Tag: literature

Organized community events bring people together and are an integral part of forging strong communal bonds in a place. Like the law, they serve a purpose in a community’s ecosystem of relationships.

To love and learn from each other in our communities is what good gossiping accomplishes.

Maybe, in the end, a home library does what a long-inhabited home does: charts a middle ground between the chaos of the world and the hyper-rationality of modernity.

Joshua Hren’s new novel, Blue Walls Falling Down, releases today. We’re happy to share the following excerpt with FPR readers.

Hence this book is something special: a new set of Christian fables on natural law that do more than teach simple morals or seek to modify children’s behavior.

Rudyard Kipling’s 1902 Just So Stories are a delightful anomaly—they feel like folk tales but were largely invented by Kipling himself as bedtime stories for his eldest daughter, Josephine.

To counter dogmatic worldviews, we should read prudently and widely across time periods and cultures and not avoid difficult content because of fear.

Out-of-sight, out-of-mind is the quintessential modern American problem-solving strategy, and it sure does have a lot going for it, when it comes to dealing with our problem of stuff—that other quintessential modern American problem. Alas, it won’t work in this case, for we really do pull these things off the shelves regularly to look up one thing or another. And it is wonderfully convenient to be able to say “oh, yes, here’s where I read about this topic” to a friend who is over for dinner—and then pull the book I’m thinking about off the shelf, right then and there.

Witnessing the ascendancy of the Machine, Lewis understood what was at stake. He watched this ideology sweep across his society and take hold in its schools, and he keenly felt the loss of what was so hastily displaced and soon forgotten. The medieval worldview that Lewis cherished was replaced by an ideology that breeds nihilism and despair.

Gatsby’s character yearns for the infinite; he sparkles with something unusual in the midst of the lavish wealth and chaotic parties of Long Island’s frivolities. Gatsby has “one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it . . . it faced—or seemed to face—the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor.”