20 Years of the Mars Hill Audio Journal

The Weekly Standard recently featured a story by Andrew Ferguson on the extraordinary work of Ken Myers, the writer, editor, and voice of the Mars Hill Audio Journal. For decades, Myers has been an exemplar of balanced and insightful cultural criticism—all the while expressing a conservative Christianity. On its way to describing the cultural plight that has fallen upon contemporary conservatism, The Weekly Standard succinctly introduces and fairly represents Myers’ work:

The Journal demonstrates how closely the interests and worries of a conservative Christian intellectual overlap those of any curious traditionalist or cultural conservative, believing or non. Myers’s own curiosity is inexhaustible. On the website’s topic index — choosing a letter at random — you’ll find under “M” segments on Mondrian (Piet) and Moore (Michael), memory and money, Mendelssohn and Marsalis, masculinity and materialism. I popped in Issue 102 the other day and heard Myers’s pleasant tenor saying, by way of preface: “Is creation meaningful, and if it is, is its meaning perceptible?” This rousing intro opened a series of ruminations and interviews with a variety of scholars and writers. A brief explanation of the split between nominalism and realism in the Middle Ages led to a discussion of Jacques Maritain’s relationship with avant garde painters and musicians in 1920s Paris, then moved through the Fibonacci sequence and the mathematical value of Bach fugues as examples of inherent order, topped off with a tribute to the paintings of Makoto Fujimura by the philosopher Thomas Hibbs. The pace is unhurried, the discussions pretty easily comprehensible. Imagine NPR if NPR were as intelligent as NPR programmers think it is.

The journal has been one of my own influences in developing our programs at Reformed Forum, and I encourage you to listen to several issues. You will be better for it.