The Importance of Being Jolly

By |2023-12-11T22:11:13-06:00December 11th, 2023|Categories: Happiness, Humor, Language, Timeless Essays|

“Jolly” is a gem of a word, and its decline in usage is a pity. To be jolly is truly a profound thing. It is to recognize the winsomeness and levity present in the world around us, and to appreciate it by responding with an exuberance of joy. Jollity, in its proper time and place, [...]

Intellectual Hedonism & Existential Glee: An Interview With Gad Saad

By |2023-11-26T14:06:41-06:00November 26th, 2023|Categories: Books, Happiness|

The more religious I am the happier I am. But I actually argue that there are very earthly reasons for why that link might exist. To the extent that religion provides me greater communality, it offers me some form of purpose and meaning, it allows me to have greater bonds of reciprocity within group members—those [...]

Utopian Fantasies vs. Real Happiness in Samuel Johnson’s “Rasselas”

By |2023-02-27T14:28:53-06:00February 27th, 2023|Categories: Culture, Fiction, Happiness, Jonathan Swift, Literature, Mitchell Kalpakgian, Timeless Essays|

In Samuel Johnson’s novel “Rasselas,” the eponymous character discovers that happiness does not derive from a beautiful place, luxurious palace, or constant entertainment, but depends upon a composed state of mind in possession of truth. Throughout the eighteenth century, novel theories of happiness and utopian ideas of perfect societies gained respectability and popularity. The exploration [...]

Liberal Education, the Wasting of Time, & Human Happiness

By |2022-08-12T17:02:38-05:00August 11th, 2022|Categories: Happiness, Leisure, Liberal Arts, Time, Timeless Essays, Wyoming Catholic College|

Human beings are not simply producers; they are also lovers of beauty and contemplators of truth. They are wasters of time. The liberally educated person has a rich inner life that allows him to waste time well. As an undergraduate, I went for walks in rural Michigan. Sometimes alone, sometimes with others. Romantic walks, friendly [...]

Joy and the Imaginative Life

By |2022-04-21T07:08:13-05:00April 21st, 2022|Categories: Christianity, Happiness, Imagination, Michael De Sapio, Senior Contributors|

Absent joy, absent the vision and expectation of eternal happiness, we lose ourselves in the immediate. When we forget about our final end, we become absorbed in the means, in technique, in minutia.It is necessary to find our way back to joy, to rekindle that flame. Much ink has been spilled in distinguishing among the [...]

Car Repair, Self-Interest, & the Benevolent Investor

By |2021-05-19T10:43:50-05:00May 19th, 2021|Categories: Adam Smith, Alexis de Tocqueville, Christopher B. Nelson, Happiness, Liberal Learning, St. John's College, Timeless Essays|

The figure of the universally benevolent man seems in many circles to have taken a back seat to the stunted, self-centered Economic Man. We ought to ask ourselves: Are we losing a nuanced sense of self-interest rightly understood? I have been reminiscing a lot lately, probably a sign of my age. But I recently came to [...]

Puddleglum, Jeremy Bentham, & the Grand Inquisitor

By |2020-11-28T06:58:11-06:00November 28th, 2020|Categories: C.S. Lewis, Dwight Longenecker, Freedom, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Happiness, Philosophy, Politics, Senior Contributors|

The aim and ambition of Jeremy Bentham was that everyone would be happy. But how is it possible for everyone to be happy? The Grand Inquisitor gives the answer: by yielding their freedom and submitting to their overlords. This is the dysfunctional and distorted psychology behind the entitlement culture and the welfare state. When on [...]

Remembering the Normal

By |2020-08-31T15:05:43-05:00August 31st, 2020|Categories: Christianity, Community, Glenn Arbery, Happiness, Nature, Senior Contributors, Wyoming Catholic College|

As this strange summer of a strange year comes to an end, I am reminded of ordinary realities and experiences that now appear in a new light. At our college, classes started back up, and I cannot recall a happier sense of new beginning, partly because this, too, has been defamiliarized. On Sunday of this [...]

Reflections on George Gershwin’s “Summertime”

By |2020-07-21T15:37:07-05:00July 25th, 2020|Categories: Christian Living, Christianity, Culture, Happiness, Music, Nature|

DuBose Heyward’s timeless lyrics and George Gershwin’s iconic melody in “Summertime” speak wisdom to our era of uncertainty. When we hear this American classic, may we always feel the presence of the Lord, remembering that God’s greatest desire is to be with each one of us in heaven for all eternity. “Summertime,” the classic opening [...]

Eva Brann on Happiness and Learning

By |2020-05-06T00:22:41-05:00January 6th, 2020|Categories: Classics, Eva Brann, Happiness, Liberal Learning, St. John's College|

There is a moment in every class when students’ eyes light up, or go wide, and they have a moment where it clicks and makes sense, where you can see they are learning something that they will never forget—these are the very highlights for Eva Brann, longtime tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis. It was [...]

Music and the Education of the Christian Soul

By |2020-07-19T15:18:46-05:00August 18th, 2019|Categories: Antonio Vivaldi, Beauty, Christianity, Culture, Happiness, Heaven, Music, Timeless Essays|

In a world ringing with noise and suffused with the more or less artful idolizing of passions divorced from objective goods, where are we to find melodies capable of penetrating our hardened hearts with spiritual truths? In Plato’s Republic, Socrates leads a group of ambitious young Athenians on a search for the best way of [...]

Community in the Wasteland

By |2019-08-02T10:55:21-05:00July 31st, 2019|Categories: Civilization, Community, Culture, Happiness, Science, Technology|

In many ways, cultivating relationships into a thriving community looks like cultivating a garden. Human beings can tolerate uprooting from one place to another, but every time this happens we disrupt those tiny little fibers of attachment from which we draw life. For a long time now, our culture has faced a crisis of loneliness. [...]

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