Peter & Mowgli
A sidebar in Vigen Guroian's “Of Weeds & Fairy Tales”
by Vigen Guroian
For more than a decade, I have taught a course at my college entitled “Religion in Children’s Literature.” Each year, the young men and women say that in their childhood they were deprived of these resources of the moral imagination. They were not introduced to most of the stories and books on the syllabus, and their natural sense of wonder was starved.
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Vigen Guroian was, until his retirement, Professor of Religious Studies in Orthodox Christianity at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. His books include Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child's Moral Imagination (2002) and The Orthodox Reality: Culture, Theology, and Ethics in the Modern World (Baker Academic, 2018).
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