Ken Myers: Humanitas Lectures
Ken Myers recently gave the three lectures to a group of faculty and graduate students at Vanderbilt University, under the auspices of the Humanitas Project. The link above provides a PDF transcript of Myers’ lecture, Faithful Stewards or Terrestrial Gods? Christianity and the Chief End of Science and an mp3 audio stream of Word Made Flesh, Flesh Made Whole: The Embodied Character of Salvation and the Basis of Bioethics. Myers is the host of one of my favorite periodicals, the Mars Hill Audio Journal. –JA
The radical anthropocentrism of modernity is linked to the assumption that the universe is made up of inherently impersonal, meaningless stuff, raw material for projects of human devising, mathematically decipherable but morally and spiritually mute. The more rationalizable the world becomes in our understanding, the more disenchanted it is.
In modern societies, the social goal of the pursuit of the total conquest of nature
eclipsed the more venerable goal of conforming the soul to reality. We no longer have
socially central institutions that are dedicated to the conforming of souls to reality, through
knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue.