Q. How will my special-needs child benefit from literature? A. Some special-needs children enjoy messages conveyed through simple picture books. In Frederick, by Leo Lionni, a little mouse cannot assist his family in the usual manner of hard, physical labor. He is not strong like the others. Instead, in days of distress, Frederick shares his small […]
Category Archives: Literature
What is the classical view of literature and art? In his book The Mirror and the Lamp, M. H. Abrams observed that art could be viewed from four different perspectives: First there is the emphasis on the universe of art, that is, the thing or idea the work is about, its subject; for example, Mona […]
Because our most fundamental realities are immaterial—like love and death—few artistic forms remain as capable as fairy tales and poetry for housing such depths. Fairy tales carry us from the prosaic landscape of our workaday rhythm to mountain streams of simple wonder and truth. No filter necessary to drink of this pure water, just the […]
One Saturday many years ago, when even my oldest children were young, we had a visit from two friends, Jim and Renee. They were not quite my parents’ age, but they were old enough that they had just become grandparents. We invited them in, and, as happened when anyone entered our home at that time, […]
Imagine an arrow shot into the air, and high in flight, it bursts into flame. How cool would that be?! If you saw this spectacle, you would probably deem it a wonder, or perhaps a symbol or sign. This is how Aeneas and the Trojan remnant (traveling with him after the fall of Troy) responded […]
Book Review: Preface to Paradise Lost by C. S. Lewis Most of us know that C. S. Lewis was a great Christian apologist and author of The Chronicles of Narnia. What most of us don’t know is that, as Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English Literature at both Oxford and Cambridge, Lewis was first and foremost […]
Reason #10: Literature What is literature, and what is it for anyway? Have you ever wondered that? It’s not practical like science and math, so what is its purpose? Why do we include literature in our curriculum, how do we choose it, and what do we hope to achieve by reading literature? These are some […]
By G. K. Chesterton – What the Classic Writers Knew That We Have Forgotten The highest use of the great masters of literature is not literary; it is apart from their superb style and even from their emotional inspiration. The first use of good literature is that it prevents a man from being merely modern. […]
Classical Literature as an Antidote to Modern Thought When the movie Les Misérables came out last year, my wife and I went to see it with several of our adult children, none of whom are fans of musicals. I don’t know how this happened. My daughter was the only one who would even consent to sit down […]
Marital Wisdom in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales Chaucer and his Canterbury Tales might well be the cardinal literary élan of the Middle Ages. Before considering Chaucer’s contribution to marriage, let us begin with a brief look at his legacy. By the late fourteenth century, it had become commonplace for the last couple hundred years to take […]