Permanent Things: Toward the Recovery of a More Human Scale at the End of the Twentieth Century

This inspirational collection gathers essays and studies of the work of some of this century's most imaginative writers--C.S. Lewis, T.S. Eliot, G.K. Chesterton, Charles Williams, Dorothy Sayers, and Evelyn Waugh--all giving voice to the permanence of Christian truth amid the secularist spirit of the age.

The essays in this collection are united in their affirmation of T. S. Eliot's "permanent things" and in their conviction that those "things" provide a basis for critical engagement with a generally decadent society. The essayists reflect on the work of a small group of twentieth-century writers who responded to the experience of chaos with an appeal to permanence: Eliot, G. K. Chesterton, Evelyn Waugh, Dorothy Sayers, and C. S. Lewis. That canon means, not surprisingly, that the collection is critically (and sometimes crankily) conservative. It is an appreciative treatment of the authors in question, which, while assuming a celebratory response to the demise of Communism, is far from sanguine about the state of Western civilization. The book is an interesting contribution to an old debate about permanence and change that should serve as a pointer to some important twentieth-century authors whose art continues to enliven political discussion at the end of the century. Steve Schroeder