What We’re Reading
Dante, Paradiso. So far this year, I have had the privilege of leading a class through Dante’s Divine Comedy. Approaching the end of the epic pilgrimage, Paradiso stands out as the journey into the celestial heavens as Dante is guided by Beatrice to the face of God. Through the gaze of Beatrice, Dante experiences the brilliance of God’s beauty and love. She acts as the in persona Christi for the poet-pilgrim Dante. However, I have belabored to the class the relationship of Dante and Virgil in paradise as well as their relationship is one of the main themes I’ve been guiding the class through. Though Virgil “disappears” in the penultimate canto of the Divine Comedy – the 30th canto of Purgatorio – he does not vanish from the poem. In Paradiso, there are various references, allusions, and direct quotes to Virgil and his poetry. Just as Virgil carried Dante down the mountains of hell to help our poet-pilgrim eventually escape the jaws of death, so Dante – through blessed memory – carried Virgil to see the face of God with him. Omnia vincit amor: Love conquers all.
~ Paul Krause
John Senior, The Restoration of Christian Culture. Although John Senior (1923-1999) is not widely read today, he should be of interest to anyone who is interested in educational and cultural renewal. A graduate of Columbia, John Senior was a famously controversial and brilliant professor of the Integrated Humanities. In fact, he was one of three scholars who taught a great books curriculum at the University of Kansas—in a program that, to this day, has been celebrated as one of the best integrated humanities programs of the twentieth century. Senior’s The Restoration of Christian Culture (1983) is a wonderful introduction to this esteemed professor’s ideas. It is a book that should be in the hands of every educator and parent. Even those who do not agree with everything that Senior says will benefit from considering his main ideas.
In Restoration, Senior does not mince words about the problems confronting modern civilization. “It is an obvious matter of fact that here in the United States now, the Devil has seized these instruments to play a danse macabre, a dance of death, especially through what we call the ‘media,’ the film, television, radio, record, book, magazine and newspaper industries.” For Senior, ours is a world dominated by mass industrialism, technology, relativism, secularism, and a great many other influences that distort our imagination and our vision of reality.
And yet—despite these problems confronting civilization, Senior does not lose hope. Instead, he sets himself to saving and restoring our inheritance of Christian culture. “Our Lord explains in the Parable of the Sower that the seed of His love will only grow in a certain soil—and that is the soil of Christian Culture, which is the work of music in the wide sense, including as well as tunes that are sung, art, literature, games, architecture—all so many instruments in the orchestra which plays day and night the music of lovers; and if it is disordered, then the love of Christ will not grow.” The restoration of Christian culture, the soil upon which the love of Christ can grow, is not a lost cause.
~ Darrell Falconburg
João Cerqueira, Perestroika. As a historical fiction novel, João Cerqueira encapsulates Soviet Union and Communist history during and around the time of Joseph Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev’s reign over the USSR with dignity and respect for historical European dictatorship. Not to be confused with Mikhail Gorbachev’s Perestroika, a political regime designed to eliminate the Era of Stagnation and alternatively reform the political framework to resemble a new and improved government, Cerqueira uses the title as a foreshadowing of hope for the Soviet Union in its coming years. Perestroika reminds me of epistolary writings, which are novels written in stationary, letter-like fashion, and Cerqueira’s work is similarly sectioned by a variety of Slavian people telling the audience their struggles in Slavia during the late 1990s.
~ Sarah Tillard
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