fbpx
Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Christianity And Practice

Happily, the new episode of Mars Hill Audio Journal has just been released, giving me time to download it onto my iPhone for post-Isaac, electricity-free listening. Here’s what’s on it: The magic word for this issue is PRACTICES. The new issue of the Journal is relentlessly practical. Each of the guests has thoughtfully addressed the way our embodied selves engage […]

Happily, the new episode of Mars Hill Audio Journal has just been released, giving me time to download it onto my iPhone for post-Isaac, electricity-free listening. Here’s what’s on it:

The magic word for this issue is PRACTICES.

The new issue of the Journal is relentlessly practical. Each of the guests has thoughtfully addressed the way our embodied selves engage creation and culture. They are each interested in the interaction of practices, affections, and beliefs.

Science, technology, community, food and farming, place, and teaching: these are the springboard subjects that launch some compelling conversations, conversations heard on the Journal and forthcoming conversations with your friends and colleagues.

Steven Shapin, on some of the myths about how scientists do their work, about the kind of knowledge science produces, and about the surprising fact that there is no such thing as “the scientific method”

Arthur Boers, on how technologies distract us from the human practices that are most significant, and how the work of philosopher Albert Borgmann illuminates the need for the recovery of “focal practices” in our lives

Christine Pohl on how community doesn’t just happen because we want it to, how gratitude, truth-telling, promise-keeping, and hospitality sustain the connectedness we need, and how modern culture creates a destructive sense of entitlement

Norman Wirzba, on how the realities of farming and food reveal essential aspects of God’s nature, and how wonderful it is that Creation tastes so good

Craig Bartholomew, on why the elusive idea of place requires more attention than Christians have typically given it, and why our sense of displacement is a serious cultural crisis

David I. Smith, on how “teaching Christianly” requires attention to the form of classroom practices and not just to the content of the syllabus

Again, I hate to sound like a shill, but I keep wanting to talk about this because MHAJ is the most exciting and intellectually engaging place I know of where cultural conservatives are talking about these foundational issues. Host Ken Myers definitely has a point of view, but his program is not ideological.  While the conversation is most relevant to tradition-minded Christians (Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox), thoughtful liberals of the kind who read this blog may find Myers’s interviews full of insights that speak to their own concerns. Read more about it and subscribe here. 

Advertisement

Comments

Want to join the conversation?

Subscribe for as little as $5/mo to start commenting on Rod’s blog.

Join Now