Raphael’s School of Athens The humanities in American higher education are in deep crisis, and the cry of alarm released on June 18 by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences will probably contribute little to a renaissance. How deep is the crisis? Here a few warning signals. According to the New York [...]
David Mamet is the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, film and television director, and author of many books of essays, most recently, in 2011, of the crackling libertarian manifesto, The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture. The target of Mamet’s book is an updated version of Rousseau’s noble savage: a 21st-century peace-loving tribesman whose Eden it [...]
Greek tragedy grew up and was cultivated within the context of religious festival, but these play-festivals of Dionysus, as Paul Cartledge has written in The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy, “served further as a device for defining Athenian civic identity…exploring and confirming but also questioning what it was to be a citizen of a democracy.” [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
Daniel McInerny Maybe nothing. Maybe the novel of belief is perfectly alive and well, though of a different character than the kinds of novel produced, inter alia, by Waugh, Greene, Percy and O’Connor in the last century. Or maybe it has all but disappeared from the literary landscape and is sorely in need of [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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. [...]
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 [...]