The Scandalous Bits of Paradise Lost
EXTRA: My newest column at Religion News Service
[A copy of "Paradise Lost" with a portrait of author John Milton. (Image courtesy of Creative Commons]
What’s appropriate for school kids to read and what isn’t is an ongoing debate and one that has been in the news a lot lately as everything gets increasingly politicized and polarized.
One thing that shouldn’t be controversial is John Milton’s epic poem, Paradise Lost! Maybe we will get to that work someday in this newsletter series. In the meantime, I wrote an article that includes all the sexual content in the poem, which got it nixed with hundreds of other books of varying literary quality and sexual content.
The irony is that Milton wrote one of the most influential modern works on censorship, his 1644 treatise, Areopagitica. (I’ve written about this work in two of my books, Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me and On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books, which is still half off at Amazon!).
You can read my short column here, and in it, a few passages from some of the best poetry ever written.
Happy reading, friends!
Milton’s words in Areopagitica are fresh: “A man may be a heretic in the truth; and if he believes things only because his pastor says so, or the Assembly so determines, without knowing other reason, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds becomes his heresy.” Boom. Turn on the bright lights. Truth is never threatened by investigation.
Happy Epiphany Day!
I was given 'Booked' as a Christmas gift 10 years ago. I had just returned, shattered in health, from working in a difficult place and had difficult questions. I remember laying in utter physical exhaustion in my room and reading that opening chapter on Milton's Areopagiticus and the need to allow Truth to wrestle with falsehood. It was such an encouragement to keep seeking the Truth, which I did during the next two and a half years while I recovered enough strength to go back into the working world. Thank you, Karen.
By the way, I got 'The Evangelical Imagination' as a gift this year. I look forward to reading it.