Ken Myers: Is Creation Meaningful?

In 2012, Ken Myers—of the excellent Mars Hill Audio Journal—delivered four talks at the Edwards Institute (which now seems to be defunct) during a conference called The True and the Beautiful. These are now criminally unavailable, so I'm redressing the wrong on my own. Here is the first talk, called "Is Creation Meaningful?"

Ken Myers: Is Imagination Necessary?

Here is the second Edwards Institute lecture, "Is Imagination Necessary?"

Ken Myers: Does Beauty Matter?

The third of Ken Myers' talks, called, as you may guess, "Does Beauty Matter?"

Ken Myers: Does God Care What Music I Like?

FInally, the fourth lecture, "Does God Care What Music I Like?" Not listen to, but like.

David Bentley Hart on American Christianity and the American future

The question that should concern us, it seems to me, is whether in years ahead America will produce a society that has any particular right to a future. By this, I mean nothing more elaborate than this: How charitable and just a society will it be, how conscious will it be of those truths that transcend the drearier economies of finite existence, and will it produce much good art? And all of that will be determined, inevitably, by spiritual forces. It is not obvious, however, what those forces will be, or what they can do. It is very much an open and troubling question whether American religiosity has the resources to help sustain a culture as a culture—whether, that is, it can create a meaningful future, or whether it can only prepare for the end times. Is the American religious temperament so apocalyptic as to be incapable of culture in any but the most local and ephemeral sense? Does it know of any city other than Babylon the Great or the New Jerusalem? For all the moral will it engenders in persons and communities, can it cultivate the kind of moral intelligence necessary to live in eternity and in historical time simultaneously, without contradiction? Will its lack of any coherent institutional structure ultimately condemn it to haunting rather than vivifying its culture, or make it too susceptible to exploitation by alien interests, or render it incapable of bearing any sufficiently plausible or even interesting witness to the transcendent...? And so on and so on. There is much to admire in the indigenous American religious sensibility, without question, but also much to deplore, and there is plenteous cause for doubt here.

From America and the Angels of Sacré-Coeur, published in a couple places including the collection, A Splendid Wickedness and Other Essays.