Worth Reading: The Ancients

Worth Reading is An Unexpected Journal’s book recommendations column. Each issue we highlight a few titles, related to that issue’s theme, that are recommended by AUJ staff, contributors, or readers. […]

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Ancients of Old

So many times, we are pushed to look at contemporary work because it’s new and innovative. Yet, we forget that there would not be anything we consider modern without the […]

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The Return of the Kings: Comparing the Homecoming of Odysseus and the Two Comings of Christ

After twenty years of suffering and wandering, Odysseus finally returns to his home country of Ithaca. He knows that in his absence, wicked men have taken up residence in his […]

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Review: After Humanity

Michael Ward. After Humanity: A Guide to C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man. Park Ridge, IL: Word on Fire Academic, 2021. 243 pp.   Initial Impressions   A review is […]

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Pius Samwise: Roman Heroism in The Lord of the Rings

J.R.R. Tolkien received early training in the classics under Robert Cary Gilson when he studied at King Edward’s, an independent secondary school in Birmingham. According to Tolkien’s official biographer, Humphrey […]

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The Imaginative Strategy of Boethius

Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy, though less well known today, was extremely influential in the Middle Ages. Through the late Middle Ages, reason and imagination were firmly integrated in the […]

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Drinking from the Well of the Past: A Reflection on the Role of History in Literature & Philosophy for the Modern World

Very deep is the well of the past. Should we not call it bottomless? Bottomless indeed, if — and perhaps only if — the past we mean is the past […]

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Till They Have Faces: Lewis’s Psyche Meets the Modern Helen of Troy and Circe

I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the […]

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O Honor, Where Art Thou?: A Modern Day Odyssey

At first glance, bluegrass music and southern, Depression-era culture seem to be a world apart from the classic Greek myth, Homer’s Odyssey. O Brother, Where Art Thou? is a film […]

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Nicomachean Ethics and the Enemy Within

In his The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle suggests that right knowledge, right character, and right choice are enough to produce wholly moral persons. In his calls to act virtuously, Aristotle clearly […]

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