Welcome to The Comic Muse!
My name is Daniel McInerny. I am a novelist and dramatist as well as associate professor and chair of the philosophy department at Christendom College in Front Royal, Virginia.
I received my BA in English from the University of Notre Dame (1986) and my PhD in philosophy from The Catholic University of America (1994). I have been teaching at Christendom College since the fall of 2019.
In March 2023 I published a novel, The Good Death of Kate Montclair (Chrism Press), which my fellow Catholic novelist Maya Sinha has called “an instant classic of 21st-century Catholic fiction.”
The Good Death of Kate Montclair depicts a brave woman in midlife struggling to come to terms with a terminal diagnosis by joining an apparently innocent death discussion group. It is a suspenseful, heartbreaking, topical, and often humorous story set in Washington, D.C./Northern Virginia during COVID Year 2020, with flashbacks to the Italy of the 1980s, told from Kate Montclair's present tense POV. The book deals with one of our culture's most hotly contested issues, euthanasia, as well as with the themes of conscience as an argument for God’s existence, and bespoke spirituality and ritual in our contemporary world.
Acclaimed Catholic poet James Matthew Wilson has said the following of the novel:
“Daniel McInerny brings us a novel of characters flirting with the temptation to be their own author only to discover the plot of their lives is not up to them. This is a book of and for our dreary moment but one which reminds us that a good story brings serious pleasure and joyful wisdom to transform even the darkest of ages.”
As a scholar I am foremost interested in retrieving an Aristotelian understanding of art as imitation, long out of favor among philosophers. In June 2024 Word on Fire Academic will bring out my scholarly work, Beauty & Imitation: A Philosophical Reflection on the Arts. Early reviews of the book have said the following:
“This is literally the best book on beauty that I have ever read: the most convincing, clear, and comprehensive; the most eye-opening and satisfying; the most insightful and delightful. It is a masterpiece. I do not use that word lightly, but there is no other word for it.”
–Dr. Peter Kreeft, Professor of Philosophy, Boston College, and author of Socrates’ Children (Word on Fire 2023)
“Daniel McInerny’s book clarifies why we enjoy works of art—pictures, music, drama and movies, poetry and novels—and it also shows why we revere such works: not as ends in themselves, but because they place us in the truthful presence of what they depict. The book reactivates Aristotle’s understanding of mimesis and Aquinas’s enhancement of it. It shows how art elevates what it displays as well as the community that experiences it. It is a metaphysical and theological reflection on the arts, written in the style and spirit of C. S. Lewis: limpid prose, abundant citations, colorful examples. A book to study and learn from, then to browse in and enjoy.”
—Msgr. Robert Sokolowski, Elizabeth Breckenridge Caldwell Professor of Philosophy, The Catholic University of America
“McInerny delivers a sustained and compelling defense of art as mimetic form, a philosophical defense rooted in careful analysis of specific works of art, ranging from ancient texts to contemporary film. The book does more than talk about beauty; it offers the careful reader a training in the way of beauty.”
—Thomas Hibbs, J. Newton Rayzor Sr. Professor of Philosophy, Baylor University
“Daniel McInerny’s The Way of Beauty is a godsend for those puzzled or even wounded by St. Thomas Aquinas’ description of mimetic art as infima doctrina, the “least of doctrines” or the “lowest learning.” No one who loves Dante or Shakespeare (or Raphael or Van Gogh) would readily consign great literature and art to so humble a status, especially because their power to illuminate reality is so manifest. But McInerny agrees with Thomas in acknowledging that the intelligibility poetry gives to human action “is only probable, not necessary” in terms of what it asks of the mind’s assent. “It is not metaphysics,” he writes, “but it is no less crucial to our lives for that.” Mimetic art has a hybrid character with its “poetic universal” that “invites us into the experience of sensible particularity even while it invites us to contemplate ideas and meanings.” With the insight born of his own work as a novelist and playwright as well as his immersion in Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy, McInerny unfolds in greater and greater depth a profoundly Catholic understanding of the crucial place of beauty that draws upon the thought of Jacques Maritain, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Robert Sokolowski as well as many contemporary commentators. This is the book many of us have been waiting for.
—Dr. Glenn Arbery, Professor of Humanities, Wyoming Catholic College
At Christendom College I teach courses on the Philosophy of Art & Beauty, the Philosophy of Technology, the Philosophy of Culture, and Ethics & Imagination.
I am also the author of three books in the humorous Kingdom of Patria series for middle grade readers (all available here on Amazon), as well as a play, The Actor, on the early life and wartime dramatic activities of Karol Wojtyla, the man who would become Saint John Paul II. The Actor will premiere at Christendom College in the fall of 2024.
My wife Amy and I have three grown children and one preternaturally adorable grandchild, and live in the beautiful Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.
