What we’re reading: To Love is to Act

From Telos Executive Director and Co-founder, Todd Deatherage:

Marva Barnett, professor of literature at the University of Virginia, has spent much of her life studying, teaching and loving the work of Victor Hugo. Her recent book, To Love Is To Act, is a beautiful and timely collection of essays on how the themes of Hugo’s celebrated work Les Miserables represent the author’s deepest values, and how modern interpretations of them on stage and screen have proven how timeless they are. Her essays on seeing others, forgiveness, the ability of people to change, finding the strength to carry on amidst dark times, and the inseparability of love and action, are so akin to our Principles and Practices of Peacemaking you’d think we collaborated with her when we wrote them. If you love Les Miserables—novel, musical or movie—you’ll love this book. And if you believe that it is through the telling of better and truer stories, more than arguing “the facts,” that hearts and minds are changed, there are few better examples than the work of Hugo.