among Christians.
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Till We Have Faces and the Meaning of Myth
C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces is, in his own words, “a myth retold.” Literary critic Thomas Howard explains that Lewis chose myth as the form through which to wrestle with certain profound ideas and mysteries, for the mythical way of seeing the world is fundamentally opposed to the tenets of modernism for which Lewis had such unrelenting criticism. 50 minutes
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Not by Accident: The Improbability of Life Itself
In 1953, a graduate student at the University of Chicago produced experimental support for the idea that life could have arisen by chance when he combined methane, ammonia, hydrogen, and an electrical spark. The soon-to-be renowned Stanley Miller and his colleagues in science claimed that the resulting amino acids were evidence that life possibly could be derived from non-life. This boast added tremendous momentum to the assertions that there is no God and that, indeed, there exists no objective value whatsoever. In Not By Accident: The Improbability of Life Itself, Dean Overman discusses the inadequacy of historic and current scientific understandings of the origin of life. Author of A Case Against Accident and Self-Organization, Overman delivers a powerful critique from within the scientific tradition. Examining the mathematical impossibility of accident, as well as the problems of complexity inherent in self-organization theory, Overman clears the way for a creator possessing “intelligence with power.”

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The American Way Toward Marriage
Barbara Dafoe Whitehead discusses the rising age of first marriage, the prevalence of premarital cohabitation, and other key elements of modern courtship. Whitehead argues that the new mating system has little to do with the goal of marriage and favors men over women. She suggests ways in which harmful trends in American courtship may be tempered or reversed.

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Maker of Middle-Earth
While it is not a story set in the twentieth century, Tom Shippey (author of J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century) claims that Lord of the Rings is very much a work of the twentieth century; the momentum of evil sweeps characters into action before they understand the events in which they are involved. Joseph Pearce (author of Tolkien: Man and Myth) defends the Lord of the Rings fantasy genre against those who would claim that realistic fiction is a better vessel for truth; because mythology is stripped of the factual, he explains, it can deal with truth unencumbered and therefore convey its moral more directly. Literary critic Ralph Wood explains why he has been drawn to J.R.R. Tolkien's moral Middle-Earth since his first reading of Lord of the Rings in the 1960s. It is a world ordered by heroism, friendship, loyalty, and hope. These ties alone, he states, enable the hobbits to complete their quest and go where no one else can. 86 minutes

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Human Life, Human Dignity
Modern people tend to ignore questions about the nature and purpose of things while learning to control them more efficiently. But as science and technology offer us the ability to fundamentally transform human nature, we can no longer avoid addressing metaphysical questions. The crisis of our time, many thinkers agree, is one concerning the definition of human nature. In “Human Life, Human Dignity,” Leon R. Kass outlines what is at stake and sets forth a framework for indispensable discussions surrounding biotechnologies. Kass stresses that we must approach the discussion with reverence and awe and that a major component of the discussion should be the notion of human dignity. Kass recommends that we turn first not to the findings of science and technology, but to the canon of “residual wisdom” in the East and West—found in literary, philosophical, and religious traditions—that vividly depicts human nature in its glories and tragedies.

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The Crisis of Islam and the Crisis of the West
Since the events of September 11, 2001, many people in the West have been pursuing crash courses in understanding Islamic belief and history. They have realized the wisdom of acquiring some historical perspective on what appears to be a clash of civilizations. In “The Crisis of Islam and the Crisis of the West,” Bernard Lewis, a Western historian of the Middle East whose work is recognized around the world, helps provide that essential perspective.

Shortly after 9/11, a book written by Dr, Lewis before the horrible events of that day was published. It was called What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response. The question in the title is asked from the point of view of the Islamic world, and refers not simply to recent events, but to a centuries-long pattern of frustration and disappointment. As Lewis writes in the introduction, “For many centuries the world of Islam was in the forefront of human civilization and achievement.” But the defeat of the Ottoman Turks in the siege of Vienna in 1683 began a period of decline in world influence, and a rise in the influence of Western ideas and habits in the region once totally ruled by the laws of Islam.

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Texts, Sex, and Sanctity: Robert Gagnon on Homosexuality and the Bible
There are few issues within the church more potent than that of homosexuality. Barbara Wheeler, President of Auburn Theological Seminary in New York, has noted that "What we in the churches teach about homosexuality affects the lives of many more people than our own members." In recent years, the debate on this issue has centered on disagreements over the exact nature of biblical teaching concerning sexuality. Dr. Robert Gagnon, Associate Professor of New Testament Pittsburgh Theological Seminary is one of the world's foremost experts on the subject and the author of the critically acclaimed text, The Bible and Homosexual Practice. In this Conversation, Dr. Gagnon talks with Ken Myers about the cultural trends and theological arguments that have shaped the dispute over the past few decades, in the hope of clarifying the answers to many of these complex questions. 72 minutes.
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Science and Theology from the Bottom Up: Sir John Polkinghorne on Enriching the Dialogue
In 1979, a much-respected physicist named John Polkinghorne resigned from his position at Cambridge. Just five years earlier he had been honored for his remarkable achievements in mathematical physics (he had been part of the team that discovered the quark) by being appointed a Fellow of the Royal Society. Polkinghorne was departing the environs of this profound and mysterious reflection on the nature of reality for a vocation no less intellectually and personally challenging: the study of theology and service as an Anglican priest.

One of the benefits to the public of Polkinghorne’s twin interests in science and theology has been the remarkable series of books he has written since 1983, beginning with The Way the World Is, continuing with the publication of his 1993 Gifford Lectures (published as The Faith of a Physicist: Reflections of a Bottom-Up Thinker) and most recently Science and the Trinity: The Christian Encounter with Reality (Yale). Sir John Polkinghorne talks about the main themes of this book in Science and Theology from the Bottom Up.

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Hillbilly Thomist: Flannery O'Connor & the Truth of Things
In this Conversation, Ken Myers talks with Susan Srigley about how O’Connor’s perception of reality suffuses her fiction in ways that fit the views of how art works developed by Thomas Aquinas, views often summarized as “sacramental” or “incarnational.” And Ralph Wood discusses O’Connor’s acceptance of the limits placed in our lives by Providence, how limits may be a source of wisdom rather than frustration.
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Church, State, and Society in Catholic Social Teaching
The history of the development in 19th century Catholic social thought of the idea of society as a spiritual and cultural reality is one of the themes in this MARS HILL AUDIO Conversation with Dr. Russell Hittinger. In addition to the contribution of Pope Leo XIII and the revival of Thomistic thought to Catholic social thought, Hittinger also discusses the centrality of our ideas about marriage to our thinking about society, the limits of the idea of social contract, the effect of an increasing proportion of Muslims on European social thought, and how modern democracies have abandoned the project of understanding public life in moral terms. 60 minutes.
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Alan Jacobs on The Narnian
In this Conversation with Ken Myers, Alan Jacobs, author of The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis, discusses a number of Lewis's writings, including The Great Divorce, The Abolition of Man, The Magician's Nephew, That Hideous Strength, and The Pilgrim's Regress. The theme that dominates the discussion is Lewis's view of the imagination, and his deep conviction that the shaping of the conscience requires the training of the imagination. 53 minutes.
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The Heav'ns and All the Powers Therein: The Medieval Cosmos and the World of Narnia
For decades, readers and scholars have wondered whether there was a Master Plan for the structure of the seven books in C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia. In his book Planet Narnia, Michael Ward makes a compelling case that the qualities attributed to the seven planets in the cosmology of antiquity and the Middle Ages are embodied in the seven books about Narnia. In this Conversation with Ken Myers, Ward explains why Lewis thought the pre-Copernican view of the cosmos can still be of spiritual benefit; that view may not be true (in the sense of factual), but its beauty reveals deeper truths. 67 minutes.
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Dancing Lessons: Eugene Peterson on Theology and the Rhythms of Life
In his 2005 book, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, pastor/theologian Eugene Peterson argued that believers should attend to the way God works in creation, history, and community. Such attention prevents theology from being mere abstraction and spirituality from becoming vague and gnostic. In this Conversation, Peterson discusses the necessity of taking time in worship; the benefits and liabilities of small groups; the delightful gifts of language; and the centrality of "fear of the Lord" in describing our response to God's initiative in salvation. 73 minutes.
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