released 11/30/2018

With characters that include a Dark Lady, a Green Lady, a Silver Lady, a Golden King, and a spoiled princess, Anna Maria Mendell’s book-length fairy story, The Golden Princess and the Moon (2016), is a re-telling of the story of Sleeping Beauty. In this Friday Feature, Mendell talks with Ken Myers about how fairy stories can use the device of magic to call attention to the real nature of things. 

13 minutes

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Theologian Vigen Guroian has been writing and lecturing for many years about how fairy tales form the moral imagination of children (and, sometimes, of grown-ups). His 1998 book, Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child‘s Moral Imagination, has just been reissued in an expanded second edition by Oxford University Press. An interview with him about this book will be presented on Volume 158 of the Journal. Meanwhile, today’s Feature presents a reading of an article by Guroian originally published in 2020 in Touchstone: “The Fairy Tale Wars: Lewis, Chesterton, at al. against the Frauds, Experts, and Revisionists.” In the article, Guroian critiques (with help from Charles Dickens, John Ruskin, C. S. Lewis, and G. K. Chesterton) the common practice of retelling traditional stories in ways that eliminate the meaning of the originals.

Related reading and listening

  • The (super)natural theology of fairy-tales — Alison Milbank describes Chesterton’s belief that story-telling is an affirmation of transcendent meaning
  • Aslan, the Christ-figure of Narnia — Alex Markos explores the transformational power of Aslan as the Christ figure in C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. (31 minutes)
  • Apprehending the enduring things — Vigen Guroian explains how children’s literature has the capacity to birth the moral imagination in our children, affirming for them the permanent things. (53 minutes)
  • Ruinous reductions and brash bowdlerizations — Ken Myers reads an article by Vigen Guroian, “The Fairy Tale Wars: Lewis, Chesterton, at al. against the Frauds, Experts, and Revisionists.” In the article, Guroian critiques the common practice of retelling traditional stories in ways that eliminate the meaning of the originals. (31 minutes)
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 158 — FEATURED GUESTS: David Setran, Vigen Guroian, Michael Dominic Taylor, Thomas Pfau, Jason Paone, and Matthew Levering
  • From myth to sacramentality — Craig Bernthal: Tolkien asserts that reading fairy stories is a way to ‘recover’ the world”
  • The reality that science cannot see — Philosopher Paul Tyson illustrates features of daily life that science cannot “see,” such as love, friendship, justice, and hope, and argues that such things are nonetheless real. (20 minutes)
  • Virtue and myth in Middle-earth — Ralph C. Wood and Bradley Birzer discuss Christian wisdom, virtues, and the strength of myth in J. R. R. Tolkien’s created world of Middle-earth. (33 minutes)
  • Man, myth, and Middle-earth — Tom Shippey and Joseph Pearce discuss the “author of the century,” J. R. R. Tolkien, and assert the power of myth to convey deep truth. (26 minutes)
  • On children’s literature and gardening — Vigen Guroian discusses profound fairy tales and the pleasures of gardening. (20 minutes)
  • Further up and further in: understanding Narnia — Joseph Pearce explains how fairy stories can open our eyes to the depths of reality if we read them with the virtue of humility. (15 minutes)
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 142 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stanley Hauerwas, Perry L. Glanzer, Nathan F. Alleman, Jeffrey Bishop, Alan Jacobs, D. C. Schindler, and Marianne Wright
  • Chesterton and Tolkien as theologians — Alison Milbank discusses how both Chesterton and Tolkien restore reason to fantasy and help us to see things as we were meant to see them. (20 minutes)
  • Vigen Guroian: “Awakening the Moral Imagination: Teaching Virtues through Fairy Tales” — Vigen Guroian contrasts the features of character and virtue with those of what is more modernly called “values,” and examines how these different approaches to moral consideration reflect conflicting ways of understanding self-formation. (48 minutes)
  • Stronger than death — Alan Jacobs and Mark Shea defend the portrayal of magic in the Harry Potter books.
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 40 — FEATURED GUESTS: Joseph Epstein, John Gray, Kenneth R. Craycraft, Jr., William T. Pizzi, Pamela Walker Laird, Albert Borgmann, Neal Stephenson, and Alan Jacobs
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