I stumbled upon an interesting discussion with Ken Myers, creator and host of the Mars Hill Audio Journal. The Journal is a bi-monthly audio magazine of sorts. It originally started in 1993 as the ‘Mars Hill Tapes’, as it was originally distributed via the mail on cassette tape. I was among the early subscribers, and subscribed for many years (including a format move from cassette to CD), then let my subscription lapse for several years. I’ve since resubscribed (now in MP3 format), and eventually went back and picked up the issues I’d missed (though I’ll confess I’m still woefully behind in my listening).

The Journal was originally created as a thoughtful and intellectually rigorous resource to help Christians better understand our cultural moment, and encourage thinking about how to best address ‘culture’. Perhaps the idea behind the tapes can best be articulated by Ken Myers himself from the pilot issue:

Christian engagement with modern culture in recent years has tended to take almost exclusively political forms. Evangelical Christians may recognize that laws and policies are shaped by beliefs and convictions, but they’ve effectively ignored the fact that such beliefs and convictions are nurtured by cultural forces – by the rhythms and resonances of our prose and poetry, by our music and dance forms, by painting, architecture, sculpture, and films. Beliefs and convictions are closely related to imagination, and so politics in a society is an expression of its culture.

Evangelical Christians are heirs to a decades-long legacy which denied the significance of cultural involvement, and which only reversed itself when the culture’s decline had consequences that were too close to home – when Penthouse showed up at 7-11, or when Christians were informed that tax dollars were funding blasphemy. Conservative Christians had by and large ignored the worlds of the arts and humanities – the mainstream as well as the avant garde.

Unfortunately, those who talk most militantly about being engaged in a cultural war only seem to be able to think about political or economic strategies. There is more talk about de-funding the National Endowment for the Arts than there is about funding creative work that could be a healthy cultural force, more energy expended on boycotts of advertisers and producers of offensive media than in producing works that are rich in beauty and truth.

Many conservative Christians seem to believe that being heaven bound means that culture doesn’t matter or could be avoided. But more than 50 years ago, C. S. Lewis warned in his address ‘Learning In Wartime’ that it was impossible to live without culture. “If you attempted”, he argued, “to suspend your whole intellectual and aesthetic activity, you would only succeed in substituting a worse cultural life for a better one. You are not, in fact, going to read nothing. If you don’t read good books, you will read bad ones. If you don’t go on thinking rationally, you will think irrationally. If you reject aesthetic satisfactions, you will fall into sensual satisfactions”. Good philosophy must exist, Lewis later reasoned, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered.

In the discussion linked at the beginning of this post, Myers talks about how popular culture can affect, and indeed has affected, the Christian faith – on both the left and the right. He contrasts the idea of a Christian ‘lifestyle’, which is a collection of artifacts and modes of expression that are driven by the culture and are thus transient, with a Christian ‘way of life’, which is something received, handed down, intergenerational, rooted.

Part of Myers’ background prior to starting the Journal included several years as an editor and producer at NPR, including the initial launching of NPR’s ‘Morning Edition’ in the late 70s. So the Journal very much has an “NPR feel” in terms of the production values. Most of the time, it consists of interviews with authors of books that are more philosophically and intellectually substantial than those generally found at the average Christian book store.

Subscribers have routinely said over the years that the Journal has helped form their general education and shaped their thinking more than any university or seminary courses. I can attest that having been a subscriber for several years before going back for my masters degree, the general background provided by the Journal gave me a distinct advantage in my classes. Even if one isn’t planning on going back to school, but just enjoys firing up their brain cells once in a while, the Journal is worth checking out.

If anyone wants to borrow an issue, give me a shout.