In recent years, the calls for censorship and banning books has increased.

Critiques of the dangerous or immoral nature of literature have been around for thousands of years.

Yet one of literature's great strengths is to depict the complexity of the human condition.

Showing truth through fiction and revealing virtue by depicting vice, literature helps us to mature ethically.

“It's a mistake to conflate the author with his characters. Characters exist to perfect the author; both his virtues and his vices.”—Jean-Luc Beauchard, The Fruit of Death

“It's a mistake to conflate the author with his characters. Characters exist to perfect the author; both his virtues and his vices.”—Jean-Luc Beauchard, The Fruit of Death

For more than 400 years, the Catholic Church maintained the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, a list of books deemed morally dubious, if not outright dangerous, by the Sacred Congregation of the Index and thus banned from being printed and read by the faithful. While many of the titles contained therein advanced positions explicitly contrary to the Church’s teachings, others portrayed vicious characters acting viciously.

Taking a page from Plato’s Republic, which warns of the corrupting influence of the poetic arts, the Sacred Congregation's work was motivated by the fear that impressionable readers may imitate the sinful behavior depicted in works of fiction. If reading books on chivalry can convince Don Quixote that........

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