Is Classical Education Revitalizing Christian Culture?

By |2024-02-29T05:33:04-06:00February 28th, 2024|Categories: Christianity, Classical Education, Featured, Timeless Essays|

The students of a classical education are part of nothing less than a civilizational renaissance, the revitalized intellectual tradition of a distinctive and vibrant Christian culture. Patrick Henry College recently brought more honor to the exciting renewal of classical education nationwide. Not only has the small liberal-arts school in Purcellville, Virginia, won nine of the [...]

God’s Truth

By |2024-02-24T21:37:57-06:00February 24th, 2024|Categories: Christianity, Classical Education, Glenn Arbery, Liberal Learning, Timeless Essays, Truth, Wyoming Catholic College|

In the transcendence of God, the truth is not a collection of dispiriting facts about our meaningless emergence from chance combinations of matter, but justice and mercy and ultimate harmony. Our approach ought to be to reveal Who God is, not to close off the way to Him. At last week’s meeting of the Philadelphia [...]

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, [...]

Love to Learn, Learn to Love

By |2023-12-18T11:41:39-06:00December 17th, 2023|Categories: Beauty, Catholicism, Classical Education, Classical Learning, Classics, Education, Great Books, Liberal Learning, Truth|

To get the most out of your time here, I have some advice: Love to learn, ignore your grades, and learn to love — and then I promise that Thomas Aquinas College will radically change your life. Before I arrived here on campus for the first time 23 years ago, my high school classmates had [...]

There Is Only One Great Book: The Bible

By |2023-10-08T19:26:52-05:00July 29th, 2023|Categories: Bible, Catholicism, Christianity, Classical Education, Classical Learning, History, Literature|

Medieval civilization proved the Bible’s power to incorporate all the tales of the pagans. It was never the goal of Augustine, Jerome, and their successors to save classical literature, although that resulted from their efforts. What they wanted to know was Christ in the Scriptures. Despite the current enthusiasm over classical education, there is little [...]

Greek to Us: The Death of Classical Education & Its Consequences

By |2023-07-26T15:39:37-05:00July 26th, 2023|Categories: Christian Kopff, Classical Education, Classical Learning, Classics, Humanities, Liberal Learning, Timeless Essays|Tags: |

Classical Education as practiced in the United States over the past 30 years is the most up-to-date, cutting edge development in K-12 education. It is also the oldest, most tried-and-true alternative on today’s educational scene. America needs the Classical Tradition. In 1999 the A&E cable network broadcast a list of “The 100 Most Influential People [...]

What Is a Classical Education?

By |2023-07-24T13:44:06-05:00July 24th, 2023|Categories: Classical Education, Classics, Culture, Education, Great Books, Timeless Essays|

When most people imagine a classical school, they probably think of a K-12 institution with a compulsory Latin curriculum focusing on grammatical analysis and close translation, an integrated approach to humanities that takes inspiration from the Great Books programs developed over the last sixty years, and some compromise with the conventional STEM-orientation in science and [...]

Literature & the Foundations of the West

By |2023-06-21T12:49:41-05:00June 20th, 2023|Categories: Classical Education, Featured, Literature, Timeless Essays, Tradition, Western Civilization, Western Tradition|

The questions for the West have now become: What it is that we should remember and teach? What are the elements of Western civilization that might sustain what is left and reconstruct what has been damaged or destroyed? In the early twenty-first century, the liberal arts curriculum at our universities is in a peculiar condition [...]

Old and New

By |2023-06-03T15:52:18-05:00June 3rd, 2023|Categories: Catholicism, Classical Education, Classical Learning, Glenn Arbery, Senior Contributors, Wyoming Catholic College|

Classical schools honor the old. Reading and discussing a great work in high school give the mind a preparatory receptivity until greater experience can broaden and deepen the field of reference, at which time studying the same work in college can be an experience formative for life. These past two weeks, I have had occasion [...]

The Source of Creativity & the Wellspring of Culture

By |2023-05-19T11:01:46-05:00May 19th, 2023|Categories: Catholicism, Classical Education, Classical Learning, Glenn Arbery, Liberal Learning, Senior Contributors, Wyoming Catholic College|

In classical education, we are not talking about tradition as the acquisition of monuments, but as a permanence gathered from moments of participation capable of being lived and lived again and then passed on to be taken up yet again by generations yet to come, with our own additions and our own achievements of greatness. [...]

Classical Studies & Modern Science

By |2023-04-11T19:32:49-05:00April 11th, 2023|Categories: Classical Education, Classical Learning, Liberal Learning, Science|

There is perhaps nothing more old-fashioned and tradition-minded than classical studies, which focus upon the dead languages, fables, and philosophies of bygone civilizations. So what could the classics have to do with cutting-edge science and technology? Quite a lot, according to Werner Heisenberg, who testified that “the sciences cannot but benefit from classical studies.” In [...]

The Recovery & Renewal of the Liberal Arts of Language

By |2023-01-31T17:53:13-06:00January 31st, 2023|Categories: Christianity, Classical Education, Education, Language, Liberal Arts, Liberal Learning, Rhetoric, Timeless Essays|

The liberal arts allow us the freedom to become more fully human by sharing as fully as possible in that which makes us distinct, and the freedom to flourish through the reality of our nature, our humanity, and, yes, perhaps even our divinity. Why My Favorite Nun Was Right: The Recovery and Renewal of the Liberal [...]

The Purpose of Mathematics in a Classical Education

By |2023-01-23T17:32:19-06:00January 23rd, 2023|Categories: Classical Education, Mathematics, Plato, Timeless Essays|

One of the chief aims of mathematics has always been to reveal and describe an order in the natural world. Mathematics, as a language, reveals this order and harmony, yet it should also be lifted from this concrete foundation and brought into the world of the abstract. A resurgence of interest in classical education has [...]

Defending the Permanent Things

By |2022-09-22T17:17:45-05:00September 22nd, 2022|Categories: Books, Classical Education, Culture, Education, Language, Liberal Learning, Timeless Essays|

Apologists for Greek and Latin have lately dwindled. Yet in the past several years there have been some notable attempts to save classical education from utter extinction—one of which is Tracy Lee Simmons’ “Climbing Parnassus.” Climbing Parnassus: A New Apologia for Greek and Latin, by Tracy Lee Simmons (290 pages, Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2007) As [...]

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