Guests on Volume 70: W. Wesley McDonald, on the significance of Russell Kirk's themes of the "permanent things" and "the moral imagination"; C. Ben Mitchell, on law, wisdom, and the possibilities of pastoral guidance on bioethical decisions, and on why and how the Church should be more welcoming toward the elderly; Carl Elliott, on the medical industry's move from healing to enhancing self-esteem and idenity formation; Richard Weikart, on the rise of "evolutionary ethics," the embrace toward ethical relativism, and the slide toward eugenics; Christine Rosen, on how and why early 20th century American religious leaders encouraged eugenics in the name of moral progress; and Dana Gioia, on the decline in literary reading in America and on the cultural loss it signifies.
Guests on Volume 71: Peter Augustine Lawler, on Luther, Locke, liberty, and the American Founding Fathers; David Koyzis, on the modern denial of objective meaning and the exaltation of individual will; Roger Lundin, on the incarnational vision of Czeslaw Milosz, and on his poetry of exile and modern boundlessness; Craig Gay, on how the nature of money affects our sense of attributing value to things; Steven Rhoads, on Taking Sex Differences Seriously(and why it's hard to do so); and R. Larry Todd, on the life and music of Felix Mendelssohn.
Guests on Volume 72: John Polkinghorne, on lessons for theology learned from the inductive nature of the work of science; Francesca Aran Murphy, on the efforts of 20th-century Catholic and French philosopher Étienne Gilson to reconcile faith and reason; James Hitchcock, on the history of the Supreme Court's decisions regarding religious practice and liberty; Wilfred McClay, on Nathaniel Hawthorne's vision of the intractability of human failings and the possibilities of the American experiment, and on the theme of place and communal obligation in Nathaniel Hawthorne's writing; Philip McFarland, on how Hawthorne's sensitivity to the darker side of human nature makes him perennially instructive; and David Hackett Fischer, on the history of how Americans have understood and symbolized freedom and liberty.
Guests on Volume 73: Richard John Neuhaus et al., on the meaning and value of human life, the vocation of medicine, the logic of autonomous individualism, and the temptation of suicide and euthanasia; Patrick Carey, on the perceptive (and peregrinating) thought of Orestes Brownson; John W. O'Malley, on the prophetic, academic, humanistic, and artistic vectors of Western culture; Patricia Owen, on what makes good children's books and on how the Newbery Medal winners have changed over time; Susan Srigley, on the sacramental and incarnational fiction of Flannery O'Connor; and Ralph C. Wood, on Flannery O'Connor as "hill-billy Thomist" and sympathizer with backwoods religion.
Guests on Volume 74: Russell Moore, on the struggles at Baylor University, "soul competency," and the Baptist culture of autonomy; W. Bradford Wilcox, on the characteristics of "soft patriarchy" in evangelical families; Joseph E. Davis, on sexual abuse, how it is explained, and how a sense of identity is thereby formed; Barrett Fisher, on the remarkable achievement of film producer Ismail Merchant; Jeanne Murray Walker & Darryl Tippens, on overcoming the neglect of literature that highlights the spiritual dimension of human experience; and Paul Walker, on the life and music of English organist and composer Thomas Tallis, 1505-1585.