Musings of a Christian Humanist

     On more than one occasion, Ray Bradbury was asked about his favorite books. While the answer varied, he consistently spoke of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol . For those who know and love the writings of Ray Bradbury, it makes perfect sense this was a favorite of his. The theme of living is vibrant in many Bradbury works. So Bradbury spoke with great excitement about the scene in  A Christmas Carol  where the culminating visits of the ghosts moves Ebeneezer, when he realizes that he has another chance, declares, I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future!  The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me.      As good as the many movie versions may be, there is a texture in the story that is simply missed in the visual interpretations. In this interview (toward the end) Ray Bradbury speaks about his love of this great Christmas story that is a call to live life. While Bradbury says that his...

    Of The Box of Delights , C.S. Lewis said, that it is a unique work and will often be re-read…the beauties, all the 'delights' that keep on emerging from the box—are so exquisite, and quite unlike anything I have seen elsewhere.  Those of us who re-read the writings of Lewis would recognize some clear references and allusions to The Box of Delights , especially in Lewis's own The Magician's Nephew .       The Box of Delights  was first published in 1935, and was acclaimed and embraced on a popular level. Some place it on the same level of excellence and as perfect for the Christmas season as Charles Dicken's  A Christmas Carol . The plot is simple in that it focuses on the adventures of Kay Harker and a gentleman Cole Hawlings who has a magical box that is most desired by a group of criminals.  As you assemble your Christmas season reading list, or gifts for children who are burned out on the most recent dys...

   For lovers of great poetry, the name Donald Hall is well known. For those familiar with the poetry of Donald Hall, we recognize the fondness Hall has for the particular place of Eagle pond. In Christmas at Eagle Pond , Hall offers all readers a treasure, in the form of a short story about an imagined childhood Christmas experience at Eagle Pond. In the midst of numerous delightful moments, there is an important reflection of a Christmas pageant and the place a Christmas party held in the life of the community. There are simple and elegant back and white illustrations throughout. The value and glory of transmission of folk culture through story telling is pushed to the front of the narrative more than once.      The story is set in the time of model A's and T's with some still using buggies and sleighs.  Among the many worthy moments in the story, there is ...

      My wife is a librarian and daily interacts with children and books. If I were not a Professor, I cannot think of a more appealing calling. We talk daily about the little ones in her school, books, and the relationship between bookish children and their overall demeanor. A picture book that we recently became aware of is The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore .       For all bibliovores, regardless of age, this book is for you. It is beautiful in form and content, it is good in form and content, and it is true in form and content. Rarely does one find a children's picture book that so throughly celebrates a bookish life, but also deals with some grand humane themes. In addition to this unique book, there is an app (sorry Luddites) that is interactive with the book.  For the critics of such apps, one can make the case that this app encourages greater interaction with the book and other books.  For short film lovers, t...

     While I have joked about this for years, it is time to be as serious as one can be about such things. While nihilism or your garden variety atheism (not the fundamentalist version of recent years) are options, the reason they do not make sense to me is because nihilism sees only abyss where there are mountains. I do understand on one level how people opt for atheism, but there are too many signals both around me and within me for me to embrace unbelief. Hobbits clearly love life.

     Henry Petroski's,  The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance , is among the most important books I've ever read. It perfectly illustrates the insight of Neil Postman that everything can be studied, and should be, in terms of history and philosophy.       Leonard's Read's charming and insightful essay, I, Pencil has been turned into a wonderful little  movie that can supplement Petroski's rich book and Read's marvelous essay about one of mankind's most brilliant inventions.       In truth, if you have grown up writing with a pencil, there is certainly a pleasure in thoughtfully using one. While I do put things on Evernote and increasingly use Google Docs, I still often find myself reaching for a pencil to scribble down notes and there are times, when I need to carefully and in a most leisurely mode compose, in those special moments, nothing is better than the pencil.

      My habit was this--wake up, make breakfast with my wife, and as she was going to work, I would read the day's headlines from the "news," and we would talk about it over the phone. Over recent months, especially the last several days, I felt like I was reading more news, and watching more news, and getting dumber as I slipped into a greater ennui.     So taking a partial cue from Walker Percy's Dr. Thomas More in Love in the Ruins who gathered "cases of Early Times and Swiss Colony sherry . . . [and] the Great Books" for what More felt might be the end of the world, I plan on a modified version of this activity. Minus the Early Times, Swiss Colony, and staying at a Howard Johnson's, but certainly with a mega dose of the Great Books, a resolution has occurred.     Some additional motivation comes from remembering a Neil Postman book I had read some years ago. Going back and looking at that marked up book, I was ashamed how much I had f...

     Finally, after years of planning and a great deal of hard (mental) work, the PhD that is profoundly grounded in the Great Books is here. It was a dream I had about five years ago to offer a fully accredited Great Books based PhD. Originally the degree was to be a DLitt, but with some possible confusion out there, the degree was slightly altered to conform to the requirements of a PhD.      We received word late afternoon on Oct. 29th. We have everything in place and will be taking applications immediately. With already more than 100 people having seriously inquired about the program for the past year, we anticipate admitting the top forty-five. A candidate can opt to concentrate in History, Literature, Philosophy, or aspire to be a generalist in the Liberal Arts. The tutorials are ideal for in-depth research in an era, person, idea, or select writings.       This PhD is literally o...

     Sadly, only the most dedicated Bradbury fans seem to be aware of this lesser known work. In truth, as with many Bradbury novels, this work consists of short stories woven together to tell a unique tale. Without giving away too much, it is a work that has moments of whimsy and poignancy. There are characters and elements that are early Bradbury in tone and there are items that are the mature, reflective  and even philosophically poetic Bradbury.       The story focuses on an Illinois family distinguished by the fact that most are ghosts and other creatures. Two key characters are a mortal child Timothy, and Cecy, a creature hard to describe. While there are numerous great moments and several delightful passages of rich word craft, the scene that was most striking to me was as follows:       " Listen, now, let me provide the history of the rising tide of disbelief. The Judeo-Christian w...

    Many of Ray Bradbury's stories have enough ambiguity worked into the tale to lend them to rich varying interpretations. This does not mean that any and all readings are faithful to the story, but it can make for lively discussions and honest disagreement about the meaning of a particular story.  The October Game is such a story. Spoiler alert--I offer here a alternative reading of the story than the one given by most. If you have not read the story, read it before you make your way through this interpretation. If you have read it, please indulge me. The consensus is that at the end of the story, the audience is shocked because they see the dismembered body of  The reading offered here is that the daughter is alive and well at the end and the shock is that she is there despite the panic and anticipated horror that something terrible had happened to her. In other words, the audience...

     It has long been a conviction of mine that too many believers are too much of the world and they know not. Human cultures have a way of so becoming the atmosphere we take into our lungs that we lose sight of the truth that sometimes the air is poison. For some it is a slow death by breathing.      Os Guinness, Peter Berger, Max Weber, and Jacques Ellul have assisted me in checking the toxicity levels, and now I need to add another--Philip Rieff. Truthfully, he is the most challenging in both the way he writes and at times what he says. Sometimes what he says is difficult to mentally grasp and other times I fear I understand him all too clearly.       Rieff is best known for his superlative scholarship on the life, writings, and influence (helpful and destructive) of Sigmund Freud. Rieff is one of those rare contemporary authors who is conversant with ideas and authors well beyond...

      "His was no Enlightenment mind, Kirk now became aware; it was a Gothic mind, medieval in its temper and structure.                         Russell Kirk, The Sword of Imagination , 68      As J.R.R. Tolkien assisted many with his most informative essay, On Fairy Stories , Russell Kirk provides a short, but helpful primer into the genre of "ghost stories." Now, of course, reading the essay, "A Cautionary Note on the Ghostly Tale," the reader realizes that "ghost stories" are not merely about "ghosts" just as "fairy-tales" are not merely about "fairies."      As with G.K. Chesterton's assertion in his "Ethics of Elfland," fairytales are inherently moral as they reflect a universe of moral order and consequences when good is dismissed and evil embraced. Russell Kirk writing of his own ghost stories says, " What I have attempted, rather, are experiments in the moral imaginatio...

This work is thoroughly grounded in Christian theology and biblical reflection. At the very heart of Zimmerman's case is the incarnation of Christ. Possibly the most explicit assertion defended throughout the book is “True humanity is the heart of the Gospel and the goal of Christ's redemptive work…” This is a truth that is sure to give some Christians, and certainly secularists, pause. Another point that all fundamentalists (Christian or atheist brand) would find troubling in this work is the argument that, “all human knowledge is always interpretive.” Again Zimmermann addresses an important issue without lapsing into relativism. “Objectivity in theological science, like objectivity in every true science, is achieved through rigorous correlation of thought with its proper object and the self-renunciation, repentance and change of mind that it involves.” In this sweeping work, Zimmerman also explores the relationship between science and religion, but more than that, the ...

NOTE: An Article I authored recently published St Austin Review, S/O 2012 V. 12, N. 5 On all lists of the best science fiction and fantasy writers of the twentieth century, Ray Bradbury is always present, and usually at the top. However, popular acclaim does not always translate into high literary craft. The discerning reader should carefully look at the full body of Bradbury’s writings to determine if all, or even some of his works, merit scholarly attention. He sub-created worlds that explored the widest range of human experiences and humane themes. Often he spoke about his dislike of being classified in genres he believed were artificial. As an author that transcended and sometimes blended narrow genre classifications, Bradbury saw himself merely as a writer. While his stories have the common features of science fiction and fantasy, these characteristics were simply functional toward the greater end of telling a fine tale about human beings being human. Even though there ...

As a number of books from important thinkers (Etienne Gilson, Jeffrey Burton Russell) have sought to educate open-minded readers to a most enlightened Middle Ages, Zimmermann seeks, in part, to challenge some misinterpretations and terrible damage done to a most Christian era--the Renaissance. According to Zimmerman, the roots of secularism and secularization are not to be found in the Renaissance, but at a later time and in different soil. At worst, there were some bad seeds planted here and there that later produced mixed fruit even during the Renaissance, but not all the bad seed can be be attributed to that age.     This book is difficult to specify the type of analysis it offers. Zimmermann moves in a most erudite manner from one discipline to another, is conversant with a breadth of primary sources, and clearly familiar with the secondary and therefore derivative and sometimes misguided sources. Structurally, the work is a survey of the Western intellec...

     Among the many words penned or spoken by the late and truly great Jacques Barzun, my favorite came in an interview where he gave his defense and definition of a Liberal Arts education. In truth, Barzun's words stand as a refutation to all who would pervert the Liberal Arts and all who would strive to extinguish the Liberal Arts. Cultural historian Jacques Barzun, in an interview with Charlie Rose (May 29, 2000), addressed the question of the value of a liberal arts education that is specifically grounded in the Great Books and the Great Tradition of the West. Barzun responded as follows:     Properly taught, and learned—acquired—a liberal education awakens and keeps alive the imagination. By the imagination, I don’t mean fanciful things, but I mean the capacity to see beyond the end of your nose and beyond the object in front you. That is to see its implications, its origins, its potential, its danger, its charm. All the things ...

      When many people think about grammar they usually think about tedious rules or the ongoing contemporary debate that there are are no rules when it comes to grammar as this is a Medieval European construct. The latter group is sometimes difficult to read as they insist on practicing what they preach. For those in the Classical school tradition they realize that grammar is "the first of the arts to assist those who are aspiring to increase in wisdom." (John of Salisbury)      Already there is a monumental difference between most up-to-date views of grammar and the traditional way. Grammar is a means toward an end. The ultimate end of grammar is not to be able to read, write, and speak without sounding like a vandal, it is so that one may ultimately become wise.  "Grammar is the science which teaches us to explain the poets and historians; it is the art which...

      Clement calls for his readers to meet Jesus as the “Word” and “Educator” that “forcibly” compels people from the “worldly way of life and educates them to the only true salvation: faith in God.”   The Educator is the one “who leads the way” to “improve the soul” not just in knowledge but to guide in virtue.  The Educator does not focus solely on knowledge, but leads his “children” toward a life of virtue.  The “Word” perfects his disciples “in a way that leads progressively to salvation” through persuasion, education, and lastly, through teaching.  The teaching of the Educator “educates” people in the “fear of God,” i nstructs in “the service of God” and provides “knowledge of truth” toward living the virtuous life which ensures salvation.       For Clement, “The education that God gives is the imparting of the truth that will guide us correctly to the contemplation of God, and a description of holy deeds that ...

     The Stoic "objective" "Rationalistic" university bequeathed to by the Enlightenment, may have met its match with the Stoic coolness, laid back "whatever", and disconnected demeanor of the modern, common university student. Of course there are a few universities passionately committed to genuine learning and some students at every school who care deeply and passionately about learning. There are those when asked, "why are you at university" give the only right answer and that is "to become educated." Over recent years, when I ask my Freshmen why they are here, you get the range of consumer answers, and only rarely the answer of one consumed with a desire to know.

     If I think about it, I am saddened that I received the invitation later in life.  I wish I had received and accepted the invitation in High School, or college, or certainly graduate school.  It was not all my fault, I was not told about the invitation until about twelve years ago.  Since that time, I have invited hundreds and hope to invite many more.      What is The Great Conversation ? The actual wording I am most familiar with comes through the writings and lives of Mortimer Adler and Robert Hutchins.  Since the 1960's those two men and a handful of others fought valiantly against social and cultural trends that would all but be the end of the Great Tradition, the Great Books, and the Great Conversation.  While things have gotten considerably worse since these intellectual warriors declared a strategy of intellectual health, there are loving resistance fighters and pockets of...