This conversation with Dallas from Mars Hill Audio is free to listen to for one week from our Mars Hill homepage, and is also free for 10 weeks on the Mars Hill app. This interview is otherwise only available to members of Mars Hill Audio.
In this conversation from 2009, Dallas discusses the truth of spiritual knowledge and its epistemological validity. His book, Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge, arose in response to interactions he had with a wide range of business, legal and political leaders which revealed their skepticism of the validity of religious, spiritual or ethical knowledge; as opposed to publicly valid knowledge, spiritual claims were seen as mere subjective traditions or opinions divorced from objective reality. He traces this skeptical belief in the U.S. back to the desire of liberal Christian theologians to protect Christianity from what they believed to be threatening developments in science, and the desire of conservative Christian theologians to emphasize the importance of understanding faith as a gift and not rational knowledge — a dichotomy Willard does not see any reason to accept. He describes in detail how this false dichotomy had led to great distortions in the understanding and practice of faith among everyday Christians and in churches, forcing believers to understand themselves as “committing” to essentially irrational claims. This sort of irrationalism leads to damaging consequences, including a loss of authority and the reduction of truth to the imposition of will and desire.
Take a free listen by hitting play on the Mars Hill homepage.
The Martin Institute and Dallas Willard Research Center’s executive director, Steve Porter, discusses Dallas’s book The Disappearance of Moral Knowledge with Mars Hill Audio here (Mars Hill members only).
Earlier in the summer, Mark Nelson caught up with Dr. Angela Carpenter (Hope College), recipient of the 2020 Dallas Willard Research Center Book Award for Responsive Becoming: Moral Formation in Theological, Evolutionary, and Developmental Perspective (Bloomsbury, 2019). In this latest of a series of lightning interviews with previous award recipients, Dr. Carpenter revisits her award-winning book, shares some thoughts about why “sanctification” sounds old-fashioned to lots of Christians, and gives us a sneak preview of her more recent work at the intersection of spirituality, theology, and the human sciences.
The Ignatian Spiritual Exercises Training (ISET) enters its 5th consecutive year in 2026! The year-long course, a partnership between the Jesuit Institute South Africa, The Martin Institute and Richmont Graduate University, equips those who have done the Spiritual Exercises and wish to minister them to others, to do so with confidence and competence. The course is designed to study the text of the Spiritual Exercises attentively so that students understand what St. Ignatius intended and how they can be adapted for women and men today. The course incorporates both insightful inputs and reflection on one’s own experience of the Spiritual Exercises.
“This is one of the most exciting and helpful courses I have done” a past student shared. “It opened up the gift of the Spiritual Exercises for me in a profound way”.