Dr. Glenn C. Arbery is President of Wyoming Catholic College. He is the author of Why Literature Matters (2001) and the editor of two volumes, The Tragic Abyss (2004) and, most recently, The Southern Critics: An Anthology (2010).

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 [...]

Advent and Melancholy

By |2023-12-02T20:54:45-06:00December 2nd, 2023|Categories: Advent, Catholicism, Christianity, Christmas, Glenn Arbery, Great Books, Liberal Arts, Liberal Learning, Timeless Essays, Wyoming Catholic College|

Nothing breaks through melancholy like a baby. During Advent, we wait for that moment of absolute newness that we need within but cannot muster, that moment when the whole of the divine nature, the whole meaning of universes beyond number, lies helpless before us. On Monday of this week, students met with me in the new [...]

Poetry & Politics?

By |2023-10-25T05:58:29-05:00October 24th, 2023|Categories: Dante, Featured, Glenn Arbery, Humanities, Liberal Arts, Poetry, Timeless Essays, William Shakespeare, Wyoming Catholic College|

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 [...]

Why We Teach

By |2023-09-30T16:00:17-05:00September 30th, 2023|Categories: Education, Glenn Arbery, Senior Contributors, Timeless Essays|

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 [...]

Do Great Books Make Us Better?

By |2023-09-20T18:02:08-05:00September 20th, 2023|Categories: Glenn Arbery, Great Books, Senior Contributors, Timeless Essays, Wyoming Catholic College|

If books could make us better on their own, then we could read our way to perfect virtue. Do Great Books make us better? This question goes to the heart of what we do at Wyoming Catholic College. In an essay for The New Yorker early in December, the professor and writer Louis Menand reviews [...]

Intending the Unintended

By |2023-09-13T19:06:58-05:00September 13th, 2023|Categories: Catholicism, Glenn Arbery, Humanities, Liberal Arts, Liberal Learning, Senior Contributors, Timeless Essays, Wyoming Catholic College|

What is the intention of a Great Books education? Does it need to make the student feel at every moment as though there were a palpable design upon him? I ask because making things “intentional” seems to have become something of a buzzword, even in spiritual matters. Guided tours can be a wonderful thing. I [...]

Silence: Seeing & Hearing God’s World

By |2023-08-22T19:06:30-05:00August 22nd, 2023|Categories: Catholicism, Glenn Arbery, Poetry, Senior Contributors, Timeless Essays, Wyoming Catholic College|

Real silence (always recommended by the saints) allows us to escape our own conceptual frames and be open to the world as it is in God's first book. The world repeats itself, as it has done and will do, a little differently each time, each time worth seeing and hearing differently. Several years ago, in [...]

The Grace of Simple Praise

By |2023-07-28T12:39:49-05:00July 28th, 2023|Categories: Catholicism, Glenn Arbery, Liberal Learning, Senior Contributors, Wyoming Catholic College|

Learning the language of Christian culture begins with God-given reality, which explains our emphasis on the outdoors and on horsemanship; it explains our technology policy, which helps students avoid an algorithmically manipulative virtual reality; and it explains our four years of classes centered on the Great Books, an encounter with the greatest thought of the [...]

Unfinished Reading

By |2023-07-07T15:35:21-05:00July 7th, 2023|Categories: Books, Catholicism, Glenn Arbery, Senior Contributors, Wyoming Catholic College|

Every summer, I look forward to reading new books in the months between classes, but this year I'm determined to finish the ones I've started. The word "graduation" in most people's minds means something like "the end of an education," even though the word "commencement" (used for this ceremony at least since 1387, according to the Oxford [...]

True Fourth

By |2023-07-03T16:17:35-05:00July 3rd, 2023|Categories: American Founding, Freedom, Glenn Arbery, Independence Day, Liberty, Patriotism, Timeless Essays, Wyoming Catholic College|

Why is the true Fourth such a powerful image of liberty? Because the things that most deepen us and rouse us are dangerous. An appetite for the real good means being willing to face danger, and the whole point of the liberty we celebrate is that we learn to handle danger, to face it responsibly, [...]

Great Books and Horses

By |2023-06-23T19:34:35-05:00June 23rd, 2023|Categories: Featured, Glenn Arbery, Great Books, Liberal Learning, Timeless Essays, Wyoming Catholic College|

The greatest books of the Western world have relied upon the knowledge of horses whose natures have so influenced and symbolized our own. When my wife Virginia and I first came to Wyoming Catholic College in 2013, we had only notions about horses. Each of us had been astride some poor rope-led nag or other [...]

Go to Top