Great Books Research Articles

The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind by Jason M. Baxter (review)

The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind by Jason M. Baxter (review)

The Educational Function of a Hindu Core Text in a Liberal Arts Context: Character Education and Caring for the Soul in the Bhagavadgita

Liberal arts courses sometimes face the question of whether core texts can actually ‘educate character’ or ‘care for the soul’ in the Socratic sense. The Bhagavadgita addresses these issues from a Hindu perspective. But at the same time, the educational function of a religious core text changes decisively when transposed into a liberal arts context. The purpose of this paper is to explain how the use and content of the Gita can contribute to reflection on some liberal arts values and their application in courses on world literature and great books.

VALUES OF CHARACTER EDUCATION IN BUYA HAMKA'S GREAT PERSONAL BOOK

This research method is library research. The aims of this research are, (1). To find out what the values of character education are contained in the great Personal book by Buya Hamka, (2). To find out how the formation of character education values in the Great Personal book by Buya Hamka, (3). To find out how the implications of character education contained in the great Personal book by Buya Hamka which are in the world of education in Indonesia. The results showed that: (1). The values of character education contained in the Great Personal book are (a). Religious, (b). Honest, (c). Tolerance, (d). Discipline, (e). Hard work, (f). Independent, (g). Democratic, (h). National spirit, (i). Love the homeland, (j). Appreciating achievements, (k). Friendly/communicative, (l). Peace-loving, (m). Social care, (n). Likes to read, and (o). Responsibility.

Fantasy Academic Editor: What I Would Choose for a Second Series of the Princeton Lives of Great Religious Books Series

Fantasy Academic Editor: What I Would Choose for a Second Series of the Princeton Lives of Great Religious Books Series

Clamouring for Legal Protection: What the Great Books Teach Us About People Fleeing from Persecution by Robert F. Barsky

Clamouring for Legal Protection: What the Great Books Teach Us About People Fleeing from Persecution by Robert F. Barsky

Shakespeare Winces Not: On Inclusion in Liberal Education

It is commonly held that the traditional European classics or Great Books cannot constitute the basis of an inclusive liberal education because they do not reflect the diverse cultural identities of contemporary students. This essay argues for a return to the older view, memorably expressed by W.E.B. Du Bois, that the classics are radically inclusive because they speak to a common human identity. This view is best understood in light of the ancient Greek distinction between physis (nature) and nomos (custom or law). Greek philosophic universalism has shown an ability to transcend profound cultural differences, such as those separating Alfarabi from Maimonides, or Shakespeare from Du Bois. The essay rebuts the frequently heard objections that the universalism of the classics is really a mask for white male hegemony and that it fails to do justice to the unique personal experiences of the oppressed and marginalized. The essay affirms that education must be particularistic as well as universalistic, but it argues that the universalism of the classics remains the key to the most perfect form of inclusion, namely, the friendship of those seeking the truth.

Great Books by German Women in the Age of Emotion, 1770–1820 By MargaretmaryDaley, Camden House. 2022. pp. x + 299. $120 (hardcover). $29.95 (ebook)

Great Books by German Women in the Age of Emotion, 1770–1820 By MargaretmaryDaley, Camden House. 2022. pp. x + 299. $120 (hardcover). $29.95 (ebook)

The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind by Jason M. Baxter

Reviewed by: The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind by Jason M. Baxter Ronald A. Hoyum The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind. By Jason M. Baxter. Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 2022. 165 pp. This is a beautifully-written examination of the literary influences that shaped C. S. Lewis's understanding of the Christian faith. [End Page 222] Lewis is well known as a powerful Christian apologist and the gifted author of the Narnia Chronicles. But another side to Lewis shaped the way he understood his faith as a Christian. Jason Baxter calls this the "Third Lewis." Baxter writes, "In addition to the Christian apologist, whose sagacious words delivered over radio waves had been so comforting during England's darkest hour, and in addition to Lewis the mythmaker, the creator of Narnia and fantastic tales of space travel, there was Lewis the scholar, the Oxford (and later Cambridge) don who spent his days lecturing to students on medieval cosmology and his nights looking up old words in dictionaries" (2). Each chapter is devoted to an examination of how Lewis's devotion to medieval literature shaped his Christian worldview. In the first chapter, "The Lost Cathedral," Baxter describes how Lewis embraced the beauty and majesty of the medieval vision of the cosmos. For Lewis, "the medieval universe was not just a system of exploded scientific beliefs, but the natural icon of transposition, the greatest example of the spiritual world expressing itself in the limited vocabulary of the physical, natural world" (22). Topics discussed in subsequent chapters include ethics, science, psychology, and how language influences our ideas of the world around us. In each chapter, Baxter draws upon Lewis's literary and apologetic writings to show how Lewis introduces us to a different way of looking at God's presence in the world and in our lives. One of Lewis's greatest gifts was his ability to "use his imaginative talent to create a feeling in which the ideas under consideration were no longer dead opinions sitting on the dissection table of the mind … but rather to live again" (37). Baxter points out that Lewis's view of the medieval period was quite expansive. "Lewis thought an ancient Roman had more in common with human beings from the eighteenth century … For this reason we can loosely think of Lewis's medieval period as the 'Long Middle Ages,' which extended from Plato to Samuel Johnson, and sometimes even to Wordsworth" (11). That is why Lewis could be thought of as a modern Boethius, whose works remind us of the lost wisdom of a previous age. "Lewis did something analogous to the late medieval writers (like Chaucer) who had translated Boethius from Latin into Middle English or French or Italian. He, too, [End Page 223] was a "popularizer" of ancient wisdom for a barbarian age. He was following in Boethius's footsteps" (15–16). Lewis never considered himself an original thinker. He simply wanted to retrieve insights and wisdom from the great writers of previous ages. Baxter examines the deep influence that writers as diverse as Plato, Cicero, Virgil, Dante, Donne, Rudolf Otto, and Martin Buber had on Lewis's apologetic works. Baxter argues with great force and conviction that Lewis's devotion to the past makes him all the more relevant today. Lewis believed that we suffer from "chronological snobbery," the belief that our modern view of the world is in all respects superior to previous ages. By reading great literature from the past we can break free from the "evil enchantment of the modern world" (69) so that we might breathe pure "Narnian air" (35). Lewis did not reject the modern world but felt that our view of life would be enriched by the wisdom of previous ages. Indeed, that is the secret to the power and enduring popularity of C. S. Lewis. And that is the overarching message you will discover in this wonderful and insightful book. Ronald A. Hoyum Port Madison Lutheran Church Poulsbo, Washington Copyright © 2023 Johns Hopkins University Press and Lutheran Quarterly, Inc.

Rites of Retaliation: Civilization, Soldiers, and Campaigns in the American Civil War by Lorien Foote

Reviewed by: Rites of Retaliation: Civilization, Soldiers, and Campaigns in the American Civil War by Lorien Foote Clayton J. Butler (bio) Rites of Retaliation: Civilization, Soldiers, and Campaigns in the American Civil War. By Lorien Foote. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. 312. Cloth, $95.00; paper, $22.95.) Adapted lectures often make for great books. Faced with the presence of a very real audience, the author has an added impetus to deliver a compelling story and a convincing argument. Derived from a series of Brose Lectures given at Penn State University in 2019, Lorien Foote’s new monograph certainly achieves both goals. Foote makes a strong case that during the Civil War the development of military policies of retaliation—officially sanctioned penalties imposed by one belligerent on the other for going beyond the brink of what it considered “civilized” warfare—had a marked impact on the nature of combat, the experiences of prisoners, and the outcome of the conflict itself. Foote contends that the Civil War represented a contest in which both sides saw nothing less than civilization itself at stake and that both sides used the threat of retaliation to assert the vision of civilization for which they fought. They were, in effect, setting the rules of the game. Though recent works, such as Aaron Sheehan-Dean’s Calculus of [End Page 258] Violence: How Americans Fought the Civil War (2018) and D. H. Dilbeck’s A More Civil War: How the Union Waged a Just War (2016), have investigated the Civil War in the context of international laws of war and just-war philosophy, both engaging incidents of retaliation, Foote’s argument that retaliation served as a legitimate and widely sanctioned method of directly influencing conduct in the field sets her book apart. Foote situates her study in the Department of the South, comprising the coastal areas of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, which became the site of intense controversy over the deployment of Black troops, mis-treatment of prisoners, and the summary execution of combatants during the war. Two starkly divergent visions of civilization and civilized society promptly collided there, visions that cut to the heart of the sectional conflict. Proceeding chronologically, Foote’s narrative benefits from the early introduction of several dynamic and articulate figures, including Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Robert Gould Shaw, Ethan Allen Hitchcock, and David Hunter. Hunter’s unhesitating organization and deployment of Black troops, almost from the outset of his tenure in command of the department, initiated a showdown between seemingly irreconcilable Union and Confederate policies. Confederates saw Hunter’s actions as tantamount to leadership of a slave rebellion, a barbaric act aimed at the destruction of southern civilization. Hunter saw the practice of enslavement, for all intents and purposes the Confederate raison d’être, as itself barbaric and the antithesis of civilized ways. Indeed, these clashing conceptions of civilization hold the key to understanding how nonslaveholding southerners and nonabolitionist northerners found the motivation to fight in the first place. Nonslaveholding Confederates fought to protect southern civilization as they understood it, which they perceived as gravely menaced by the so-called Black Republican administration. Nonabolitionist northerners fought for a civilization of free labor undergirded by the Union, even if that vision paid little to no heed to Black Americans’ rights. Foote rightly notes that once one begins to look for the language of “civilization” in the parlance of the Civil War era, it becomes ubiquitous. The debate over the Union’s use of Black troops offers Foote her best example of how military leadership turned to policies of retaliation to influence the direction of the fighting. Jefferson Davis, she writes, “was convinced he could shape Federal policies through the threat of retaliation” (43). Confederates proposed to reenslave or execute the Black soldiers they encountered in battle. It seemed to them an eminently justifiable position. The only thing that ultimately gave them pause was the prospect of retaliation. The thought that Confederate prisoners might suffer the same fate as Black soldiers forced them to reconsider their policy and generally, though [End Page 259] by no means in every case, stayed their hand. By treating Black soldiers as equals in the...

What’s Missing? Evaluating a University Library Collection for Workplace Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Using WorldCat

The areas of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) have become increasingly important in recent years within businesses, colleges, and libraries. In response to this development, this article reports on an assessment of the workplace DEI coverage in an academic library monograph collection. A sample of books on the topic, retrieved through a WorldCat search, was analyzed and compared with the library’s holdings. The authors discovered gaps in the library’s workplace DEI coverage and identified contributing factors. The authors selected and reviewed great books on DEI in the workplace to add to the library’s collection and recommend to students and faculty.

‘A Precious Treatise’: How Modern Arab Editors Helped Create Ibn Taymiyya’s Muqaddima fī uṣūl al-tafsīr

Ibn Taymiyya’s Muqaddima fī uṣūl al-tafsīr (‘Introduction to the Principles of Qur’anic Hermeneutics’) is frequently used as a guide to the classical tafsīr tradition, and its hermeneutic is viewed as the normative way to understand the Qur’an. It is even presented as one of the ‘classics’ of the medieval Islamic tradition and one of Islam’s ‘great books’. This small treatise has inspired other works on the Qur’an, especially those which are more tradition based, such as those that seek to interpret the Qur’an through the Qur’an and the Prophetic tradition. However, this article demonstrates that the treatise was not historically one of Ibn Taymiyya’s major works, did not have a stable name, and was not copied or disseminated profusely. The various parts of the treatise operated independently of one another, with medieval scholars referencing different parts of it. It was only in the modern period when Arab editors ‘rediscovered’ the work and went through the process of editing, naming, commenting on, and publishing the treatise that it became such an essential factor in our contemporary understanding of the Qur’an. By tracing the endeavours of these editors, we better appreciate the nature of the treatise and how it has influenced modern Qur’anic interpretation.

The Slain Birds by Michael Longley

Reviewed by: The Slain Birds by Michael Longley Fred Dings MICHAEL LONGLEY The Slain Birds Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Wake Forest University Press. 2022. 96 pages. MICHAEL LONGLEY'S new verse collection, The Slain Birds, is mostly a book of miniatures, some poems not exceeding four, five, or even two lines, appearing two per page in eighteen instances; consequently, we read eighty-eight poems in seventy pages. In only a few cases do the poems achieve a length greater than half a page. This matters because, with Longley working in the tradition of poetry being an essential art, it places great pressure on the language to achieve the poetic in a few words. The poet does achieve that benchmark frequently, sometimes as luminously as a dwarf star, but other times, the poems can seem merely notational or observational. The Slain Birds would be a great book if it were edited to 70 percent of its current length, but as such it is only a good book. Patient readers will be rewarded. At his best, Longley uses nuance and carefully selected detail (uncrowded by the inclusion of the superfluous) to attain affecting resonance with few words. Consider the imagery in the following poem, "Agony": "To die like the skylark / parched on a mirage // Or like a tired quail / after crossing the sea [End Page 90] / losing the will to fly and / dying in the first bushes // But not to live lamenting / like a blinded goldfinch." The second image has the pathos of Shelley's "sick eagle looking at the sky." Similarly, what might seem at first like merely descriptive language in "Shell" becomes quickly consequential: "The spring tide keeps us from walking any farther / Towards the sea, so we sit on a reedy bank / And you pick out from wool and seaweed and droppings / A shell and slip into your handbag its spirals / With the fisherman's float I rescued from the lake / Where, more than fifty years ago, we honeymooned. / The ravens in conversation overhead might be / Discussing us or that sheep dead in a hollow / With its yellow ear-tag and delicate black feet." Here, we also hear the powerful influence of that best of Irish poets, William Butler Yeats, in "Adam's Curse." In these two examples, then, we hear Longley at his most poetic and in relation to the best in English-language poetry; however, more times than I would like, these poems seem merely descriptive or of little consequence. For example, consider the poem "Dream": "I dreamed I had written a poem / About the beech tree in our garden. / I tried to find it in our notebook, / I sensed the beech tree taking shape, / Three hundred years of summer leaves." Even if the reader summons the frequent appearance of the beech tree in Western literature and perhaps its specific importance in Irish mythology as providing the slices of bark on which Ogma, a god of poetry and writing, wrote, and even if the reader summons the idea of the body of three hundred years of Irish poetry taking leaf in a time of growth and the poet's own season adding to it—even if the reader brings all of this to the poem, is it enough then for this particular poem to attain effective resonance? The problem poses the larger question: Is mere description or mention of cultural symbols enough for a poem? It's a matter of aesthetic value and province, perhaps. The better question might be, Is the language of the poem optimal? When thinking of descriptive poetry and image, I sometimes recall the influence of Rodin on Rilke, and how Rilke sought to write poems that realized the object of their gaze as fully as did Rodin's sculptures. Rilke's object-poems (dinggedichte), poems like "The Spanish Dancer" and "The Panther," find the language, the shape of sound, that brings the objects (and their interiors) optimally and vividly present. Perhaps that is the project at which some of Longley's poems succeed and others don't; however, to end with another example of Longley's success, I quote a two-line poem, "Eyelid," about the poet's daughter examining the dead...

At the Crossroads: Introducing New Work in Early America and Colonial Latin America

At the Crossroads: Introducing New Work in Early America and Colonial Latin America

Review of The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind

Review of The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind

Mencius and Xunzi between Humaneness and Justice

Mencius and Xunzi between Humaneness and Justice Sungmoon Kim (bio) In his now classic Disputers of the Tao (1989), A. C. Graham aptly captured the central feature of the ancient Chinese world of thought in terms of the dispute about the Way between competing philosophical schools. But it has since long remained an intellectual challenge how to understand and evaluate the unfolding of the philosophical schools in ancient China [End Page 439] coherently from a philosophical standpoint. Tao Jiang's Origins of Moral-Political Philosophy in Early China attempts to meet this long overdue challenge, and it does so admirably with philological rigor and philosophical insight. What is central to Jiang's framework is the conceptual tripod of humaneness, justice, and personal freedom, which he generally understands as "the moral norm that is agent/recipient relative" (especially, natural inclinations toward one's family/kin members), "impartial judgment on the merits of persons and states of affairs," and "the appreciation and cultivation of personal space where one can be left alone … without [being] entangled in the sociopolitical world," respectively.1 Jiang begins with Confucius by presenting him as the first major thinker in Chinese history who wrestled with the tension between humaneness and justice. According to Jiang, Confucius' seminal idea of impartial justice was critically re-appropriated by the Mohists, who advocated "impartial care" (jian ai 兼愛), while his idea of partial humaneness was later developed by Mencius, who upheld "familial virtues" as the pivot of Confucian morality and politics—although, as will be discussed shortly, this represents only one dimension of Mencius' philosophical system. Jiang understands the later development of the Laoist, the fajia ist (commonly known as "Legalist"), and the Zhuangist thoughts, largely as critical responses to the Confucian (especially the Mencian) argument for partial humaneness and the congruity between the familial and the political by naturalizing Heaven (thereby decoupling the political from the familial), developing an objective political system independent of the ruler's moral virtue, and insulating private persons from human relationality and the intervention of the state. Finally, Jiang argues that while Han Feizi's political thought presents the culmination of the early Chinese concern with impartial justice, Xunzi reformulated Confucianism by synthesizing humaneness and justice. I find Tao Jiang's overall argument, buttressed by extensive philological examinations, well-structured and penetrating, and I have no doubt that this book will make an important contribution to Chinese moral and political philosophy. Like many great books, however, Jiang's book makes numerous novel yet controversial claims, and this review aims to engage with several key questions Jiang raises with regard to Mencius and Xunzi, the two giants of classical Confucianism. The Two Strands of Mencius? In interpreting Mencius, Tao Jiang's core argument is that there is "a deep tension at the heart of the Mencian system."2 This tension, according to Jiang, rises from the two incompatible strands in Mencian thought, the "extensionist" strand and the "sacrificialist" strand: [End Page 440] [W]hile the extensionist Mencius operates on the assumption, normative within Confucianism, of congruity between the personal, the familial, and the political domains, the sacrificialist Mencius recognizes a tension between the familial and the political that can be hard to reconcile or even irreconcilable under certain circumstances. Furthermore, the sacrificialist Mencius radically separates the familial from the political and ultimately prioritizes the former over the latter, by embracing the necessity for sacrifice as a way that, at times, is required to save the familial.3 The extensionist Mencius presents the normative (i.e., partial humane) strand of Confucianism, which stipulates the seamless continuity between the personal, the familial, and the political, as best demonstrated in Mencius' statement that "the root of the world lies in the state; the root of the state lies in the family; the root of the family lies in oneself."4 That is, the extensionist strand of Mencius highlights the transformative force of moral self-cultivation that achieves the unity between the inner self and the outer world through the Heaven-decreed human nature, thus denying the categorial separations between ethics and politics, between moral virtue and political virtue, and between private and public. In Jiang's view, the extensionist strand captures...

Cultural Capital: Reflections from a Latin Americanist

<i>Cultural Capital</i>: Reflections from a Latin Americanist

SCIENCE Of INTERPRETATION At lMAM AL – CHAZALI FOR DURING BOOK (REVIVAL Of RELIGIOUS SCIENCES ) CONTEMPLATION DOCUMENTARY

This research is a new step in the beginning of a special study in the science of interpretation by reference . The parameters of this study are clarified by Koranic studies mentioned by lmam AL – Chazali in his book )Revival( where he linked the science of interpretation by reference and the science of purification, and that when he mentioned the concepts of the branches of the science of purification in koranic perspective, he confirms in these koranic studies on the need to adopt the interpretation by reference on the apparent meanings of the text؛ and emphasizes the need to guide the interpretation by reference in the concepts of the sciene of purification or worship؛ moral and missionary aspects to be true. This research has come to limit and clarify this important study , and to show it in the form of an integrated studg after it was scattered throughout this great book (Revival of Religious sciences ), It was difficult to clarify the parameters of this study without being collected, arranged and linked to their scattered concepts between them, This research illustrates a whole study on the science of interpretation by reference and its effect in clarifying the notions of the science of purification in koranic perspective.

Collecting and Directing Correct Qur’anic Readings in Al-Baidawi Explanations' (d.685 AH) Surat Al'anbia' as a Model

&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; Praise be to Allah, the praise of the thankful, and blessings and peace be upon the most honorable of the prophets and messengers, our master Muhammad, and upon all his family and companions. And after ...&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; Because the sciences, even if their origins differ, and their variants vary, then the greatest of them is a matter, the highest mentioned, and the most expensive of which is a dowry that relates to the great Qur’an the best book and the greatest book, and there is no doubt that the science of readings is the most science related to the Book of God it is an honorable science, and an honorable demand, even if knowledge is an honor for the known. ; It derives its sources from the revelation of Allah revealed through our master Gabriel, peace be upon him, to the first teacher of the readings, our master Muhammad. From this point of view, this research is specialized in the correct readings in the interpretation of Imam al-Baidawi (may God have mercy on him) and his name is (collecting and directing the correct Qur’anic readings in Tafsir al-Baidawi) (D.685 AH) Surat Al-Anbiya as a model).

The Term and its Significance in the Holy Qur’an - an Objective Study-

&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; ABSTRACT&#x0D; &#x0D; The overall importance is focused on clarifying the knowledge of the scientific truth of the Qur’anic texts, managing their meanings, knowing the related words to the word in the Qur’anic verses, clarifying the scientific truth of the word contained in the Qur’anic texts, and distinguishing between the higher word, the lower word, the remaining word, and the word piety. There are axes to guide people, and it is difficult to go through them and manage all of them, so I addressed an important aspect of this great book, and this aspect relates to its good words that I chose to be the title of my research entitled (the term of the word and its significance in the Holy Qur’an - an objective study). Since research in such a topic required an extensive study, so I thought it appropriate to limit this study to some Qur’anic verses in which came the word and its significance.&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D;

Two Portrayals of Public Debt in the Formation of Modern Italy: From the Ancien Régime to Modern Capitalism

The unification of Italian public debts in 1861 has been analysed until now without any detailed investigation into the changes that occurred in pre-existent public finance models, particularly as regards the contextualisation of public debt within the evolving framework of Italian capitalism. The Kingdom of Sardinia imposed on the other Italian regions not merely a state, bureaucratic and administrative system, but also an economic and financial one: a modern liberal-capitalist model of northern European origin and inspiration. The transition and incorporation of the Neapolitan public debt into the Great Book of the Italian Public Debt bear witness to this change. The aim of the present article is to investigate the transformation of the Italian public debt's structure. I explore specifically the effects of the shift from registered bonds to bearer bonds in Naples, as exemplifying a more radical metamorphosis and the transition from a public finance model typical of the ancien régime to the modern liberal-capitalist one, which is characterised by the Kingdom of Sardinia.