Reaching into the Silence

By Rodney Delasanta, René Fortin, and Brian Barbour Reaching into the Silence presents thirty-four essays on seventeen major authors and some twelve hundred years of literary history. Selected from the work of three friends who taught together for decades at Providence College, these essays exemplify the outlook of Catholic Humanism: grounded in the Creed and blending a love of letters and the arts with a conviction that reality is sacramental; that human beings live in a metaphysically grounded and morally ordered universe in which good and evil are real alternatives; that the human person is a unity of body and spirit with an eternal destiny, not a mere bundle of appetites and desires; and that, in Newman’s words, “the human race is implicated in some terrible aboriginal calamity” from which it needs the redemption won by Christ. Words, after speech, reachInto the silence.  (T. S. Eliot, Burnt Norton) Treating Chaucer and Shakespeare, Austen and Wordsworth, Flaubert and Dostoyevsky