Uniting the Liberal Arts: Core and Context is a selection of essays, presented or further developed from the 1999 Association of Core Texts and Courses conference in New Orleans, focusing on a few of the vertices or vortices, where an intensified sense of the interplay between the ways of knowledge may be glimpsed, or a memorable moment in the past when all briefly achieved a greater congruity may be revived for new consideration. These essays fall into an organization according to the major scheme each posits as unifying, or attempting to unify, the liberal arts.

The Prospect of Lyric, edited by Bainard Cowan Reading a great lyric poem we know that lyric is more than a convention, that it speaks of an encounter of genuine depth. But what is the terrain of that encounter? The fourth in the Genres of Literature series enters into the heart of the lyric experience, with General Editor Louise Cowan analyzing the lyric impulse, its ontological ground, and its relation to the life of a culture in her Introduction to the volume. The following sixteen essays examine key poets and texts, from Biblical and Greek antiquity through the pinnacles of the English lyric and on to the modern American and Caribbean world, ending with a frank critique of the conditions for poetry in contemporary culture by poet Frederick Turner. Authors include: Daniel Russ, Karl Maurer, Gregory Roper, Scott F. Crider, Robert Alexander, Louise Cowan, Anna Priddy, Bernadette Waterman Ward, Glenn Arbery, Seemee Ali, Robert Scott Dupree, Larry Allums, Claudia Allums, Mary Di Lucia, Bainard Cowan, and Frederick Turner. Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture Publications

Gained Horizons takes up Pope Benedict XVI's invitation, issued in his lecture at the University of Regensburg, to enter into the dialogue of cultures by "broadening our concept of reason" to "once more disclose its vast horizons." Benedict placed in the foreground the notion of God as acting with reason, and said of "this great logos, this breadth of reason," that "to rediscover it constantly is the great task of the university." Contributors include Jean Bethke Elshtain, Peter Lawler, R. R. Reno, Glenn Arbery, and Nalin Ranasinghe.