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Books > Humanities > Religion & beliefs > General > Philosophy of religion > General
Robert Crumb (b. 1943) read widely and deeply a long roster of
authors including Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Dickens, J. D.
Salinger, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg,
as well as religious classics including biblical, Buddhist, Hindu,
and Gnostic texts. Crumb's genius, according to author David
Stephen Calonne, lies in his ability to absorb a variety of
literary, artistic, and spiritual traditions and incorporate them
within an original, American mode of discourse that seeks to reveal
his personal search for the meaning of life. R. Crumb: Literature,
Autobiography, and the Quest for Self contains six chapters that
chart Crumb's intellectual trajectory and explore the recurring
philosophical themes that permeate his depictions of literary and
biographical works and the ways he responds to them through
innovative, dazzling compositional techniques. Calonne explores the
ways Crumb develops concepts of solitude, despair, desire, and
conflict as aspects of the quest for self in his engagement with
the book of Genesis and works by Franz Kafka, Jean-Paul Sartre, the
Beats, Charles Bukowski, and Philip K. Dick, as well as Crumb's
illustrations of biographies of musicians Jelly Roll Morton and
Charley Patton. Calonne demonstrates how Crumb's love for
literature led him to attempt an extremely faithful rendering of
the texts he admired while at the same time highlighting for his
readers the particular hidden philosophical meanings he found most
significant in his own autobiographical quest for identity and his
authentic self.
In his Treatise on the Virtues, Aquinas discusses the character and
function of habit; the essence, subject, cause, and meaning of
virtue; and the separate intellectual, moral, cardinal, and
theological virtues. His work constitutes one of the most thorough
and incisive accounts of virtue in the history of Christian
philosophy. John Oesterle's accurate and elegant translation makes
this enduring work readily accessible to the modern reader.
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