Vigen Guroian: “Awakening the Moral Imagination: Teaching Virtues through Fairy Tales”

An Intercollegiate Studies Institute Partner Feature

released 4/5/2018

In this audio reprint of Vigen Guroian’s “Awakening the Moral Imagination,” Guroian discusses the role that fairy tales plays in moral formation. The multi-dimensional world of the fairy tale has the capacity to depict a compelling vision of what is good and evil without reducing moral formation to mere instruction and the moral imagination to advanced utilitarian reasoning skills. In this essay, Guroian also 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.

This essay was originally published in the Intercollegiate Review, Fall 1996, and is read by Ken Myers.

48 minutes

PREVIEW

The audio player for this program is restricted to MHA members and friends of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. Log in or sign up now to listen to it.

Related reading and listening

A prophetic “wake-up call” — In this 2024 lecture honoring the bicentennial of George MacDonald’s birth, Malcolm Guite explores MacDonald’s power to awaken readers’ spirits and effect in them a change of consciousness. (59 minutes)
Perceiving truths that dazzle gradually — Rolland Hein on lessons from George MacDonald about the imagination as a spiritual faculty
We wonder as they wander — Daniel Gabelman on the spiritual geography of George MacDonald’s fairyland
Foolishness, gravity, and the Church — In this essay, Albert L. Shepherd V explains why George MacDonald’s story “The Light Princess” is meant for “all who are childlike in faith and imagination.” (8 minutes)
Victorian ideas about belief and doubt — FROM VOL. 148 Timothy Larsen situates George MacDonald within a Victorian understanding of faith and doubt. (17 minutes)
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)
Constructing your Favorites List — Ken Myers describes the new ecosystem of Mars Hill Audio’s membership/partnership program and shares clips from five recent lectures released as Bonus Features. (26 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)
Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 162 — FEATURED GUESTS: Mark Noll, R. Jared Staudt, Paul Weston, William C. Hackett, Hans Boersma, and David Paul Baird
Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
The rediscovery of meaning — Poet and theologian Malcolm Guite explains Owen Barfield’s idea of the development of consciousness over time, an evolution made evident through language that reveals an earlier, pre-modern way of seeing the world. (63 minutes)
In the image of an Imaginer — Dorothy L. Sayers on the inevitability of analogical language about God (and everything else)
Teaching for wonderfulness — Stratford Caldecott on why education is about how we become more human, and therefore more free
A George MacDonald symposium — Excerpts from four interviews talking about the work of George MacDonald: Michael Di Fuccia, Marianne Wright, David Fagerberg, and Daniel Gabelman. (28 minutes)
George MacDonald on the imagination — Readings from two essays by George MacDonald about how the human imagination is “made in the image” of God’s imagination. (20 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
With Eastern eyes — Paul Valliere and Vigen Guroian discuss questions of law, politics, and human nature from the Orthodox tradition. (34 minutes)
The story of the demotion of stories — Malcolm Guite on the Enlightenment’s rash dismissal of poetic knowledge
From myth to sacramentality — Craig Bernthal: Tolkien asserts that reading fairy stories is a way to ‘recover’ the world”
Faith born of wonder — Theologian Andrew Davison echoes a theme in the work of G. K. Chesterton, describing the work of apologetics as awakening a sense of wonder in the reality of Creation as a beautiful gift. (23 minutes)
How myth speaks to deep desires in the human heart — Rolland Hein explains that George MacDonald is a writer of myth functioning rightly, and that such myth affects people a-rationally, stirring something in them much deeper than intellect or emotion alone. (15 minutes)
A Lenten meditation on gardening — Theologian Vigen Guroian reads “Lenten Spring,” a gardener’s meditation on the anticipation of new life, material and spiritual. (16 minutes)
Thomas Howard on Charles Williams — From a 1995 interview, literary scholar Thomas Howard describes the texture and depth of the “metaphysical thrillers” of Charles Williams. (16 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)
Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 144 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jonathan Mcintosh, Kevin Vost, Malcolm Guite, R. David Cox, Grant Brodrecht, and Peter Bouteneff
On children’s literature and gardening — Vigen Guroian discusses profound fairy tales and the pleasures of gardening. (20 minutes)
Alison Milbank: Imaginative Apologetics beyond C. S. Lewis — Alison Milbank offers an approach to defending the Christian faith that restores the imagination as a faculty inseparable from reason. (61 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)
Fairy tales and what’s really real — Anna Maria Mendell describes how fairy stories can use the device of magic to call attention to the real nature of things. (13 minutes)
Mary Midgley, R.I.P. — Philosopher Mary Midgley (1919–2018) was a tireless critic of the reductionist, atomistic claims of modern science. (16 minutes)
The risk of stories — George Steiner on the necessity of vulnerable imaginations
Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 103 — FEATURED GUESTS: Steven D. Smith, David Thomson, Adam McHugh, Glenn C. Arbery, Eric Miller, and Eric Metaxas
Alan Jacobs on The Narnian — Alan Jacobs discusses C. S. Lewis’s view of the imagination and his deep conviction that the shaping of the conscience requires the training of the imagination. (53 minutes)
Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 76 — FEATURED GUESTS: D. H. Williams, Catherine Edwards Sanders, Ted Prescott, Martin X. Moleski, Stephen Prickett, and Barrett Fisher
The arts and public funding — Ken Myers answers a letter from a high school student asking about whether Christians should support the idea of federal funding for the arts.
Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 75 — FEATURED GUESTS: Mark Malvasi, John Lukacs, Steve Talbott, Christian Smith, Eugene Peterson, and Rolland Hein
The Christian Mind of C. S. Lewis — Interviews about Lewis with Clyde Kilby, Michael Aeschliman, James Como, Bruce L. Edwards, Thomas Howard, and Gilbert Meilaender. Plus a reading by Alan Jacobs. (73 minutes)

Tags: Fairy stories Guroian, Vigen Imagination