Stanley Fish

Inside Paradise Lostby david quintprinceton, 344 pages, $35Early on in Inside Paradise Lost, David Quint writes a sentence that is at once simple and, for this reader, simply terrifying: “The series begins with Virgil’s own submerged reference to Lucretius.” The series Quint has in mind is the . . . . Continue Reading »

Whenever I teach Paradise Lost, the hardest thing to get across is that God is God. Students invariably (one is tempted to say “naturally”) fall in with the view declared by William Empson in Milton’s God when he says that “all the characters are on trial in any civilized narrative.” In . . . . Continue Reading »

Father Neuhaus mistakes my position when he says (or implies) that I pit freedom of inquiry against truth or critical thought against a commitment to truth, or, more simply, faith against reason. In fact I don’t regard these as opposed to one another (they are not binaries) but as mutually . . . . Continue Reading »