Saturday, March 17, 2007

John Fleming Interview (podcast)

Anchoress points to a neat interview with Middle Ages scholar John Fleming, conducted by Fausta.

Transcript here.

5 comments:

Athos said...

Tidy little article. Makes me want to get deeper into Christopher Dawson, Eamon Duffy (Stripping of the Altars) and more Belloc. The latter, BTW, seems to be more and more substantiated by the work of Duffy and Scarisbrick, revisionist historians, who see the English "reformation" as begun with the enlistment of a "few brave, sincere and often unbalanced men," but finished by "a pack of robbers ... who licked their lips" at the chance to rob "ordinary people of their protector, the Church (Ker, 62).

Belloc's cold eye (two Firsts in History, Oxford) sees the Reformation as the genesis of the "isolation of the unsupported soul," the modern European mind:

"Protestant culture is now 'ending by abandoning human reason.' The soul is left not only isolated but paralyzed: 'When reason is dethroned, not only is Faith dethroned (the two subversions go together), but every moral and legitimate activity of the human soul is dethroned at the same time' (The Great Heresies)."

Porthos said...

Did I tell you I got Dawson a while back, at your recommendation? It was good.

Fausta said...

Thank you for the link

Athos said...

And a hearty welcome, Fausta!

An aside: Ian Ker's The Catholic Revival in English Literature, 1845-1963 provides a nifty springboard for introductory glimpses of Newman, Hopkins, Belloc, Chesterton, Greene, and Waugh.

Porthos said...

Guys, we've got babes visiting us again! How can we get them to stick around?

Quick, see if Fr. Phil has any good homilies.