Guests on Volume 95: Stewart Davenport, on how nineteenth-century Christians separated the moral and practical aspects of economic life; William T. Cavanaugh, on how theology and economics are necessarily intertwined and on how a larger understanding of the meaning of "freedom" would change our economic actions; J. Matthew Bonzo & Michael R. Stevens, on Wendell Berry's concern for the dislocating and fragmenting forces in modern life; Craig Gay, on how language—specifically the spoken word—is central to our human experience; Eugene Peterson, on how Jesus' use of ambiguous language encouraged active spiritual engagement; and Barry Hankins, on how the late Francis Schaeffer moved from being a defensive fundamentalist to a prophet of cultural engagement.
Guests on Volume 96: David A. Smith, on the beginnings of the National Endowment for the Arts and the capacity of the arts in a democracy for combatting atomistic individualism; Kiku Adatto, on how images, words, and ideas interact in a visually saturated culture and on how the image of a person's face in a photograph has the capacity for intimate representation of inner personhood; Elvin T. Lim, on how presidential speeches have been dumbed down for decades and why presidents like it; David Naugle, on the deeper meaning of happiness, the disordering effects of sin, and the reordering of love made possible in our redemption; Richard Stivers, on the technologizing of all of life; and John Betz, on the critique of the Enlightenment offered by Johann Georg Hamann (1730-1788), and why it still matters to us.
Guests on Volume 97: Mark Noll, on how Christian higher education is aided by a commitment to something like "Christendom," a commitment to the assumption that the Gospel has consequences for all of life and all of social experience; Stanley Fish, on how university professors should refrain from bringing their own political, philosophical, and religious commitments into the classroom; James Peters, on how Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Pascal, and many others had an understanding of the nature and purpose of reason quite different from the common modern understanding; Scott Moore, on cultivating an understanding of politics that goes beyond mere statecraft, and on the limits of the notion of "rights"; and Makoto Fujimura, on how his work as a painter is enriched by writing, why artists need to cultivate an attentiveness to many things, and how visual language expresses experience.
Guests on Volume 98: Stanley Hauerwas, on the public witness of Fr. Richard John Neuhaus and on why Neuhaus abandoned his 1960s radicalism to become a leading "theoconservative"; Clarke Forsythe, on why prudence is a lost political virtue and on why and how the pro-life movement needs to broaden its educational efforts; Gilbert Meilaender, on the necessity of a concept of human dignity and on why Americans no longer seem able to defend it; Jeanne Murray Walker, on how her students learn to understand poetry and on how metaphors are at the heart of poetic expression; Roger Lundin, on how the disenchantment of the world led to new forms of doubt and self-expression; and David Bentley Hart, on the feeble and confused arguments of the recent crop of outspoken atheists and on how a misunderstanding of the nature of freedom is at the heart of their revulsion at religion.
Guests on Volume 99: Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, on how the abuse of language creates distrust in the power of words and on how we can be better stewards of the gift of language; Paul A. Rahe, on the heresy of progressivism, which abandons vital convictions about human nature and political order and invites the advent of "soft despotism"; James L. Nolan, Jr., on how European countries have adopted the American model of "problem-solving courts" (and what they also get in the bargain); Andrew J. Cherlin, on why the twin American commitments to marriage and to expressive individualism hurt families; Dale Kuehne, on the faulty assumption that intimate relationships demand sexual involvement, and on how the essentially relational nature of the Gospel is ignored; and Alison Milbank on how the fantasy writings of G. K. Chesterton and J. R. R. Tolkien are intended to reconnect readers with reality.
