Rallying The Really Human Things

by Guroian, Vigen

• ISBN13: 9781932236507
• ISBN10: 1932236503
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-09-30
• Publisher: Isi Books

Summary

For Vigen Guroian, contemporary culture is distinguished by its relentless assault on the moral imagination. In the stories it tells us, in the way it has degraded courtship and sexualized our institutions of higher education, in the ever-more-radical doctrines of human rights it propounds, and in the way it threatens to remake human nature via biotechnology, contemporary culture conspires to deprive men and women of the kind of imagination that Edmund Burke claimed allowed us to raise our perception of our own human dignity, or to "cover the defects of our own naked shivering nature." In Rallying the Really Human Things, Guroian combines a theologian's keen sensitivity to the things of the spirit with his immersion in the works of Burke, Russell Kirk, G. K. Chesterton, Flannery O'Connor, St. John Chrysostom, and other exemplars of the religious humanist tradition to diagnose our cultural crisis. But he also points the way towards a culture more solicitous of the "really human things," the Chesterton phrase from which he takes his title. Guroian's wide-ranging analysis of these times provides a fresh and inimitable perspective on the practices and mores of contemporary life.

Author Biography

Vigen Guroian is Professor of Theology at Loyola College in Maryland. He is the author of numerous articles and books, including Ethics after Christendom: Toward an Ecclesial Christian Ethic (Eerdmans Pub Co, 1994) and Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child's Imagination (Oxford University Press; New Ed edition, 2002).

Table of Contents

Preface	ix
Acknowledgments	xiii
1: Three Voices of Christian Humanism
1. G.K. Chesterton: Rallying the Really Human Things	3	(16)
2. Flannery O'Connor: The Art of Incarnation	19	(12)
3. Russell Kirk: Christian Humanism and Conservatism	31	(18)
2: On the Moral Imagination
4. On Fairy Tales and the Moral Imagination	49	(14)
5. The Moral Imagination in an Age of Sentiments	63	(20)
3: Wanderings in the Wasteland
6. The Lost Children	83	(8)
7. On the Office of Being a Good Son or Daughter	91	(10)
8. Family and Christian Virtue in a Post-Christian World: The Vision of John Chrysostom	101	(18)
9. On Gay Marriage	119	(14)
10. The Virgin and the Ivy	133	(12)
11. Dorm Brothel	145	(16)
12. Huxley's Mirror	161	(16)
13. Why Should Businessmen Read Great Literature?	177	(12)
4: Politics and Freedom
14. The Narrative of Freedom	189	(12)
15. Nationalism, A Non-Liberal Assessment	201	(10)
16. Human Rights and Modern Western Faith	211	(10)
17. Human Rights and Christian Ethics	221	(12)
Notes	233	(10)
Index	243