S7E100: Why Literature Still Matters with Dr. Jason Baxter
And this is exactly what I had accidentally inflicted on myself in Sardinia. The distance between me and the landscape had been erased. I had been reduced to an experience of pure elemental conditions, and I loved it, because I was no longer a tourist. I was local. More than local. Its ecosystem had been written onto my body. … I was no longer human. I was a lizard: a Mediterranean salamander. I had shed 87% of my rationality: and loved it, because the gap between what I saw out there and what I held within had begun to close. I was being reunited, as Lewis put it, with something in the universe which I had been alienated from before.
Jason M. Baxter, Why Literature Still Matters
Show Summary:
- This week on The New Mason Jar podcast, we bring you a conversation Cindy and Dawn had with Dr. Jason Baxter about his new book Why Literature Still Matters published by Cassiodorus Press
- How Jason wrote this book and the style of his writing as if to a specific, live audience
- Why Jason wrote about the importance of beauty, art, and literature in terms of our current culture
- Why is there a sense of urgency about the message of reconnecting with the old books and ideas
- How Jason’s Substack “Beauty Matters” serves to illuminate his book
- What type of literature Jason thinks may be making a comeback
Listen Now:
Books and Links Mentioned:
The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis by Jason M. Baxter
A Beginner’s Guide to Dante’s Divine Comedy by Jason M. Baxter
The Divine Comedy: Inferno trans. by Jason M. Baxter
Laurus by Eugene Vodolazkin
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
1984 by George Orwell
Saving Beauty by Byung-Chul Han
The Warden by Anthony Trollope
“Field” by Benjamin Myers
“Supernatural Love” by Gjertrud Schnackenberg
“A Prayer at Winter Soltice” and “Insomnia” by Dana Gioia
Saint Thomas and the Forbidden Birds by James Matthew Wilson
Dr. Baxter’s podcast episodes on The Literary Life
Find Cindy and Jason:
Cindy’s Patreon Discipleship Group
Mere Motherhood Facebook Group
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…we know that old things are deep things, and that they are written on the human heart, and that, accordingly, they emerge, sometimes, when we least expect them.
Jason M. Baxter, Why Literature Still Matters
