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Permanent things : toward the recovery of a more human scale at the end of the twentieth century

Title: Permanent things : toward the recovery of a more human scale at the end of the twentieth century / edited by Andrew A. Tadie and Michael H. Macdonald.
Publication: Grand Rapids, Mich : William B. Eerdmans, ©1995.

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Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Request Scan Not available - Please for assistance.	Text	Use in library	PR478.C45 P47 1995	Off-site

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Description

xvi, 311 pages; 24 cm

Summary

Permanent Things reminds us that some of the century's most imaginative minds - G. K. Chesterton, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, Dorothy Sayers, and Evelyn Waugh - were profoundly at odds with the secularist spirit of the age, seeing progressive enlightenment as ushering in, not a millennium of perfect freedom, but a Waste Land whose inhabitants - Waugh's "vile bodies," Eliot's "hollow men," Lewis's "men without chests" - can find refuge from their boredom and anomie only in the ceaseless acquisition of things or in the consoling illusions of pseudo religions - "distracted from distraction by distraction," as Eliot memorably put it. How does one explain the desolation of a world which, though richly endowed with material comforts, is mentally and spiritually impoverished? The essayists here are united, as were their subjects, by a need to try to answer this question. Modern man's poverty of spirit, visible alike in so much of his art and architecture, his literature and philosophy and political science, reflects his loss of any good reasons for living - his loss of the Permanent Things. The Christian writers whose work is eloquently interpreted in this book repay our attention for at least two reasons. First is their ability to sharpen our awareness of what, by any previous civilized standards, must be called the abnormal condition of modern man. For all the writers treated in this book, it was never enough to simply capture the spiritual aridity of modern life. It was also necessary to speak of a moral order that may yet be restored by the expressive power and beauty of the written word.

Subject

Genre/Form

Criticism, interpretation, etc.
History

Bibliography (note)

Includes bibliographical references.

Contents

Introduction / Ian Crowther -- The great mysterious incorporation of the human race / Russell Kirk -- Father Brown's war on the impermanent things / John Peterson -- Chesterton's Dickens and the literary critics : the thing and the theory / David Whalen -- Waugh's road to affirmation / David Dooley -- "Little systems of order" : Evelyn Waugh's comic irony / Gregory Wolfe -- C.S. Lewis celebrates "patches of Godlight" / George Musacchio -- Chesterton, democracy and the permanent things / Kent R. Hill -- G.K. Chesterton and the science of economics / William F. Campbell -- Finding the permanent in the political : C.S. Lewis as a political thinker / John G. West, Jr. -- What Dorothy L. Sayers found permanent in Dante / Barbara Reynolds -- Perplexity in the Edgeware Road : Four quartet's revisited yet again / Thomas T. Howard -- G.K. Chesterton among the permanent poets / Aidan Mackey -- Darkness at noon : the eclipse of the permanent things / Peter Kreeft -- In defense of permanent truth and value / John A. Sims -- "There are no 'trees' ... only this elm" : C.S. Lewis on the scientific method / Evan K. Gibson -- Some ideas on a Christian core curriculum from the writings of G.K. Chesterton, T.S. Eliot, and Dorothy L. Sayers / Alzina Stone Dale -- C.S. Lewis and the conversion of the West / William J. Abraham -- The recovery of the permanent things : Eliot circa 1930 / Marion Montgomery.

ISBN

0802838049
9780802838049
0802842313
9780802842312

LCCN

95035842

OCLC

ocm33007665
33007665
SCSB-2073266

Owning Institutions

Princeton University Library