The Very Model of a Modern Catholic Comedy
In Which Daniel McInerny Sweats Out the Writing of a Comic Novel for These Apocalyptic Times--and Hilarity Ensues!
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Beauty Beats Nihilism!
On Amazon this week my book, Beauty & Imitation: A Philosophical Reflection on the Arts, reached #1 in the “Philosophical Aesthetics” category—outpacing, among other titles, Friedrich Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. Take that, nihilism!
In his recent review of the book in the Candlemas 2025 issue of Dappled Things, Trevor Cribben Merrill concludes the following:
“The book is an engaging, enlightening tour de force, which deserves a place on the bedside table of artists and art lovers alongside Jacques Maritain’s Art & Scholasticism (which it persuasively critiques), Fr. William Lynch’s Christ and Apollo, and Flannery O’Connor’s Mystery and Manners.”
I would be happy enough to have my book prop up the rickety leg of any bedside table featuring those books and authors, so I am humbled by Trevor Cribben Merrill’s assessment.
x2 in Dappled Things
I am very pleased, in fact, to have my work featured twice in the current Candlemas issue of Dappled Things. Leading off the issue is my essay, “The Very Model of a Modern Catholic Comedy,” which in a spirit of serious play reflects on the artistic challenges of writing a comic novel in these apocalyptic times (as I am currently endeavoring to do). Here’s an hors d’oeuvre:
“How is a Catholic writer to convince a modern audience that this undivine comedy of the modern self’s jejune progress on the Road to Nowhere is in fact a comedy? The very prospect boggles and leads this Catholic writer to think that maybe attempting to write a comic novel in the 21st century is its own fantasy reality, and that the modern Catholic comic novelist is himself a comic character. Watch him as he enters Murdoch’s blasted landscape, its once colorful transcendent backdrop taken down and folded up. Watch him as he ambles down the road—only to run into Samuel Beckett’s two clowns from Waiting for Godot. The modern Catholic comic novelist hopes to show these two clowns that they are actually living a divine comedy. For the two clowns, however, life in a cosmos without any meaning is a cruel, ironic joke. Yet the Catholic imagination aspires to go beyond cruel irony. It wants to uphold Professor Frye’s “vision of innocence” and “total human intelligibility.” But how to do this in a cultural environment that has despaired of both innocence and intelligibility?”
Read the rest by subscribing to Dappled Things.
Daniel McInerny’s 2025 World Tour
Why should Taylor Swift have all the fun?
For information on my upcoming talk at the Beauty & Truth Conference to be held this June at Christendom College in Front Royal, Virginia, click here.
Congratulations Dan!!!!