Ars Vitae: A Response to the Symposium

Anyone with an email account knows the flutter of daily inbox arrivals ranging from the most trivial to the most vital. For someone just publishing the results of something like fifteen years (really a life’s worth) of reading and thinking in a book called Ars Vitae (The Art of Living), discovering an email one day…
The Recovery of Creatureliness

“All of this presupposes that we are creatures capable of observing, sustaining, and living suspended in the fragile beauty of the world around us, within us, and beyond us” (p. 358, emphasis added). With these words, Elizabeth Lasch-Quinn concludes her argument calling for a recovery of inwardness in response to a pervasive culture she terms…
Of Spiritual Journeys and Autobiographies

Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn’s Ars Vitae is just the kind of reasonable, non-polemical book that our society needs today. Equally adept at diagnosing the problem and offering cogent solutions, Lasch-Quinn balances well the theoretical and the practical, the external and the internal, the philosophical and the theological, the pagan and the Christian, the academic and the popular,…
Coping Strategies and the Consolation of God

In Ars Vitae: The Fate of Inwardness and the Return of the Ancient Arts of Living, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn canvasses five ancient schools of practical-philosophical thought. Contemporary intellectual and cultural trends, she contends, bear various relationships of ancestry and family resemblance, and in some cases of shared nomenclature, to these ancient schools and can be usefully…
From Plato to Christ

A Review of Louis Markos, From Plato to Christ Recent years have seen a resurgence of Christian interest in classical Greek philosophy. While the nineteenth-century distrust of Hellenization led to a dismissal of essentialist philosophical categories as useful for theology, recent authors have recognized the damaging toll of such a denial of metaphysics for theological…