The current Friday Feature
duration 24:54
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Latest wisdom from Sound Thinking
- Not-so-light comedy
Thomas Hibbs on the casual nihilism in Woody Allen’s films - Economics rightly understood
Herman E. Daly on how modern economics has little to do with oikonomia - Love isn’t a technique
Christian Smith on how we become more fully human when we enhance the personhood of other - Making melody to the Lord with all your heart
Christopher Page on the power of music to evoke ritual (and community) - Economics is about right relationships
John C. Médaille. on the situatedness of economics in human life
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Related Features
Countering alienation
Love precedes reason
The formation of affections
We become what we behold
Meet one of our Partners
The Valor Institute for Studies in Person and Community exists to promote a capacious vision of the human person flourishing in community. Its work is a creative response to the defining crises of our time — spiritual and intellectual pathologies rooted in impoverished and reductive understandings of what it means to be human, of what constitutes authentic community, and of our proper relationship to the created world. The work of the Valor Institute is a concrete manifestation of John Paul II’s affirmation of the “inviolable mystery and dignity of the human person.”
Through academic retreats, symposia, and public lectures, the Valor Institute seeks to deepen understanding of the human person as a unity of body and soul, capable of truth, love, and moral transformation — opposed to ideologies that see human beings as consumers, workers, or biological machines. Further, the Valor Institute endeavors to promote a vision for authentic community rooted in a broad vision of the common good and shared loves — beyond a view of transactional community that exists only to serve individual preference and desire. Finally, the Valor Institute cultivates a metaphysics of gift, which approaches all of creation first with wonder and gratitude — against the technological ontology that sees the material world as something merely to be used. In the words of Eric Voegelin, “Philosophy springs from the love of being; it is man’s loving endeavor to perceive the order of being and attune himself to it.”
On this page, you can browse a listing of lectures that the Valor Institute has made available as Features for Mars Hill Audio members.
Click here to see news from all our Partners
A recent Bonus Feature
In this October 2022 lecture, Dr. Jens Zimmermann reflects on why a defense of personhood is a crucial task for the future of humanity. A radical change in the understanding of anthropology is already becoming mainstream, he says, in which human life is being redefined in technological-computational terms. It is becoming less strange to many that human nature and relations are increasingly defined by and subservient to technology. Zimmermann illustrates examples of this reductionism; explores the origins, teachings, and effects of this vision of humanity; and argues for a recovery of a robust personhood that can resist this redefinition.
The 18 most recent Conversations and Features we’ve released are described here.
If you’re not yet a member, you can get a free Visitor’s Pass and listen to hours of free audio. Details are here.
Our most recent Journal
Guests on Volume 168
- BRIAN BROCK, author of Some New World: Myths of Supernatural Belief in a Secular Age, on science as a human endeavor
- FR. LUKE BELL, author of author of Truth in Person, on the relational nature of knowing truth
- PETER HARRISON, author of Some New World: Myths of Supernatural Belief in a Secular Age, on science as a human endeavor
- KATHERINE CALLOWAY, contributor to Art Seeking Understanding, on Francis Bacon, George Herbert, and poetic knowledge
- BRENT STRAWN, contributor to Art Seeking Understanding, on poetry as Divine discourse in the Old Testament
- PETROC WILLEY, author of Light from Alexandria: Recovering a Vision for Christian Paideia for Education & Formation, on spiritual formation in the early Alexandrine church