Addenda
A monthly e-mail newsletter from MARS HILL AUDIO
April 17, 2007 – Number 38
"Our first look at God is not as an abstraction—a higher power, eternal love, or
pure being—but as a creator, making the workplace that all of us continue to work in:
light to work by, the ground under our feet, the sky above us, the plants and trees
that we grow, the rhythms of the year, fish and birds and animals in the food chain."
--Eugene Peterson, Living the Resurrection:
the Risen Christ in Everyday Life (NavPress, 2006)
New on our desks
"Pearls Before Breakfast"
All of the guests on the MARS HILL AUDIO Journal contribute to a critique of contemporary culture. Historians, artists, philosophers, bioethicists, sociologists, the accumulated wisdom of all their comments indicates that, despite the persistence and gracious epiphanies of goodness and beauty and truth, contemporary culture is structurally alienated from the transcendent. A recent article in the Washington Post chronicles a manifestation of this disorder. [Read more on Pearls]
Serendipity
In a world increasingly shaped by technology, people encounter few opportunities to have the unexpected waylay them. . . . Professor Alan Jacobs (a guest on several issues of the Journal) notes and laments the lack of opportunity for serendipity in a technological society in a new essay online. [Read more on Serendipity]
Volume 84
We had a number of production problems with the publication of this issue, which means that the shipping dates for both the cassettes and CDs were delayed. Most of the CDs were shipped March 27 and the rest were shipped April 2 (the cassettes were shipped on March 20). You should have your copy by the end of April; but if May arrives and you're still looking for volume 84, please call 800.331.6407 and we'll send a replacement. We apologize for the delay!
Vegetables and Refugees
To be rooted, geographer David Sopher once scoffed, is "the property of vegetables." The French mystic and philosopher Simone Weil, by contrast, insisted that "to be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul" (see The Need for Roots). Since Americans move on average 14 times in their lifetime, many of us understandably suffer from what Florence King once dubbed "a sense of fromlessness." And globalization seems to make things even less stable, with the world being divided (according to sociologist Zygmunt Bauman) into tourists and vagabonds, the first group those wealthy enough to be at home anywhere, the second those working stiffs inhabiting places that have had all the attributes of placeness sucked out of them.
Because of our belief in the importance of place for embodied creatures in need of community, many years ago MARS HILL AUDIO produced an audio Anthology called Place, Community, and Memory. It featured readings from anthropologist Gina Bria ("A Theology of Things"), farmer and poet Wendell Berry ("The Work of Local Culture"), Nobel prize winner Ivo Andric (from his novel The Bridge on the Drina), and ethicist Gilbert Meilaender ("Creatures of Place and Time"). Until this week, this Anthology was available only on cassette, but it's now one of the growing number of audio programs we're pleased to offer as an MP3 download (for just $5). Look here for more information.
The irony of offering a product on the importance of place which will most likely be experienced while driving has not escaped us, but we hope it will help you make your way home happily, and cherish your own place that much more.
Manners and Civilization
"The idea that people can behave naturally, without resorting to an artificial code tacitly agreed upon by their society, is as silly as the idea that they can communicate by a spoken language without commonly accepted semantic and grammatical rules." So observed Judith Martin in a lecture given at Harvard in the mid-1980s, the text of which Mr. Don Imus would have done well to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest many years ago (it was published as Common Courtesy). Ms. Martin went on to observe that "if everyone improvises his own manners, no one will understand the meaning of anyone else's behavior, and the result will be social chaos and the end of civilization, or about what we have now." Another essay by Judith Martin, "The World's Oldest Virtue," is one of four readings included in the MARS HILL AUDIO Anthology, Manners and the Civil Society, now newly available as an MP3 download (for $5).
The other essays in this 90-minute program are by Gertrude Himmelfarb ("In Defense of the Victorians"); Deal Hudson ("The Last Outpost of American Manners"); and James Morris ("Democracy Beguiled"). Look here for more information.
Attention Bookstores
If you work in a bookstore that would be interested in stocking the CD edition of our newly released audiobook, Nigel Cameron's Are Christians Human? An Exploration of True Spirituality, please e-mail us at shelfspace@marshillaudio.org. More information about the audiobook is at http://www.marshillaudio.org/human.
In the Beginning Was the Command Line
It's still in the fantasy stage at present, but we are toying with the idea of a big project to overhaul some of our in-house computer systems, and have been exploring the possibility of assembling a team of volunteers with open source programming experience to collaborate with us. While we're not quite sure what it means, we have been instructed to look for people with Extreme Programming (XP) experience. If this intrigues you, e-mail us at webfuture@marshillaudio.org.
The Ascending Voice: An International Symposium of Sacred A Cappella Music
Pepperdine University in Malibu, California, is hosting a symposium of a cappella music June 4-7, 2007. The Ascending Voice: An International Symposium of Sacred A Cappella Music will include lectures and clinics, public performances, a recital of new hymns, and panel discussions, all on the theological, historical, and musical richness of a cappella traditions. Symposium planners are calling for paper and hymn submissions. For more information about the symposium, including details about submissions and registration, visit www.pepperdine.edu/provost/conferences/ascendingvoice/; or call (310-506-4261) or e-mail (provost@pepperdine.edu) Darryl Tippens, Pepperdine's provost.
Transforming Spaces: Virtu(e) and the Virtual
Christians in the Visual Arts (CIVA) is hosting its biennial conference June 14-17, 2007, at Messiah College in Grantham, Pennsylvania. Speakers for the event are Ken Myers, Ena Heller from the Museum of Biblical Art, and Catherine Kapikian from Wesley Seminary. For more information about the event or CIVA, call 978-867-4124, e-mail office@civa.org, or visit www.civa.org.
Subscriber Update
Volume 85 (March/April 2007) of the MARS HILL AUDIO Journal is in production. Guests include: John C. Sommerville discussing his book The Decline of the Secular University; Christopher Shannon on Conspicuous Criticism: Tradition, the Individual, and Culture in Modern American Social Thought; Matthew Dickerson on Ents, Elves, and Eriador: The Environmental Vision of J. R. R. Tolkien; and Michael G. Lawler on his essay "Marriage As Covenant in the Catholic Tradition" published in Covenant Marriage in Comparative Perspective.
Various Details, Disclaimers, Etc.
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Copyright 2007 MARS HILL AUDIO, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Published by
MARS HILL AUDIO
P.O. Box 7826
Charlottesville, Virginia 22906
Call 1.800.331.6407
Fax 1.434.990.9090