Schall on Belloc for Lent

National Review Online asked a few prominent men and women what they would be reading during the Lenten season. The Chesterbellocian Fr. Schall responded with the following:

For Lent, I will read Hilaire Belloc's Places. Belloc is the best essayist in our language. Here are essays on places from North to the South of Europe, to the Mideast, to North Africa. The memory of what we are, or perhaps of what we were and are now rejecting, is here found. The third essay is "On Wandering;" the final essay is "About Wine," neither to be missed. I heard of a new book that, like the European constitutionalists, wrote of Europe as if it had no Christian roots. But, "A (man) travels in order to visit cities and men, and to get a knowledge of the real places where things happened in the past, getting a knowledge also of how the mind of man worked in building and works now in daily life." Today we must also find these same places in books, lest we forget what we are.

— Father James V. Schall, S. J., is a professor of government at Georgetown University. He is author of, among other books, Another Sort of Learning.

read all the responses at NRO's The Lenten Bookshelf