In a world beset by violence, doubt, despair, cynicism and sin to turn to the works of poet Thomas Traherne is to breathe a gust of fresh Spring air. My little sister followed me to England, fell in love with the country, fell in love with an Englishman, and fell in love with the English [...]
“Modernity” comes from Latin "modo," meaning “just-now.” Thus modernity is any generation’s own time; it is the mode of the recent, the contemporary—with a hint of time-pride: the latest is the newest, and the newest is the best. Mr. Ropoulos and I were talking in the St. John’s College Coffee Shop, and the subject of [...]
Charles Eliot Norton is unknown today outside historians of literature or education, but between Fort Sumter and Teddy Roosevelt he dominated Anglo-American literature and Harvard lecture halls. Beginning with optimism, in the years following Appomattox his perspective darkened into fears that American democracy encouraged selfishness, corruption, and the hatred of excellence. In the 1890s, Harvard [...]
We live in a world in need of re-enchantment; but re-enchanting love is rekindled in the hearts of people one at a time. To reclaim that sense of loving delight in God and the world, we need to give our students a break from the busyness and distraction that surrounds daily life, let them digitally [...]
Louis Awerbuck believed that societies fell to folly when they drew distinct lines between their warriors and scholars. What this ultimately led to was a society’s thinking being done by cowards and its fighting done by fools. Awerbuck saw himself as the keeper of a tradition, a heritage of warriors in ages past, and civilization’s [...]
The essayist’s head is always in the clouds, his feet are never on the ground. What keeps me going is cultivating an inner joy. A sort of contemplative trance is for me the most blessed state in which to find oneself. Sometimes it even leads to prayer, the highest form of reflection and communion. As [...]
Great poetry can come from deep engagement with the problems of politics, but it is especially moving to see how exile—often the consequence of that engagement—subtly becomes the symbol of the condition of fallen man. Students at Wyoming Catholic College memorize many poems in the four years of the humanities curriculum, but few of the [...]
First, I want to say how honored I feel at receiving this prize named after Russell Kirk, an admirable writer, and Paideia, a noble practice. Even those of you who have not studied Greek may recognize what paideia means. It is the same word you can hear in “pediatrics,” the medical care of children, or [...]
We are made for the stars but rooted in the soil. We are made to seek spiritual realities, but we must use this world, this visible creation, to do so. How the brief life of a storied liberal arts program changed lives the world over. In 1967, at the age of forty-four, John Senior transferred [...]
A preliminary function of a liberal education must be to serve as a purgative, a cleansing, of those who wish to be free. By its means we can cleanse ourselves of our undigested and unconscious prejudices. When it first came home to me that I would not be a tutor at the Graduate Institute in [...]
If we want to win souls for Christ, we must touch their imaginations. Christopher Dawson’s idea of teaching Christian culture was certainly consistent with that idea of facts, events, history, and description. The adventure, the romance, and the beauty of the story of the Body of Christ after Pentecost shows the splendor of the truth [...]
The title of Shakespeare’s tragedy is misleading, in that "Julius Caesar" shows us much more about Antony and the friend who betrays Caesar, Brutus, than it does about the legendary leader of Rome. Brutus: “There is a tide in the affairs of men Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea [...]
Our college exists to combat nihilism by opening our students to the integral wisdom of the past—the great tradition—and to the truth of nature directly experienced. We are firmly centered in God, not in the abstract, but in the real world, in what He has revealed about His action in human time, and more specifically [...]
“The Magic Flute” has been called Mozart’s “Masonic opera,” and so it is. Mozart was a serious Freemason. But the Masonic influence is of secondary importance to the power and precision of Mozart’s music, which, like all great music, is inexhaustible. Every act of listening to this work brings new discoveries. “Feelings are ‘vectors’; for [...]