Guests on Volume 100: Jennifer Burns, on the life and legacy of Ayn Rand, "goddess of the market" and entrenched enemy of altruism; Christian Smith, on the aimless cultural world of "emerging adulthood" and on how it makes the idea of objective moral order implausible; and Dallas Willard, on why it's important to recover the conviction that religious beliefs involve real knowledge. In honor of the five score milestone, part two of the issue features a look back at the beginnings of the Journal and a few special excerpts of conversations with those early guests, including Peter Kreeft on Lewis, Huxley, and J.F.K. after death; P. D. James, on good and evil in fiction; James Davison Hunter, on culture wars; Paul McHugh, on when psychiatry loses its way; Ted Prescott, on nudity in art and advertising; Ed Knippers, on the powerful presence of the body; Martha Bayles, on pop and perverse modernism; Dominic Aquila, on Christopher Lasch; Gilbert Meilaender, on random kindness; Neil Postman, on technology and culture; and Alan Jacobs, on being maudlin in Madison County.
Guests on Volume 101: James Davison Hunter, on how the most prominent strategies of Christian cultural engagement are based on a misunderstanding about how cultures work; Paul Spears, on why Christian scholars need to understand their disciplines in ways that depart from conventional understanding; Steven Loomis, on why education needs to attend more carefully to nonquantifiable aspects of human experience; James K. A. Smith, on how education always involves the formation of affections and how the form of Christian education should imitate patterns of formation evident in historic Christian liturgy; Thomas Long, on how funeral practices have the capacity to convey an understanding of the meaning of discipleship and death; and William T. Cavanaugh, on the distinctly modern definition of "religion" and how the conventional account of the "Wars of Religion" misrepresents the facts in the interest of consolidating state power.
Guests on Volume 102: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., on recovering the view that the just war tradition is more about the shaping of character and virtue than a checklist for political leaders; Lew Daly, on how the discussion concerning faith-based initiatives raised larger issues about the identity of social groups in American society; Adam K. Webb, on whether the traditional personal and communal virtues in premodern village life must be abandoned for poverty to be alleviated; Stratford Caldecott, on how denying the reality of beauty is linked to a denial of the coherent meaning of Creation; James Matthew Wilson, on Jacques Maritain's pilgrimage to faith and his subsequent development of a rich philosophy of beauty; and Thomas Hibbs, on the similar projects of painters Georges Rouault (1871-1958) and Makoto Fujimura (b. 1960), and how they each resisted various confusions in modern art.
Guests on Volume 103: Steven D. Smith, on how the law only makes sense in the context of certain metaphysical beliefs, and on why we aren't allowed to talk about such things in public; David Thomson, on the American Dream, acting, loneliness, the moral complicity of movie audiences, and the genius of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho; Adam McHugh, on how American culture distrusts introverts and on why their place in the Church needs to be valued; Glenn C. Arbery, on the Vanderbilt Agrarians, poetry, and the moral imagination and the shaping of virtue; Eric Miller, on Christopher Lasch's intense commitment to understand the logic of American cultural confusion; and Eric Metaxas, on how Dietrich Bonhoeffer's early experiences prepared him for his heroic defiance of the Third Reich.
Guests on Volume 104: James Le Fanu, on the mistaken assumption that modern medical science has eliminated the fittingness of a sense of mystery and wonder at the human mind and body; Garret Keizer, on how many noises in modern life reveal a state of warfare with the limitations of our embodiment; Daniel Ritchie, on how Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) and Isaac Watts (1674-1748) anticipated late twentieth-century critiques of the Enlightenment; Monica Ganas, on how the distinct vision of life embedded in "California-ism" has exerted a powerful cultural influence; Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, on how the search for faithfulness to Christ led him to the wisdom of the Benedictine Rule and a "new monasticism"; and Peter J. Leithart, on why Constantine has an unfairly bad reputation and on how his rule dealt a severe blow to paganism in the West.
