Revisiting the Catholic Revival: Notre Dame Philosophy and American Literature

I am most pleased to share this announcement.  Samuel Hazo's The World within the Word has just been published with a forward by the great philosopher (about whom it was written) Jacques Maritain, and with a substantial critical and historical introduction by yours truly. I read Hazo's writing on Maritain, back in my graduate student days at Notre Dame, and indeed drew on his ideas for my own work on Maritain and art and poetry. My introduction to this book -- Hazo's dissertation, published sixty years after it was written and reviewed by Maritain himself -- provides a comprehensive introduction to Maritain's role in the Catholic revival of the first half of the twentieth century.

Anyone with a yearning for the old days of Catholic literary and intellectual life -- ballasted as it was by Notre Dame's (alas lost) educational daring and (still with us) football greatness -- or with a desire to learn why it is Jacques and Raissa Maritain should have changed so many lives, will find something to please them in these pages. Beyond that, anyone curious to see how the young poet Samuel Hazo first went about the craft of poetry and carved out for himself a distinguished place in American and Catholic letters will benefit from my essay at defining Hazo's poetic and metaphysical vision.

---