Brutus: An Honorable Hero?

By |2024-03-14T15:33:19-05:00March 14th, 2024|Categories: Character, Herman Melville, History, Literature, Timeless Essays, Virtue, William Shakespeare|

In his last moments, Brutus voiced a sentiment about the ultimate tragedy of the virtuous life in those evil days, in which the good was punished and the evil rewarded. This does not make virtue worthless for the individual; it just may place him on the losing side. [E]veryone knows that some young bucks among [...]

Jane Austen, C.S. Lewis, Laughter, & Lent

By |2024-03-11T21:37:40-05:00March 11th, 2024|Categories: C.S. Lewis, Christianity, Dwight Longenecker, Jane Austen, Lent, Literature, Senior Contributors, Timeless Essays|

C.S. Lewis' obscure essay, ‘A Note on Jane Austen,’ shows that it is Austen’s humor and humility that captures Lewis’ fancy and that directs us to a Lenten lesson. In his rule Saint Benedict advises that each monk should have a holy book to read during Lent. When searching for a holy book, we are [...]

Music of the Republic

By |2024-03-02T19:15:28-06:00March 2nd, 2024|Categories: Christopher B. Nelson, Classics, Great Books, Liberal Learning, Music, Plato, St. John's College, Timeless Essays, Virtue|

Music pervades our lives and always has. It has taken you outside of yourselves and taken you deep within. It has been associated with things divine. There comes a time in every year when I find myself saying to a friend or a prospective student that this is a very musical College [Convocation, St. John’s [...]

Nietzsche & Martin Luther King Jr. on Christian Suffering

By |2024-03-01T05:37:06-06:00February 29th, 2024|Categories: Christianity, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Luther King Jr., Philosophy|

Friedrich Nietzsche, in Beyond Good and Evil, targets Christianity, in the form most accessible to him: Catholicism. He critiques the virtues it fosters and the religion’s effects, particularly highlighting Christianity’s stance on suffering. On the other hand, Martin Luther King Jr. rejects Nietzsche’s accusations of Christian notions encouraging mediocrity and weakness. Despite the philosophers' adherence [...]

The Humanity of Huck Finn

By |2024-02-17T17:29:52-06:00February 17th, 2024|Categories: Books, Christine Norvell, Fiction, Literature, Mark Twain, Senior Contributors, Timeless Essays, Virtue, Wisdom|

Huckleberry Finn is no hero, though he does symbolize the American conscience at the time Mark Twain wrote, or at least the conscience Twain hoped for. Yes, "Huckleberry Finn" is a coming-of-age tale and a social criticism and satire, but it also asks crucial questions: Who actually changes? What type of American will change? Huckleberry [...]

The Inferno: A Novel

By |2024-02-11T19:14:25-06:00February 11th, 2024|Categories: Books, Catholicism, Christianity, Dante|

In taking his autobiographical protagonist through hell, Winston Brady does many things that would, I believe, have pleased Dante Alighieri. Like Dante’s "Inferno," Brady’s "Inferno" tests the will and courage of its hero, forcing him to wrestle with his American identity and legacy, to understand the grave nature of sin, and to seek repentance from [...]

Dante’s Transformed Love: Musings on the Poet’s Love for Beatrice

By |2024-02-10T20:18:07-06:00February 10th, 2024|Categories: Art, Books, Christianity, Dante, Love, Timeless Essays, Western Civilization|

If the "Vita Nuova" had been the only major work Dante had made, this work alone would have earned him the reputation as a great poet of Western Civilization. It is well-known that Dante is one of the greatest poets in Western Civilization. His magnum opus, The Divine Comedy, is considered one of the crowning [...]

“God’s Own Descent”: Dante, the Incarnation, & Frost’s “The Trial by Existence”

By |2024-02-06T19:56:27-06:00February 6th, 2024|Categories: Dante, Literature, Poetry, Robert Frost|

“The Trial by Existence” is an example of Robert Frost’s strong and brilliant reworking of Dante’s poetic tradition in his own work. He incorporates many of Dante’s images, but he also pushes past the ending silence of "Paradiso" by making the incarnate Christ the sight at the top of the mountain. But God's own descent [...]

The Profoundly Humane Vision of “Groundhog Day”

By |2024-02-01T19:34:01-06:00February 1st, 2024|Categories: Christianity, Classical Education, Culture, Film, Great Books, Liberal Learning, Timeless Essays|

The protagonist of the film “Groundhog Day” discovers that what makes life worth living is not immediate gratification, or moral autonomy, or flippant cynicism, or self-deification, but rather encountering those things that give meaning and purpose to our lives. Today, we are experiencing nothing less than a renaissance of classical education throughout the United States, [...]

Plato’s Big Mistake

By |2024-01-31T21:32:52-06:00January 31st, 2024|Categories: Classics, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Louis Markos, Plato, Timeless Essays, Virtue|

Every time I reread the “Protagoras” or “Meno,” I am surprised anew that a man of Plato’s towering intellect and searing insight into human nature could have been so mistaken about the human propensity to sin and rebellion. Plato never cared much for the sophists, viewing them as amoral peddlers of a relativistic kind of [...]

Liberal Education and Politics: The Case of “The Tempest”

By |2024-01-19T18:06:11-06:00January 19th, 2024|Categories: Benjamin Lockerd, Education, Featured, Liberal Learning, Politics, Timeless Essays, William Shakespeare|

A liberal education is free in the sense that it is free of practical goals. We study our language and our literature or biology and chemistry and psychology just because it is a human instinct to do so, and because it is enjoyable to do so. Everything is Political Just as I began my college [...]

Chasing Lions: Don Quixote in Pursuit of the Beautiful

By |2024-01-15T18:05:45-06:00January 15th, 2024|Categories: Beauty, Culture, Featured, Great Books, History, Literature, Love, Timeless Essays, Truth|

When man pursues beauty, he takes it into himself and becomes beautiful through it; a perpetual beauty-seeker, such as Don Quixote, is, therefore, a beautiful man. He conceived the strangest notion that ever took shape in a madman’s head, considering it desirable and necessary, both for the increase of his honor and the common good, [...]

A Masterpiece of Cultural History: Jacques Barzun’s “From Dawn to Decadence”

By |2024-01-09T18:18:32-06:00January 9th, 2024|Categories: Books, Classics, Culture, Economics, Political Economy, Robert M. Woods, Timeless Essays, Virgil|Tags: |

In the annals of writing history, there are a handful of volumes that have become established as models due to tone, insightful content, and excellence of style. The most recent historical work by Jacques Barzun is such a work. It is a cultural history of the highest standard. As a historical volume of such scope, [...]

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