"The Tragic Abyss"
an episode in the podcast series, Sacred and Profane Love, directed by Jennifer Frey, philosophy professor at the U. of South Carolina.
Episode 44: The Tragic Abyss with Dr. Kevin Kambo
In this episode, I speak with Dr. Kevin Kambo about Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, in light of an essay by Louise Cowan titled “The Tragic Abyss.” Cowan argues that tragedy is “a liturgical confrontation of a deep seated dread which, when brought to light, can be borne only through the medium of poetic language.” We discuss the nature of the tragic, which always involves a moment of “unmasking” and a peering into the dark abyss; we discuss what tragic wisdom is and how you could possibly gain it; and we try to grapple with the question of how our grasp of the tragic changes when we shift our perspective from Athens to Jerusalem.
Glenn Arbery in his article on Louise Cowan
An eloquent reminiscence in Glenn Arbery's article on Louise, "An Apostle of Literature," https://www.firstthings.com/article/2022/04/an-apostle-of-literature
“Having experienced the effect of her reading voice too many times to count, I gradually saw that professing literature did not consist of saying brilliant things about it, but of taking others into the saving power of imagination. The calling is less to analyze literature or extract concepts from it than to enter the poetic space it creates and experience it whole—whether “it” is the scene in which Achilles and Priam gaze at each other in the last book of the Iliad, or the scene in which Ike McCaslin, at twelve, having left behind his compass and his rifle, encounters Old Ben, and reality, as Melville might say, outruns apprehension.”
A Symposium in Honor of Louise Cowan
A special issue of Ramify: The Journal of the Braniff Graduate School of Liberal Arts at the University of Dallas: http://ramify.org/symposia.php
Contributions by Bainard Cowan, Glenn Arbery, Josh Skinner, Amber Dyer, Kathleen Marks, and Cowan Archive staff member Alex Taylor. All contributors were students of Louise except Alex, who represents the rediscovery of Don and Louise’s work now in the Great Reawakening of Classical and Christian Learning that the world seems to be undertaking.
Bonus: behind the scenes archival material
This rough sketch for the first session of a meeting related to the Trinity Forum was saved on May, 8, 1992. Keep an eye out for the St. Patrick reference! It is presented here without commentary or correction: