Smiling Through the Cultural Catastrophe: Toward the Revival of Higher Education
by Mr. Jeffrey Hart
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Book Summary Information
Author: Mr. Jeffrey HartEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2001-08-01
ISBN: 0300087047
Number of pages: 288
Publisher: Yale University Press
Book Reviews of Smiling Through the Cultural Catastrophe: Toward the Revival of Higher Education
Book Review: The Tension Between Faith and Reason
Summary: 4 Stars
Jeffrey Hart, the author of "Smiling Through the Cultural Catastrophe" is an eccentric Professor Emeritus from Dartmouth. Following in the footsteps of his own professors, who included Jacques Barzun and Mark Van Doren, Hart is a great proponent of Western Civilization and a truly liberal education. In the wake of the multiculturist wave that swept academic in the 1980's, he became an outspoken advocate of the traditional "Great Books" education that was once the foundation of a liberal arts education. In his preface, he cites the premise advanced by one of his own professors at Dartmouth, a German refugee named Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy who felt that the goal of the educational system must be to help create citizens who he defined as a "person who if need be, can re-create his civilization." Hart wants an educated American to "understand his civilization in the large, its shape and texture, its narrative and its major themes, its important areas of thought, its philosophies and religious controversies, its scientific development, its major works of the imagination." These are demanding but laudable goals and in this short book of essays Hart illuminates the tensions in western culture between the classical secular philosophical foundation on one hand and the moral and religious tradition on the other. He feels that it is this tension, the attempt to reconcile reason and faith that makes western civilization unique. In my own reading, it is this balance between faith and reason that is perhaps the central element in the American founding. In many of these essays, which the author has clearly thought through over decades of teaching, he contrasts intellectual figures from the world of secular reason with those who have been religiously inspired. Hart contrasts Athens with Jerusalem, Socrates with Jesus, Moliere with Voltaire, Dosteyevsky with F. Scott Fitzgerald. Other essays include "Moses as an Epic Hero" and one on St. Paul. Although this book was written in reaction to what the author felt was a cultural crisis, the title is not particularly apt as the book is not a manifesto of any kind, but an elegantly written meditation on the great literary and philosophical classics that Jeffrey Hart introduced generations of students to.
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