The Center for Christian Study

presents

An Evening with Vigen Guroian

Rallying the Really Human Things:

The Moral Imagination in Politics, Literature,

and Everyday Life

(Intercollegiate Studies Institute 2005)

November 14, 2005

7:00 p.m.

The Center for Christian Study

128 Chancellor Street

For more information please call Carl Briggs at (434) 817-1050

or e-mail carl@studycenter.net

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 Edmund 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. 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.

Guroian explains that “Chesterton’s ‘really human things’ may be defined as certain perennial powers and attributes of human existence, perennial because they express the given nature of that creature whom God has created in his own image. Modern man misuses and mars these distinctively human things through his hubris and impiety.. . . The abuse of our sexual nature and procreative powers, the undermining of the biblical and Christian understanding of marriage and the family, the rape of nature, the moral and intellectual evisceration of liberal education, the degradation of work and misspent leisure—all are signs of our cultural decadence.” (x)

During this November 14 presentation, Guroian will give examples from his book that further elaborate on Chesterton’s vision for a true, and thereby, Christian humanism.

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