Rallying The Really Human Things: Moral Imagination In Politics Literature & Everyday Lif [Hardcover]

Vigen Guroian (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 30, 2005

For Vigen Guroian, contemporary culture is distinguished by its relentless assault on the moral imagination. In the stories it tells us, in the way it has degraded courtship and sexualized our institutions of higher education, in the ever-more-radical doctrines of human rights it propounds, and in the way it threatens to remake human nature via biotechnology, contemporary culture conspires to deprive men and women of the kind of imagination that Edmund Burke claimed allowed us to raise our perception of our own human dignity, or to "cover the defects of our own naked shivering nature." In Rallying the Really Human Things, Guroian combines a theologian's keen sensitivity to the things of the spirit with his immersion in the works of Burke, Russell Kirk, G. K. Chesterton, Flannery O'Connor, St. John Chrysostom, and other exemplars of the religious humanist tradition to diagnose our cultural crisis. But he also points the way towards a culture more solicitous of the "really human things," the Chesterton phrase from which he takes his title. Guroian's wide-ranging analysis of these times provides a fresh and inimitable perspective on the practices and mores of contemporary life.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Vigen Guroian is Professor of Theology at Loyola College in Maryland. He is the author of numerous articles and books, including Ethics after Christendom: Toward an Ecclesial Christian Ethic (Eerdmans Pub Co, 1994) and Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child?s Imagination (Oxford University Press; New Ed edition, 2002).

Product Details

• Hardcover: 325 pages
• Publisher: Intercollegiate Studies Institute (May 30, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 193223649X
• ISBN-13: 978-1932236491
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,681,955 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars Great collection of essays, June 30, 2011

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David G. Moore "Author advocate" (Austin, Texas) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: Rallying The Really Human Things: Moral Imagination In Politics Literature & Everyday Lif (Hardcover)

This is a wonderful collection of essays on Chesterton, Flannery O'Connor, and Edmund Burke. There is a terrific chapter on what business folks ought to be reading...and it is not "business books."

5.0 out of 5 stars Here are some of the inexplicably missing capsule reviews -, January 27, 2008

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Mr. Tom "tombyzantium" (Jacksonville, FL USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Rallying The Really Human Things: Moral Imagination In Politics, Literature, and Everyday Life (Paperback)

"Vigen Gurorian's courageous and discerning vision illuminates both current issues of burning importance (campus promiscuity, nationalism, and gay marriage, for example), and major Christian thinkers of the recent past (Chesterton, O'Connor, and Kirk). This compendium is a resource that will help us all see more clearly."
-- Frederica Mathewes-Green, columnist for Beliefnet.com and author of The Illumined Heart: The Ancient Christian Path of Transformation

"Guroian is a rare and precious bird these days: a scholar of the Real. Here he focuses his moral passion and theologian's mind on some of today's most smoldering issues."
-- Kevin Ryan, Professor Emeritus, Boston University

"These eloquent and wide-ranging essays in the moral imagination establish Vigen Guroian as our own Chesterton. For with fine Chestertonian wit, he demonstrates that the modern West is not heinously wicked so much as it is wildly virtuous, as the old Christian virtues, uprooted from their native theological soil, continue to produce mad sprouts. Responding astringently to the cultural and religious vexations of our age, Guroian restores these saving virtues to the deep loam of Christian tradition."
-- Ralph Wood, University Professor of Theology and Literature, Baylor University

"Rallying the Really Human Things does not so much inform as remind. Vigen Guroian has busied himself with one of the most pressing tasks in our intellectual life, which is to rescue the dignified word "humanism" from the damage wrought upon it by both the secularly self-sufficient and the piously ignorant."
-- Tracy Lee Simmons, author of Climbing Parnassus: A New Apologia for Greek and Latin

"Professor Guroian's book is both a powerful and provocative defense of traditional Christian humanism in its conflict with secularism."
-- Bob Cheeks, intellectualconservative.com

"Of course, this review hasn't even mentioned excellent essays on 'gay marriage' and why businessmen 'should read great literture.' There are myriad positions in his pages I would like to sound with trumpets on one hand and anathematize on the other. Like Chesterton, Guroian can write infuriating passages, but never dull ones."
-- David Paul Deavel, Gilbert Magazine