Eating Alone: Aristotle & the Culture of the Meal

By |2023-02-26T17:46:43-06:00February 26th, 2023|Categories: Aristotle, Christian Living, Civilization, Family, Friendship, Paul Krause, Senior Contributors, Timeless Essays, Tradition|

Eating together, as a social event, is meant to be time-consuming because it is meant to be an intimate experience where friendship—true friendship—is experienced, rekindled, and love stands at the center of the dinner table. It is, in its own way, a call to sacrifice. Aristotle identified man’s eating habits as one of the cornerstones of civilization—one [...]

The Goods of Friendship

By |2022-12-30T15:11:59-06:00December 30th, 2022|Categories: Aristotle, Friendship, Great Books, Timeless Essays, Virtue|

In “Nicomachean Ethics,” Aristotle offers students a refreshing alternative to the instrumentality of modern life: the pursuit of goodness. Goodness inspires honor, and mutual honor is the stuff of friendships of virtue. These are the friendships which yield the greatest happiness. Recently, I had the great pleasure afforded by technology in our chaotic, pandemic times [...]

The Crisis of the Intellectual Life

By |2022-11-06T15:45:29-06:00November 6th, 2022|Categories: Aristotle, Featured, Humanities, Liberal Learning, Plato, St. John's College, Timeless Essays|

The removal of intellectual life from the world, the withdrawn person’s independence from contests over wealth or status, provides or reveals a dignity that can’t be ranked or traded. This dignity, along with the universality of the objects of the intellect—that is, that they are available to everyone—is what opens up space for real communion. [...]

Honor and Fame

By |2022-10-23T14:01:17-05:00October 23rd, 2022|Categories: Aristotle, Conservatism, Culture, Glenn Arbery, Homer, Plato, Timeless Essays, William Shakespeare, Wyoming Catholic College|

Should honor and fame no longer be ends of ambition in such a world? The ancient philosophers doubted the ultimate merit of fame, but they also looked for the most spirited students, those most inclined to “undertake extensive and arduous enterprises." In response to my essay about baptizing ambition, a friend from Boston College recommended [...]

A Short History of the Human Soul

By |2022-09-25T17:34:37-05:00September 25th, 2022|Categories: Aristotle, Christianity, Great Books, History, Philosophy, Plato, Timeless Essays|

To understand the journey of the human imagination across civilizations and centuries, one must grasp how the utterly fascinating Hellenic invention of the “democratized” concept of moral judgment in the afterlife came into its beautiful philosophical maturity. And so they came to Rome —Acts IV. “I was not, I was, I am not, I do [...]

Aristotle: Education for Virtue and Leisure

By |2022-09-29T11:29:33-05:00May 10th, 2022|Categories: Aristotle, Books, Philosophy, Virtue|

Aristotle says that friendship makes life worth living, but despite being a central feature of daily life for almost every human being who has ever lived, friendship seems curiously absent from many philosophies of education. Aristotle, however, reminds us that education should focus on what is central to a flourishing life, and so it must [...]

The Political Relevance of St. Augustine

By |2022-02-25T11:54:04-06:00February 25th, 2022|Categories: Aristotle, Christendom, Christianity, Essential, Politics, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Timeless Essays|

St. Augustine observed, “To begin with, there never has been, nor, is there today, any absence of hostile foreign powers to provoke war.” Evil men lusting after power—aggressors—are endemic to human history, and noted Augustine, “When they go to war what they want is to make, if they can, their enemies their own, and then [...]

Can We Be Friends? Spirit, Duty, & Our Canine Companions

By |2023-05-21T11:28:57-05:00August 26th, 2021|Categories: Aristotle, Books, Classics, E.B., Eva Brann, Friendship, Senior Contributors, St. John's College, Wisdom|

This book is full of observations about friendship—discerningly borrowed and observantly original; it is a credible descendant of those wonders of human perspicacity, Aristotle’s books on friendship. One of those borrowed observations is that “the point of being friends is to charm each other.” Willing Dogs and Reluctant Masters: On Friendship and Dogs by Gary [...]

The Knowing Soul

By |2022-05-12T11:23:13-05:00August 9th, 2021|Categories: Aristotle, Featured, Jacob Klein, Liberal Learning, Plato, St. John's College|

Learning and teaching are mysterious processes. To understand them fully would mean to discover the secret of our lives. For we are, perhaps above anything else, learning and teaching animals. What I have to speak about, briefly and in a most elementary way, is what both learning and teaching mean and do not mean. Learning [...]

The Imaginative Conservative: 11 Years of Preserving & Advancing

By |2021-07-09T13:58:09-05:00July 9th, 2021|Categories: Aristotle, Bradley J. Birzer, Cicero, Reason, Russell Kirk, Senior Contributors, The Imaginative Conservative, Timeless Essays|

What we held back in 2010 we still hold today: “The Imaginative Conservative” is not meant to be one voice, but many voices forming one voice. The ideologue and the conformist, we equally despise. We want excellence, argument, inquiry. We wish to provide, above all, a safe haven for reason and reasoned passion: We wish [...]

The Boy Who Fishes: The Importance of Leisure

By |2021-07-07T21:36:59-05:00July 7th, 2021|Categories: Aristotle, Culture War, Leisure|

The boy I saw fishing was enjoying a moment of solitude—a state of being alone that seems a luxury in a churning world agitated with digital waves. It made me realize that in leisure, we open ourselves to receive God and take confidence in trusting the mysterious and fragmentary. Be at leisure – and know [...]

Winged Words: Reading & Discussing Great Books

By |2021-06-01T09:36:29-05:00June 1st, 2021|Categories: Aristotle, Dante, Essential, Featured, Great Books, Homer, Humanities, Imagination, Liberal Arts, Liberal Learning, Peter Kalkavage, Plato, St. John's College, Timeless Essays|

Great books introduce us to ideas and to ways of looking at the world that are new to us. They provide a refreshing distance from the trends, fashions, tastes, opinions, and political correctness of our current culture. Great books invite us to put aside for a while our way of looking at the world and [...]

Aristotle Contra Mundum: The Woke Come for the Philosopher

By |2020-09-20T15:15:19-05:00September 19th, 2020|Categories: Aristotle, Christianity, Equality, Great Books, Liberalism, Politics, Virtue|

Professor Agnes Callard is admirable in her unwillingness to cancel Aristotle. In light of recent events, she might find his views are not so much prejudiced as they are realistic, and, on that note, timeless, unlike the egalitarian utopias which liberals are always chasing. The philosopher had a disposition toward the world around him which [...]

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