About Louise Cowan

Dr. Cowan (1917-2015) received her Ph.D. in 1953 from Vanderbilt University. She served for many years as the Graduate Dean and chairman of the English Department at the University of Dallas, and as Director of its Institute of Philosophic Studies. With her husband, Dr. Donald Cowan, she pioneered the University's lauded core curriculum, based on classic texts. Dr. Cowan's publications include The Fugitive Group (1959), The Southern Critics (1971), The Terrain of Comedy, ed. (1984), The Epic Cosmos, ed. with Larry Allums (1992), Classic Texts and the Nature of Authority, ed. with Donald Cowan (1993), and Invitation to the Classics (Baker Book House, 1998), ed. with Os Guinness.

What Is Jerusalem’s Claim on Us?

By |2024-02-11T16:30:31-06:00July 23rd, 2023|Categories: Christian Humanism, Great Books, Liberal Learning, Literature, Timeless Essays|

The Bible provides a different and seemingly antithetical model of poetry from that given in Greek literature. It demands one’s whole heart and one’s whole viscera. Nonetheless, without in the least giving up a faith in Scripture, Westerners still find within themselves qualities that only the classical vision can express. What has Athens to do [...]

“I’ll Take My Stand” as Southern Epic

By |2023-05-17T19:10:34-05:00May 17th, 2023|Categories: Agrarianism, Books, South, Timeless Essays|

Ever since the first stir they created in the early 1930s the Southern Agrarians have been difficult to assess. How serious, politically and economically, were they in what they advocated? How much agreement was there among them? The four collected above papers point up and even accentuate their divergence, investigating wide-ranging and, at least on [...]

Why Are the Classics Necessary?

By |2020-05-04T17:15:34-05:00May 4th, 2020|Categories: Classical Education, Classics, Liberal Arts, Literature, Timeless Essays|

Our need for the classics is intense. Yet any defense of them in our time must come from a sense of their absolute necessity—not from a desire to inculcate “cultural literacy,” or to keep alive a pastime for an elite, but to preserve the full range of hu­man sensibility. What is needed is to recap­ture [...]

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