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TITLE
Emerging from the Wasteland: The Cultural Reaction to the Desert of Modernity
DATE:
Sunday, June 29, 2003
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DESCRIPTION
cultural response to the nihilism and agnosticism of Modernity.
Leading with a discussion of Eliot's The Waste Land, the Paper will examine the artistic reaction to the scientism and cynicism that have characterised the self-proclaimed (and ultimately illusory) 'progressiveness' of modern thought. Through the eyes of Eliot, C.S. Lewis, Chesterton, Belloc, Tolkien and a number of other literary giants, we shall see how the forceful arguments of Art & Tradition have exposed the fallacious nature of social, political and cultural 'progressivism'.
In stressing the incisive perceptiveness of this cultural response we shall see the paradox at the heart of all contemporary debate on the nature of the individual and society. It will be seen that the function of Tradition is to restore life and order to the moribund vacuity and desert of so-called 'progressive modernity'. Only the restoration of the Ancient, sinking the roots of perennial truth into the infertile soil of Modernity and its bankrupt materialism, can revitalize the Modern. This is radicalism in its original form, i.e. the linking of the fruits of culture to the roots of culture. As Chesterton never tired of telling us, orthodoxy is always dynamic. This dynamic orthodoxy is the breath of life that restores theology, philosophy, science and art to its proper relationship with reality. It is also the dynamic which will restore the proper relationship between the individual and the community.
Mr. Joseph Pearce |
SPEAKER/PERFORMER INFORMATION
Joseph Pearce has written books on two of the 20th century's literary giants, G.K. Chesteron and Hilaire Belloc. Friends in the same Faith, these men sought to understand and articulate the glories of the Catholic past and the contemporary ideological challenges of their own day. G. K. Chesterton once remarked that the Catholic Church saves a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his own age. Mr. Pearce will investigate the freeing intellectual breath of two great champions of Catholic culture.
LECTURE PREVIEW
SERIES THEME:
Communitas, 2003 Eichstatt
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