Addenda
A monthly e-mail newsletter from MARS HILL AUDIO
January 15, 2006 v Number 23
"Modern Christianity is so strongly inclined to lecture the world on the merits of justice,that we are in danger of neglecting the weightier matters of the law:our dealings with our bodies and our immediate neighbors."-- Colin Gunton, The Triune Creator: A Historical and Systematic Study
New on our desks
Aging Gracefully
Professor Leon Kass, former chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics and a guest on several volumes of the MARS HILL AUDIO Journal, has drawn the public's attention to issues of aging in recent months. In September 2005 he oversaw the publishing of the Council's report Taking Care: Ethical Caregiving in Our Aging Society; two periodicals, Commentary and The New Atlantis, took advantage of the report's appearance in order to attend to the questions an aging society faces. Commentary ran an article by Kass and Eric Cohen (editor of The New Atlantis) that relied in part on Taking Care; The New Atlantis published an excerpt of the report. [Read more about Aging Gracefully]
Roger Shattuck, 1923-2005
In December of last year, the literary scholar Roger Shattuck died at the age of 82. Shattuck was best known for his first book, written in 1958, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I. I first read this book in 1989, when I was working on All God's Children and Blue Suede Shoes: Christians and Popular Culture. Shattuck helped me see that many of the characteristic attitudes and sensibilities of popular culture were shared with the much more recondite work of epoch-defining artists of the 20th century, such as Henri Rousseau, Alfred Jarry, Erik Satie, and Guillaume Apollinaire. [Read more about Roger Shattuck]
Listen to a conversation with Roger Shattuck, from Volume 24 of the MARS HILL Tapes (scroll to the bottom of the page).
Christianity and Science in the Beginning
It is widely affirmed that Francis Bacon (1561-1626) is a pivotal figure in Western cultural history. Bacon was a champion and publicist for what became known as the "scientific method," sometimes referred to (in honor of his singular role in promoting its legitimacy) as the Baconian method. The central assertion of this new way of knowing and explaining the world was that empirical and inductive practices could lead to experimentally verified (and repeatedly verifiable) set of conclusions about how things happen. Classical forms of knowledge of the world proceeded by deducing conclusions in the abstract from an array of more fundamental propositions. [Read more about Christianity and Science in the beginning]
"The Image Culture"
In the Fall 2005 issue of The New Atlantis, Christine Rosen continues her insightful series of articles on technology and culture, especially those technologies that we might call "consumer technologies" rather than "producer technologies." She's not interested in large data-processing, communications, travel, or manufacturing systems, but in things like iPods, cell phones, video games, and online dating services. These are technologies that re-configure the way we sustain relationships and order our experience in time and space. They also affect the way we regard and use language, our habits of thinking and imagining, even our sense of self. [Read more about "The Image Culture"]
Our Website May Have Given You (and Has Give Us) Fits
We are in the process of moving our website to a different web hosting company, not least because many of you have experienced errors while attempting to place online orders or trying to read one of our web pages. To anyone who has encountered one of these annoying errors, we apologize and regret the inconvenience and irritation. Since it will still be a few weeks before we switch hosts, please note that in most cases errors can be resolved by refreshing your browser. And if you experience an error while ordering online, please call us or send an e-mail so that we may still process your order. Thank you for your patience.
Thank You for Year-End Support; and, Discounted Gift Sub Offer Extended
As usual, the end of the year was very busy for us, as we processed hundreds of gift subscriptions (and non-gift subscriptions) and year-end contributions within a brief period of time. We are grateful to all of you who have supported our work in either of these ways.
Many of you let us know that you had not received the customary Christmas renewal notice for some (or all) of the gift subscriptions you gave in the previous year. We're not sure why this happened (or rather, didn't happen) but in any case we would be happy to honor the gift rates of $30 on cassette or $42 on CD until the end of January, if you would still like to give a gift subscription at our Christmas discount. Call us at 1.800.331.6407, see www.marshillaudio.org/xmas, or send mail to the PO Box listed at the end of this message.
Ken Myers in Georgia
Early in the New Year Ken Myers will be speaking at a conference at Christ Presbyterian Church in Marietta, Georgia, on Christian discipleship, the Church, creation, and culture. "After Evangelism: The Cultural Life of Christians and Their Neighbors" is scheduled for February 24 and 25, 2006.
Myers will be giving four lectures during the course of the conference, the titles of which are: "Christ and Creation: Two Adams and a Fall"; "Creation and Redemption: Salvation and the Fulfillment of Humanity"; "Creation and Culture: Real Reality and Cultural Order"; and "Church and Culture: Discipleship and All of Life."
Registration is open to the public on a first come, first serve basis. To register, or for more information about the conference, visit www.afterevangelism.org or call (770) 956-7572.
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Copyright 2006 MARS HILL AUDIO, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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