Moral Imagination

Russell Kirk

In the franchise bookshops the shelves are crowded with the prickly pears and the Dead Sea fruit of literary decadence. Yet no civilization rests forever content with literary boredom and literary violence. Once again, a conscience may speak to a conscience in the pages of books, and the parched rising generation may grope their way toward the springs of moral imagination. The first annual lecture at this new Center for the Study of Christian Values in Literature is an endeavor to describe that high power of perception and description which has been called “the moral imagination,” and to relate that imagination to what Chateaubriand called “the genius of Christianity.” What once has been, may be again.

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