Practical Fantasy

by | Mar 29, 2007

Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child’s Moral Imagination by Vigen Guroian. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. 198 pp., $22.00 cloth. ON ONE OCCASION when he had given a talk on children’s literature to a conference of...

Practical Atheism

by | Mar 29, 2007

The Way of the (Modern) World: Or, Why It’s Tempting to Live As If God Doesn’t Exist by Craig M. Gay. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company (255 Jefferson Avenue, S.E., Grand Rapids, MI 49503), 338 pp., 1998. Craig Gay’s The Way of the (Modern) World...

Metaparody

by | Mar 27, 2007

Postmodern Pooh by Frederick Crews, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York), 175pp, $22.00 cloth, 2001. Frederick Crews has set himself a daunting task: to parody a postmodern criticism that is already itself a parody of real writing and thinking. Crews, a professor...

Are Fish Good for the Brain?

by | Mar 27, 2007

On Essays and LettersWe used to have an ethics teacher in Spokane who, when he wanted to give an example of some intricate moral point, would pull out his dog-eared copy of Will Cuppy’s book, How to Tell Your Friends from the Apes. No doubt today he would be...

Stubborn Myths

by | Mar 27, 2007

Those Terrible Middle Ages! Debunking the Myths, by Régine Pernoud, translated by Anne Englund Nash. Ignatius Press (San Francisco, California) 179 pp., $12.95 paper, 2001. We have all more or less been formed by the grand narrative of the Enlightenment. In...