The Gospel & the Intellectual Life

By |2023-10-08T19:27:02-05:00May 9th, 2023|Categories: Bible, Books, Bradley G. Green, Christianity, Liberal Learning, Senior Contributors, Timeless Essays|Tags: |

Why is it that wherever the gospel goes the academy follows? What does the gospel have to do with the mind? I have tried—across five major themes—to delineate something of the relationship between the Christian vision of God, man, and the world and the intellectual life. The two theses I have argued are: 1.  The [...]

Ballast on the Ship of State: Statesmanship as Human Excellence

By |2023-05-07T19:31:16-05:00May 7th, 2023|Categories: Classics, Politics, Timeless Essays, Virtue|

The true statesman embodies in the depths of his soul the cardinal virtues—courage, temperance, prudence, justice—as well as a commitment to political liberty or self-government and a principled and passionate opposition to the negation of civilized life that is tyranny in its various forms. The founding fathers of modern republicanism had no qualms about appealing [...]

The Great Books: Enemies of Wisdom?

By |2023-06-11T10:32:45-05:00May 1st, 2023|Categories: Education, Great Books, Philosophy, Timeless Essays|Tags: |

Great Books fanaticism ignores the audience and in so doing reveals its parochialism, its innocence towards history. We no longer live in a book-dominated culture; to treat our students as though we did is to violate their very psychic structure. Today we enter a new kind of Middle Ages, but Great Books people still absent-mindedly [...]

Guided by Pleasure

By |2023-04-21T13:54:39-05:00April 21st, 2023|Categories: Catholicism, Dante, Glenn Arbery, Liberal Learning, Senior Contributors, Wyoming Catholic College|

As another school year draws toward its close, it is a good occasion to consider what the whole of an education or “leading out” really entails. Who better than Dante to remind us? In Canto 27 of Purgatorio, Dante gives us one of the most liberating passages in literature. After his long journey down through [...]

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 [...]

Myths versus Novels

By |2023-05-21T11:28:40-05:00April 11th, 2023|Categories: E.B., Eva Brann, Fiction, Literature, Myth, Senior Contributors, St. John's College, Timeless Essays, Virginia Woolf|

Although myths and novels belong to different categories, they are alike in being the venues of human figures who are not presented as images of actually existent, “real-world” people. They have their being in a specific work of art, a drama or a narrative, such as the “Oresteia,” or a novel, such as Edith Wharton’s [...]

Student Loans & the President’s Power of the Purse

By |2023-03-03T08:34:03-06:00March 2nd, 2023|Categories: Congress, Constitution, Education, Supreme Court|

President Joseph Biden’s creating and inserting of his student loan forgiveness program, which his Department of Justice solicitor general accurately just called a “benefit” program, into last fall’s midterms elections received a thorough hearing in the Supreme Court on Tuesday. In defense of the program, the government’s case turned on what statutory words normally mean [...]

Materialism: The False God of Modern Science

By |2023-03-01T13:50:50-06:00March 1st, 2023|Categories: Existence of God, George Stanciu, Philosophy, Reason, Science, St. John's College, Timeless Essays|

Trained to believe that every object as well as every act in the universe is matter, an aspect of matter, or produced by matter—that is, schooled to be a materialist—I scoffed at the two fellow students of mine in graduate school who regularly attended church. For me, at that time, the brain was the mind [...]

Odysseus: Patron Hero of the Liberal Arts

By |2023-05-21T11:28:41-05:00February 19th, 2023|Categories: Classics, E.B., Education, Eva Brann, Featured, Homer, Liberal Arts, Odyssey, Senior Contributors, St. John's College, Timeless Essays|

I am to write about my hero Odysseus and to connect him to Liberal Arts. A tall order, you might think, considering that this clever young king of Ithaca and wily old warrior at Troy probably — no, certainly — never read a book in his life, and that to me, at least, the liberal [...]

Thomas More: Virtuous Statesman

By |2023-07-06T00:23:49-05:00February 6th, 2023|Categories: Books, Christendom, Cicero, Classics, Protestant Reformation, St. Thomas More, Timeless Essays|Tags: |

Several centuries before Edmund Burke, Thomas More warned against theorizing about the perfect society and advised statesmen to do their best with the form of government their people have passed on to them. Though he himself favored one form of government over another, he admitted that we rarely have the power to create the government [...]

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 [...]

The Necessary Island

By |2023-01-21T10:44:55-06:00January 21st, 2023|Categories: Catholicism, Glenn Arbery, Liberal Arts, Liberal Learning, Senior Contributors, Wyoming Catholic College|

The end of a liberal education should not be escape from the corrupt contemporary world or the achievement of a purity that increasingly excludes others, but rather the cultural incarnation of the Word in our own time and our own history. Almost fifteen years ago, my wife and I took a trip to Ireland—part vacation, [...]

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