The English or French essay has been in many ways the most delightful of literary expressions. Moreover, the essay has been particularly adapted to Christianity, to its concreteness, to its awareness of the importance not just of ideas or thoughts, but of little things, particular moments wherein salvation and joy more especially take place.
Idylls and Rambles takes its title from the two journals of Samuel Johnson,
The Idler and
The Rambler. Johnson was the most insightful and original of men. Too, this book takes its form, the number of its chapters, from Belloc who loved the essay and who wrote so charmingly and profoundly about everything he saw. These particular essays are moments Father Schall has seen, people he has known. They are often lightsome, yet they bear the sense that it is in joy that our most perplexing moments occur for joy, more than sadness perhaps, leads to the highest things in which we exist.
''Hurrah for Fr. Schall. He is keeping alive in our time one of the noblest, and most ancient, forms of literature, namely, the short essay. But if 'noble' and 'ancient' suggest solemn, think again. 'He who has the faith has the fun,' said Chesterton. We readers are the beneficiaries of this maxim in Fr. Schall's essays. There is fun and substance, and serious reflection, and all of it in good prose, and all of it suffused with the spirit of a robust Christian orthodoxy.''
Thomas Howard, Author, Chance or the Dance
''James Schall inherits the talents of the authors of The Idler and The Rambler and other eighteenth-century periodicals of that character. Like Samuel Johnson, he is moved by a profound religious conviction that suffuses his reflections.''
Russell Kirk
