By Emily Stimpson

Journal asks big questions about faith and culture

Host interviews authors to examine culture through Christian lens

Ken Myers may have one of the world's greatest jobs ... at least for someone who loves reading, thinking and talking about faith and culture.

As the creator, producer and host of Mars Hill Audio Journal, Myers' work centers on talking with leading Christian thinkers and cultural critics, then turning those conversations into a bimonthly program available to subscribers on CDs and MP3s.

For more than 15 years, those conversations -- on topics ranging from bioethics and architecture to technology, teenagers, Flannery O'Connor and Prozac -- have challenged Christians to question the culture in which they live. They've also challenged them to examine how modernity and postmodernity impact their understanding and practice of Christianity.

Starting small

Boasting nearly 10,000 subscribers, Mars Hill reaches at least another 10,000 through "pass-along" listening and library subscriptions. These are pretty impressive numbers considering that Myers produced the first edition in his garage.

That was in 1992. Myers, a former National Public Radio host, had wanted for more than a decade to launch a magazine that looked at contemporary culture through a Christian lens. When funding for the magazine didn't pan out, he switched his focus to an NPR-style radio program that could accomplish the same objectives. But the program was, according to Myers, "too Christian for public radio and too intellectual for Christian radio."

Then, Myers hit upon the idea of a subscription-based audio journal. He produced a pilot edition featuring interviews with friends and sent it to a few hundred people -- individuals who subscribed to a newsletter he produced. The response was overwhelmingly positive. Less than a year later, Mars Hill Audio was up and running.

Reprogrammed

Although Myers started out wanting to examine contemporary culture's hostility to Christianity, he soon realized that more than contemporary culture needed examining.

"Over time, the same cultural forces that created hostility toward Christianity in secular institutions infiltrated the Church," he explained. "I came to see that it's no longer just some enemy 'out there' we're up against. We ourselves have been reprogrammed."

Myers sees two major themes in that "reprogramming" of Christian life. The first is a kind of Gnostic dualism, what he describes as "a separation of nature and grace, of body and spirit ... a denigration and suspicion of embodiment."

The second, he said, is the 14th-century heresy of nominalism, "denying that nature has a nature, assuming that creation is just a lot of meaningless raw material that we assign meaning to instead of creation having divinely established meaning."

To unpack the practical effects of those esoteric problems, Myers turns to writers from a wide variety of academic disciplines, typically focusing his "conversation" on their latest book.

The right questions

One of Myers' most recent guests was Christopher Shannon, author of "Conspicuous Criticism: Tradition, the Individual, and Culture in Modern American Social Thought" and history professor at Christendom College.

Shannon believes the importance of Myers' work shouldn't be underestimated. He explained: "Culture and faith are inextricably bound. If you don't have cultural support, it's hard for a faith to survive. And right now, the cultural challenges for the Church are much greater than whether we see dirty movies or not. Too many people are missing the big questions about faith and culture. Ken isn't. He's asking the right questions: What is Christian culture? What bonds us together as a community? How does that impact the whole of life?"

Lessons for faithful

What may be just as interesting as the questions Myers asks is who he's asking, not to mention who's listening.

The majority of Myers' audience is Protestant. Myers himself comes from a Reformed Presbyterian background. But more often than not, his guests are either Catholic or deeply influenced by a sacramental worldview.

The reason for that, he said, is that for too long many Protestants have defined their faith by "the subjects that distinguished the Reformers from the Catholic Church in the 16th century, focusing on just a few doctrinal points like justification." In the process, he continued, they've neglected other Christian teachings that "have relevance for understanding the culture."

The decidedly sacramental flavor of the journal results from his desire to explore those teachings and their implications for Christian life.

But, according to Shannon, Myers' Protestant listeners aren't the only ones who can benefit from such an exploration.

"For a long time Catholics didn't have to think about culture, they just lived it," Shannon said. "That's not the case anymore. Most Catholics need a reminder of the richness of the Catholic intellectual and cultural tradition and how it applies to their lives."

Shannon believes Catholics have as much, if not more, to gain from Mars Hill as Protestants.

"While a good segment of what passes for the best Catholic thinking is still consumed with fighting the battles of the 1960s, the best Protestant thinkers are discovering what Catholics used to know," he said. "There are incredible opportunities for ecumenism in the area of culture right now. That's what makes Mars Hill such an important project for our time."

Emily Stimpson is a contributing editor to Our Sunday Visitor. For more about Mars Hill Audio, visit www.marshillaudio.org.