The Moral Imagination

The dystopia novel. Discuss the language: Newspeak, doublethink, memory hole.

Hemingway's WWI novel. Hard, beautiful, sad.

Southern Gothic stories with Catholic theological backbones. Read the title story aloud.

Orwell's anti-Stalinist fable. Short, perfectly constructed, devastating.

The greatest of marriage novels. Older end of this range.

Divine law vs. civil law. The original conscience-and-state drama.

The pear-stealing chapter (Book II), the death of his friend (IV), the garden conversion (VIII). Full reading at 16-18.

The other great twentieth-century dystopia. Read alongside 1984 and discuss which we got.

Waugh's account of "the operation of divine grace on a group of diverse but closely connected characters."

A student murders a pawnbroker and discovers what conscience is. The first serious novel many readers have.

Willy Loman, sixty-three and finished, comes home from a sales trip he could not complete. The American play about a man who believed the wrong promises.

An American with Republican guerrillas in the Spanish Civil War. Hemingway's most ambitious novel.

Pip, Miss Havisham, Magwitch. Dickens at his most controlled.

A prince meets his father's ghost on the battlements at Elsinore and is asked to remember. The greatest play in the language. Read aloud; the Branagh film after.

The St. Crispin's Day speech alone justifies reading. Pair with the Olivier or Branagh film.

The full novel without abridgment. Pair with Wuthering Heights for the Brontë contrast.

Read unabridged if possible, or use a serious abridgment. The Bishop of Digne scene is one of the great moments in literature.

Three short speeches that contain the moral and rhetorical core of American statesmanship.

Shakespeare's shortest tragedy and one of his most ferocious. About what ambition does to a soul.

Try the first thirty chapters at this age; come back for the full novel at 16-18.

Short, devastating, foundational. The American memoir.

The play Aristotle uses as his model in the Poetics. The mechanism of tragic recognition.

A single day in a Stalinist labor camp. Spare, granular, devastating.

Socrates' defense at his trial. Short, accessible, foundational. Read alongside Crito.

Why Socrates won't escape from prison. The companion piece to the Apology.

The full encounter with Austen. Read after Sense and Sensibility if possible.

A weaver, a stolen hoard, and a child. Eliot's most accessible novel.

The actual text. Most adults have never read it; your child should.

Read closely, aloud, more than once. Notice the structure of the argument.

A young priest in a rural French parish, dying as he serves. The Catholic novel of priestly vocation.

Read at minimum 10, 51, 70, 78. The architectural drawings of the Constitution.

The American novel of money, longing, and the past. Short and re-readable.

A Mexican pearl diver finds the pearl of the world. Short, severe, parable-like.

A whisky priest in revolutionary Mexico. Greene's greatest novel and one of the great Catholic novels of the century.

Puritan New England, an A on a dress, and four different responses to sin.

Prospero on his island breaks his staff and drowns his books. Shakespeare's last solo play and his farewell to the stage.

Bertie Wooster, his valet Jeeves, a country house full of fiancées and minor fascists, and a silver cow-creamer. Wodehouse's prose is the funniest English ever written. Read a chapter aloud and listen to the rhythm of the sentences.

Flora Poste, recently orphaned and resolutely sensible, descends on her gloomy Sussex farming relatives and improves them whether they want it or not. The perfect comic antidote to D. H. Lawrence and Hardy.

Linked sketches of an English country town in the 1840s, observed from inside its circle of widows and spinsters. Small lives drawn with dry humor and great tenderness.

Gulliver wakes up tied down by six-inch men who argue over which end of a boiled egg to break first. Later he lives in a box as a pet for giants, and later still he meets a race of horses who keep humans as animals. The first two voyages are for nearly anyone; the last one is for when they’re ready to hear what Swift thought of people.

The General Prologue, the Knight's Tale, the Pardoner's Tale. Read in modern translation; sample Middle English aloud.

Use Anthony Esolen or Mark Musa for translation. The descent through hell. Purgatorio and Paradiso wait until 16-18.

The great Middle English chivalric romance. Tolkien's translation is the traditional one; Armitage is more contemporary.

Woodward and Bernstein and Watergate. The reporter's film.

The Easy Company miniseries. Ten hours, watched over weeks. The best American war narrative on screen.

Four hours covering the three-day battle. The Joshua Chamberlain Little Round Top sequence is unforgettable.

The 54th Massachusetts, the first Black regiment of the Union army. About courage and brotherhood.

Four hours of David Lean on 70mm. See it on the largest screen you can find.

Daniel Day-Lewis as Lincoln during the final months of his life. Patient, political, great.

A naïve idealist confronts Senate corruption. The American political film.

Trappist monks in Algeria choose to stay during an Islamist uprising. The contemporary martyr film.

"I coulda been a contender." A longshoreman finds his conscience with a Jesuit priest's help.

Kurosawa's King Lear, set in feudal Japan. The summit of his career.

A crime told from four contradictory perspectives. The film that introduced the West to Kurosawa.

The full film at this age, having seen selected scenes earlier.

The Holocaust film. Preview carefully; the violence is not gratuitous but it is severe.

British POWs build a bridge for their Japanese captors. About pride, duty, and madness.

Older 15, with discussion. The American family-as-corruption epic.

Vito Corleone's rise from Sicily to New York, cut against his son Michael's slow corruption in the Nevada desert. The American family epic completed.

Chuck Yeager and the Mercury Seven. American competence and courage in the early space age.

Malick's film about a 1950s Texas family, creation, and grace. Demanding and rewarding.

An old Swedish professor reviews his life on a journey to receive an award. A good first Bergman.

An American oil-company executive is sent to buy out a Scottish coastal village and is slowly undone by the place. Forsyth's funniest, most generous film. The Mark Knopfler score is worth keeping after.

A successful Hollywood comedy director tries to make a serious film about suffering, sets out as a tramp to research it, and discovers by accident what laughter is for. Sturges's case for comedy.

Thirteen episodes from the Dark Ages to the modern world, narrated by Clark walking through the actual sites. The foundational humanities-survey documentary; every survey since is in conversation with it.

Hand-restored, hand-colorized footage of the British soldier's experience of the Western Front, with veterans' own recorded audio. About ninety minutes that change how the war poets read.

Seven episodes covering the Second World War through the experience of four American towns. The civilian-history companion to Band of Brothers.

Sixteen hours on the Carter Family, Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, Cash, Haggard, Dolly Parton, and forward to the present. The history of the form, told with the music playing.

Fourteen episodes on the American civil-rights movement from Brown v. Board through the late 1980s. The definitive treatment, made while many of the participants were still alive to speak.

Multiple cuts of beef grilled slowly over wood coals. Chimichurri on the side. The Argentine Sunday.

Cake from creamed butter and sugar, or a French fruit tart with pastry cream. The dessert worth working at.

Layered spiced rice and meat. Hyderabadi or Lucknowi are good starting traditions.

Black beans stewed with pork and beef. With rice, orange slices, and farofa.

Real semolina couscous, steamed, with seven-vegetable stew on top. A Friday meal in much of the Maghreb.

A weekend morning at a real Cantonese dim sum hall, with carts rolling by. Har gow, siu mai, char siu bao.

Lanzhou-style or biang biang. Watch them stretched fresh; eat them five minutes later.

A platter with several small dishes, dal, rice, breads, pickle. The traditional Indian meal-as-survey.

Marinated and grilled Jamaican chicken with allspice and scotch bonnet. Smoke over pimento wood ideal.

Pick one — Italian, French, Mexican, Chinese, Indian — and learn six to ten authentic dishes well.

Gunpowder green tea with fresh mint and sugar, poured from a height. The Moroccan welcome.

Mashed fried plantains with garlic and pork cracklings. The Puerto Rican comfort food.

Tandoor-baked flatbread. From a real tandoor it is a different food than a frozen one.

The lacquered, carved-tableside duck with thin pancakes and scallion. A ceremonial meal.

Raw fish "cooked" in lime juice with onion, cilantro, chili. Sweet potato and corn on the side.

Three or four courses for six to eight people. Menu, shopping, timing, plating. The full host experience.

Tonkotsu, shoyu, miso, shio. The Japanese soul food, increasingly serious in American cities.

At a real sushi bar, not a strip-mall buffet. Start with nigiri; let the chef order for you.

Roast bones, simmer for hours. The foundation of serious cooking.

Slow-braised meat with fruit and spice, cooked in a conical clay pot.

Light, crisp, briefly fried vegetables and seafood. Texture is everything.

Smell, regions, pairing. No consumption needed. Cicerone or sommelier intro guides are useful.

A real production, dressed for it. Start with Mozart, Puccini, or Tchaikovsky.

The American founding pilgrimage. Walk the houses and the grounds.

Habitat for Humanity, a parish mission, an inner-city or rural service trip. Real work, real people, real conditions.

Mark or John, with a serious commentary (Brant Pitre, N.T. Wright, Ratzinger's Jesus of Nazareth). Take weeks.

Walking through churches and museums, eating meals slowly. The classic Western formation trip.

Spend a full day. Pick three works to see in depth rather than trying to see everything.

The Ode to Joy in the final movement. The symphony that broke open what symphonies could do.

The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited, Blood on the Tracks. The American songwriter.

All four are worth knowing. Start with the First (the famous Beethoven-shadowed one) and the Fourth.

Born to Run, Darkness on the Edge of Town, The River, Nebraska. The blue-collar American rock canon.

Fauré's gentler Mass for the dead. The In Paradisum at the end is among the most peaceful music ever written.

Wade in the Water. Swing Low, Sweet Chariot. Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child. Were You There. The greatest body of religious music America has produced, born out of the slave South and central to W. E. B. Du Bois's claim that the spirituals are the singular spiritual heritage of the nation. Listen to the Fisk Jubilee Singers, Mahalia Jackson, Marian Anderson.

Rome, San Luigi dei Francesi. The light, the gesture, the moment of vocation.

Dürer paints himself at twenty-eight frontally, in the pose previously reserved for Christ. Melencolia I — the winged figure slumped beside a magic square — is the first picture of an intellect at the end of its rope.

Nighthawks, Early Sunday Morning, House by the Railroad. American solitude.

The greatest American portrait painter. Madame X, the Boit daughters, the watercolors.

The self-portraits over a lifetime, and the late Prodigal Son in St. Petersburg. The deepest of the Northern Baroque masters.

Ghent, Belgium. Twelve panels of staggering technical and theological achievement.

Prado, Madrid. The most analyzed painting in Western art. The game of mirrors and viewer.