BiblioFiles: A CenterForLit Podcast about Great Books, Great Ideas, and the Great Conversation

One of the most beautiful elements of literature is its ability to offer a limitless variety of perspectives on the nature of man. Each story is unique in the experience it offers the reader. That is why, after recently discussing the role of art as an act of communion between humans, we decided to compare notes on the stories we've been reading lately and share how each author addresses the universal problem of isolation. Fasten your seat belts–this week Percy, Tolstoy, Hawthorne, Sartre, and McCarthy join the Andrews in the Great Conversation.

Referenced Works:

–An Experiment in Criticism by C.S. Lewis: literature "heals the wound of individuality"

–The Moviegoer by Walker Percy

–War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

–The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

–No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre: "Hell is other people."

–All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

–Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

We love hearing your questions and comments! You can contact us by emailing [email protected], or you can visit our website www.centerforlit.com to find even more ways to participate in the conversation. 

Sometimes a conversation is just so good that we can't let it drop after only one episode! This time we decided to continue our discussion about art by asking the question "should art be beautiful?" We want our children to see and know that which is truly beautiful, but do we do them harm when we also neglect that which is ugly? There's a lot of truth, beauty, and goodness action in this episode–we hope you enjoy!

Referenced Materials:

–Cheers, directed by James Burrows

–Married with Children, created by Ron Leavitt and Michael G. Moye

–"Beauty" (taken from Nature: Addresses and Lectures) by Ralph Waldo Emerson

–"Ode on a Grecian Urn" by John Keats

–The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

–The Dadaist movement

–"Musee des Beaux Arts" by W.H. Auden

We love hearing your questions and comments! You can contact us by emailing [email protected], or you can visit our website www.centerforlit.com to find even more ways to participate in the conversation. 

Hooray! We're back! After a painfully long absence, the CenterForLit team has returned to wrestle with the hard questions of the Great Conversation. This time, we're broadening our scope a little. If we assume that literature is art, then we're forced to ask: What is art? What makes art good or bad? Must art be beautiful to be good? What does this mean for us as readers? Can we look into all the nooks and crannies of this question in 50 minutes? Probably not. But we might as well get the ball rolling!

Referenced Works:

–"What is Art?" by Leo Tolstoy

–Lyrical Ballads by William Wordsworth

–The Road by Cormac McCarthy

–"The Origin of the Work of Art" by Martin Heidegger

–The works of Stephen Crane, Marilynne Robinson, George MacDonald, and Edgar Allan Poe

We love hearing your questions and comments! You can contact us by emailing [email protected], or you can visit our website www.centerforlit.com to find even more ways to participate in the conversation. 

The postmodern movement introduced a nihilistic philosophy of reading that divorced a work of literature from any kind of meaning. As Christians, we see red flags when we hear the word "nihilism," but could it be that sometimes we fall into this same trap? Is there such a thing as Christian Deconstructionism? Join the Andrews clan as we sit down to hash out the implications of reading literature to teach morals. 

Referenced Works:

– "Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom fully realize the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors." -C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism

– War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

– The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

– Bust It Like a Mule by Caleb Mannan

We love hearing your questions and comments! You can contact us by emailing [email protected], or you can visit our website www.centerforlit.com to find even more ways to participate in the conversation. 

In our last BiblioFiles episode, we tried to define "The Great Conversation" and suggest the purpose it might have in today's world. This time the Andrews begin a discussion of how one goes about participating in that conversation by attempting to figure out what the reader's role is when approaching works of literature.

Referenced Works:

–Areopagitica by John Milton

We love hearing your questions and comments! You can contact us by emailing [email protected], or you can visit our website www.centerforlit.com to find even more ways to participate in the conversation.