The Classical Mind Newsletter for March 1, 2024

Faustus and Voldemort, Shakespeare and Jane Austen on Love, The Fight Between Carnival and Lent, Liberation Narratives, and Baseball Season

Housekeeping

• Be sure to check out our Julius Caesar episode and the conversation with Kristen Rudd on monsters if you haven’t already!

• The episode on Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe will be out this coming Tuesday.

• Our next read will be Emma by Jane Austen.

• If you enjoyed the conversation with Kristen Rudd on monsters, you can sign up for her class at www.kristenrudd.com. If you’re one of our paid subscribers, we have posted a discount code you can use for the class in the chat.

• Speaking of classes, Junius will be teaching a class called “Father of Lights: A Theology of Beauty”. He released a new trailer for it here:

Faustus and Voldemort

Great minds think alike, or something like that. It was a great delight to see Christopher Bellitto’s article “What Faustus and Voldemort Can Teach Us about Humility” at the CiRCE Institute come across my feed as we were preparing to record our recent episode on Doctor Faustus. Bellitto highlights something that we bring out in our episode: how Faust (and Voldemort) are negative examples who teach us about the dangers of hubris and the importance of humility as an antidote.

Shakespeare and Jane Austen on Love

Karen Swallow Prior

connects Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 to Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (with a bonus shout out to the Book of Common Prayer…Anglicanism for the win!) in her recent post over at

The Priory

. For those of you who may be new, we’ve had Dr. Prior on the podcast before to discuss Robinson Crusoe. In this post, she provides a helpful reminder that these commonly-praised romantic writers see love as something so much more than pure passion. Love is a reasonable choice to “bear all things” (1 Cor 13:7). Dr. Prior concludes, “True love is not just of the heart—it is of the mind as well.”