How a Small, Virtuous Life can Change the World

Video from The Free Press

How a Small, Virtuous Life can Change the World

"Middlemarch is George Eliot (real name Mary Ann Evans)’s masterpiece. The 900-page Victorian novel is about the people living in a fictional English town in a time of enormous changes.

In this episode, Shilo Brooks sits down with Dominican friar Father Jonah Teller to discuss what makes the book worth reading. Their conversation tackles the novel’s major themes: marriage in all its mismatched forms, political upheaval around reform and the rise of liberalism, the promises and limits of scientific progress, and the facets of human nature revealed in ordinary domestic life. They highlight Eliot’s conviction that there are no truly insignificant lives—that quiet, “unhistoric” acts and small, private decisions are of great importance." from the video introduction

"George Eliot

First published Mon Apr 28, 2025

The work of George Eliot (1819–1880) challenges any strong disjunction between philosophy and art. Her deepest philosophical interests were in ethics, aesthetics, and the relation between them. Indebted above all to Spinozism and Romanticism, she developed her thinking in sustained dialogue with the European philosophical tradition, both before and after she began to write fiction under the pseudonym “George Eliot” in 1857. She wrote novels, shorter stories, poetry, and review essays, and throughout her career she experimented with literary form. Through her bestselling novels, her engagements with philosophy and with contemporary questions about morality, art, politics, feminism, religion and science reached wide readerships..." from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

#extraordinarygod