Classical Et Cetera

When you finish a great novel, is there one idea you were meant to walk away with? And if you miss it, have you missed the book? In this Classical Et Cetera we ask whether every story is built around a single theme, or whether literature is more open than that. We discuss reading a book two ways, letting it have its way with you and then stepping back to understand i...

Can anyone have the best of both worlds? In this _Margin Notes_ we take up C.S. Lewis’s _The Great Divorce_ — where a bus carries ghosts from a grey town to the outskirts of heaven, and each is asked to surrender the one thing they love more than God. We discuss whether pride or selfishness lies at the root of every refusal, why heaven must be chosen while hell is on...

If you could build a book list for a single century, what would make the cut? In this Classical Et Cetera we land on the 1800s, the century of the novel. We discuss why the form exploded with rising literacy, the printing press, and serialized fiction, then trade lists across English, Russian, French, American, and Norwegian writers plus the Romantic poets. We also s...

Graham Greene’s _he End of the Affair asks whether God can draw good out of the worst we do. In this Margin Note we follow Maurice Bendrix, Sarah, and her husband Henry through jealousy, hatred, and an unlikely pull toward faith. We discuss ordinary corrupt human love and its limits, suffering as a strange pathway to grace, the thin line between love and hat...

Have you ever sat down to read and found you couldn’t focus for more than a few minutes? In this mailbag Classical Et Cetera we answer that question and more. We discuss why Rod & Staff math moves slowly on purpose, whether you can mix and match curriculum (and where that goes wrong), Charlotte Mason narration versus comprehension questi...