originally published 10/2/2015

Historian Christopher Shannon discusses how American academic historical writing presents a grand narrative of progressivism, which it defends by subscribing to an orthodoxy of objective Reason. In The Past as Pilgrimage: Narrative, Tradition, and the Renewal of Catholic History, Shannon and his colleague, Christopher Blum, take their cue from Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, in which MacIntyre argued that a community’s conception of the good is rooted and upheld in communal stories and practices. For Shannon, the historian’s craft is to give an authentic re-telling of a community’s vision of the good as it is sustained through story and practice. This Archive Feature was originally presented in 2015 on Volume 127 of the Journal.

21 minutes

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