On Friday, July 17, 2020 we welcomed writer, poet, and professor Marilyn McEntyre for an Online Conversation to discuss her provocative book, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies. The book focuses on the morality, power, and importance of caring for language. She notes that caring for one another is not entirely separable from caring for words. Words are entrusted to us as equipment for our life together, to help us survive, guide, and nourish one another. If language is to retain its power to nourish and sustain our common life, we have to care for it the way good farmers care for the earth.

Learn more about Marilyn McEntyre
Watch the full Online Conversation video and read the transcript
Watch our Online Conversation with Marilyn McEntyre and David Bailey on “Speaking Peace and Seeking Reconciliation.”
Check out her brand new book called Where the Eye Alights: Reflections for the Forty Days of Lent.

Authors mentioned in the conversation:

Jane Austen
Ezra Pound - “Go in fear of abstractions.”
George Steiner - Real Presences
Theodor Adorno
William Faulkner
Wendell Berry

Books mentioned in the conversation:

The Road to Character, by David Brooks
Blind Spot, by Mahzarin R. Banaji and Anthony G. Greenwald
Winnie the Pooh, by A.A. Milne
Little Women, by Louis May Alcott
The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Moby Dick, by Herman Melville
Middlemarch, by George Eliot
Prayers of the Cosmos and The Hidden Gospel by Neil Douglass Klutz

BBC Radio Program - My Word

Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies with Marilyn McEntyre