Jacques Barzun Passes at 104

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 that enable one to navigate in this difficult and complex world with a modicum of wisdom, with calm, not be alarmed with every little thing that happens and with resources that in moments of stress, and after retirement, in illness, and loneliness keep one’s soul and body alive.

May people continue to learn from Jacques Barzun and may he Requiescat in pace.

Faith, Hope, and Love in a Culture of Death: Lois Lowry's The Giver as Film

Let's begin with the film's single greatest obstacle: the culture Philip Rieff described as "the death culture" is not likely to assemble en masse to pay for viewing a morality tale. A central message in this film is that we have become "shadows." Indeed, those immersed in our death culture do not likely have ears to hear and eyes to see the hollow selves we currently are. In a time such as ours, where very little if anything signifies, it is not probable this movie will be understood. At one key moment The Giver declares, "we are living a life of shadows, of echoes." This sentence captures the essence of the death culture. Add to that the following minor problem of our nearly national obsession with spectacle, as evidenced in news shows and recent popular YA movies such as The Hunger Games and Divergent . It is clear our current death culture is taken with the dystopian novel and dystopian movie version of said novel as long as it provides ...

How Twitter Killed Tolstoy or Why You Will Likely Not Finish this Blog

My favorite fictional Professor, aptly described the end of learning. Faber, tells how his class went from Sven Birkerts The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction Alan Jacobs Slow Reading in a Hurried Age David Mikics Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital Age Naimi S. Baron My own experience parallels that of Professor Faber. With declining Liberal Arts majors and distracted Great Books students.... Our lives have become as thin as the thinnest flat screen TV. There is a hollowness to our public discourses and our private conversations. It is not surprising how the tone, texture, and content of our verbal exchanges mimic posts on our dominate social media or the headline stories Of course, the title of this blog could have been any of the following: How Instagram Killed How Vine Killed How Facebook Killed How Google+ Killed How LinkedIn Killed

If Dostoevsky Had Written Science Fiction

Sounding like a modern, the Greek writer Callimachus once penned an epigram where he quipped, “a large book is a great misfortune.” Does not the legitimacy of such an assertion depend on the author and the reader? Novelist Michael O’Brien gives all lovers of fine novels another marvelously large book. As one who enjoys good science fiction, it is always a treat when a first rate novelist ventures into a genre different than what is the norm for that novelist. Often when talking about literature, someone will ask, “what is it about?” This question is sometimes confused with the more important question of, “what are the possible meanings of this work?” While the storyline of Voyage to Alpha Centauri is about a trip of the spaceship Kosmos to Alpha Centauri and given to us primarily in the form of the diary of Neil de Hoyos, one might be able to say that the novel is really about what it means to be a human being, the human...

Musings of a Christian Humanist

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