Latest links from Dappled Things editors
A Story from A New Decameron
From Pete Candler, curator of A New Decameron,
“As you know, The Decameron was written in the middle of the fourteenth century, a particularly eventful time in central Europe, when the Black Plague ravaged the continent. Boccaccio used the Plague as the subtext for his mammoth collection of stories in which ten citizens of Florence flee their hometown to seek sanctuary in the countryside. For ten days, they take turns telling stories to one another to pass the time, and to share in common humanity. . . . I don’t know how many people are going to read Boccaccio these days, but I had a thought: why not recreate the Decameron for our time?” “So Long Ago,” by Richard Bausch is a recommended story from the new Decamaron collection.
Writings by Joshua Hren, Friend of Dappled Things and Former Managing Editor
Evelyn Waugh on his first voyage to the United States in 1947
- What Evelyn Waugh saw in America (An Anglo-American romance), at America.
- Old Blood at The Agonist. (“Old Blood” will appear in Hren’s second collection of short stories, In the Wine Press, forthcoming in May 2020.)
“Great American Fiction and the Catholic Literary Imagination”
This review of Nick Ripatrazone’s book, Longing for an Absent God: Faith and Doubt in Great American Fiction, by James Matthew Wilson is at National Review.
Empty St. Patrick’s Cathedral
Heroes of the Fourth Turning
Said to be “a play both critical and sympathetic to Catholic conservatives,” Heroes of the Fourth Turning was given the best drama award by the New York Drama Critic’s Circle. It’s reviewed in “‘Heroes of the Fourth Turning’ is a haunted play about religious conservatives” at The Outline by B.D. McClay.
Suggestions for an Apologetics that Inverts the Categories of Postmodern Culture
In “The Ultimately Liberal Condition” at First Things April 1995, Roger Lundin wrote persuasively that those “who try to use “the language of postmodern pragmatism as a useful technique for apologetics” run this risk: “to borrow Shakespeare’s image, the Christian who adopts postmodern language is likely to find himself ‘hoist with his own petard.'” Lundin advises us to ponder Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s observation that the Christian must be worldly, with “the profound this-worldliness characterized by discipline and the constant knowledge of death and resurrection.”
With cunning, passion, sincerity, and perseverance, Christians may bring to postmodern culture good news that completely inverts the categories of that culture. To an age that believes that freedom makes you true, Christians respond with a more ancient message, ‘You shall know the truth, and the truth will make you free.’”
