About Daniel McInerny

Daniel McInerny is Chairman of the Department of Philosophy at Christendom College. He is also author of The Difficult Good: A Thomistic Approach to Moral Conflict and Human Happiness. He holds a PhD in philosophy from the Catholic University of America and has taught at Baylor University and the University of Notre Dame.

Gatsby and the Grandeur and Poverty of Eros

By |2018-01-31T15:39:11-06:00May 10th, 2013|Categories: C.S. Lewis, Christianity, Daniel McInerny, Film, Literature, Modernity|Tags: |

With Baz Luhrmann’s garish 3D hip-hop adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby rolling into theaters this week, my thoughts turn to a piece from last June’s Guardian in which novelist Jay McInerney (no relation) reflected on why Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel has become an American classic–and more than a classic: “a defining document of [...]

Neil Gaiman’s Coraline

By |2013-12-20T22:12:22-06:00April 30th, 2013|Categories: Books, Daniel McInerny|Tags: , |

If Neil Gaiman had a Klout score, he might just break a hundred. But then maybe Neil Gaiman does have a Klout score. He seems to be everywhere else on the Internet these days. As, for example, in “A Beginner’s Guide to: Neil Gaiman” a feature in this week’s Time magazine. (For those who haven’t [...]

In Defense of a Popular Literature

By |2019-12-12T13:19:24-06:00April 18th, 2013|Categories: Daniel McInerny, Literature|

Michael Chabon’s instinct is spot on. In his essay, “Trickster in a Suit of Lights–Thoughts on the Modern Short Story,” from his 2008 collection, Maps & Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands, he makes the case for a literature that does not despise to be entertainment, that challenges the hegemony of “literary fiction,” that [...]

Home Economics: Re-Imagining Distributism

By |2016-02-12T15:28:27-06:00April 9th, 2013|Categories: Christianity, Daniel McInerny, Distributism, G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc|

  Distributism, as originally conceived by G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, has long ceased being a practical possibility for the majority of those living in the liberal democracies of the West. Yet this does not mean that the core principle of distributism—widely distributed private ownership of the means of livelihood—is wholly beyond our reach. Chesterton, [...]

The Irrationalism of Nationalism

By |2014-03-07T10:58:42-06:00March 24th, 2013|Categories: Daniel McInerny, Foreign Affairs, Politics|Tags: , , |

Barack Obama and Abdullah II of Jordan The juxtaposition of two posts on The Imaginative Conservative this week has me thinking about U.S. foreign policy in our increasingly fractured world, and, more deeply, the moral stance of Christian humanism within the same encroaching chaos. Let’s begin with Pat Buchanan’s thought-provoking article, “America’s Role [...]

Happy Birthday, Pride and Prejudice!

By |2013-12-24T11:42:02-06:00February 27th, 2013|Categories: Books, Culture, Daniel McInerny, Jane Austen|

Jane Austen In the most recent issue of The Atlantic film critic Christopher Orr asks the question, “Why are romantic comedies so bad?” His answer reveals much about the current state of our cultural decline: “…there’s more at work here than the vagaries of stars or studios. It’s not just them; it’s us. Among [...]

Children’s Literature and the Spirited Element

By |2019-11-19T17:26:09-06:00February 18th, 2013|Categories: Books, C.S. Lewis, Christianity, Daniel McInerny, Liberal Learning, Literature, Moral Imagination|

Admirers of C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man (of which I am one–it is, for me, Lewis’s most compelling work of non-fiction), will remember that the inciting incident of his argument is a school textbook he calls, in order to save its authors from embarrassment, The Green Book. The moral theory Lewis discovers lying like a [...]

On Popular Fictions, Or How I Learned to Relax and Enjoy Downton Abbey

By |2016-02-12T15:28:30-06:00February 9th, 2013|Categories: Art, Books, Christianity, Culture, Daniel McInerny, Fiction, Film, G.K. Chesterton, T.S. Eliot|

Downton Abbey cast A friend of mine wrote on Facebook about Downton Abbey: “take away the English accents, the bucolic setting, the period costumes, and the antiquated moral code, and you’re left with Days of Our Lives. Some truth to that, I thought at first. Downton Abbey often suffers from severe melodramatic fits. [...]

Recollecting Laughter: On the Cultural Value of Satire

By |2022-03-31T11:06:24-05:00December 21st, 2012|Categories: Books, Culture, Daniel McInerny, Satire|

Have we, as a culture, lost our ability to appreciate satire? Like Socratic questioning, satire can help us “recollect” the timeless truths that we apparently have always known, but just forgotten for awhile. The question occurred to me recently as I was reading Gordon Wood’s Revolutionary Characters, picked up on a Thanksgiving trip to Colonial [...]

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