Practical Fantasy
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
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
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?
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
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...Henrie on Kirk
Kirk was convinced that in our age, the unimagined life is not worth living for a human being. He labored to reform our sensibilities, so that we could see ourselves both for what we are and for what we have become. He labored to make available an intellectual...Kirk on Types of Imagination
Imagination it is that shapes society—moral imagination, or idyllic imagination, or diabolic imagination.Kirk on Eliot on PT
By ‘the Permanent Things’ [T. S. Eliot] meant those elements in the human condition that give us our nature, without which we are as the beasts that perish. They work upon us all in the sense that both they and we are bound up in that continuity of belief...Kirk on Progress
Real progress consists in the movement of mankind toward the understanding of norms, and toward conformity to norms. Real decadence consists in the movement of mankind away from the understanding of norms, and away from obedience to norms.
There are metaphorical hills on which I would be willing to die. The Oxford comma is one of them.
So easy to forget that the best way to educate yourself is to read great works of literature and philosophy, then talk about them. Bring back the salon!