August 11, 2021
“Now, in these terrible latter days of the once violent and beloved America, and of the Christ-forgetting, Christ-obsessed, death-bringing Western world, I lost myself in a grove of young pines and wondered, Has it finally happened?”
Dr. Tom More, a descendant of Britain’s great martyr, says this in the first sentence of Walker Percy’s third novel:
Love in the Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic in a Time Near the End of the World.
Written in 1971, this prophetic work presents a world strikingly similar to our own. Today’s guest, literary scholar Jessica Hooten Wilson, joins the show to give us an overview of Percy and discuss aspects of many of his best-loved novels. love in ruinsshe describes it as a “panoramic satire” that shows how modern day’s “lost sense of self makes it impossible to live a good life.”
Topics include:
- How Percy’s Southernness Influenced His Novels
- his sharp and ruthless observations on race relations;
- His repeated commentary on the modern dissociation between mind and body, which protagonist Tom More calls oscillating between the angelic and the bestial.
- his use of apocalyptic themes
- His treatment of love between men and women
- the lasting importance of his work
link
walker percy love in ruins https://www.amazon.com/Love-Ruins-Walker-Percy/dp/0312243111
jessica hooten wilson https://JessicaHoutenWilson.com/
JHW, Read novels by Walker Percy
https://www.amazon.com/Reading-Walker-Percys-Novels-Jessica/dp/0807168777
JHW, Walker Percy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and the Search for Influence
https://www.amazon.com/Dostoevsky-Influence-Literature-Religion-Postsecular/dp/0814213499
Click this link to join the online Great Books VIP waitlist and receive 25% off your first 3 months. https://hj424.isrefer.com/go/ogbmemberships/tmirus/
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