released 9/10/2024

Amidst the tyranny of senseless, fragmented images and shallow stories of our age, the great fairy tales resonate with the deepest qualities of our humanity and draw us into the mystery of virtue. So argues Vigen Guroian, Professor of Religious Studies and Orthodox Christianity at the University of Virginia. In this lecture from October 2013, Guroian explains how children’s literature has the capacity to birth the moral imagination in our children, affirming for them the permanent things. Great fairy tales challenge us, enabling us to make correlations, through allegory and metaphor, between the imaginary world and our own. They enrich the moral imagination as children see virtue “come to life.” Guroian concludes his lecture with the example of Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio, which illustrates how virtues are our path to becoming fully human.

This lecture is provided courtesy of Anselm House.

53 minutes

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