The poet relies upon on a shared understanding that gives his imagination the oxygen to sustain it. The world lacks certitude about its direction, and we want most of all to awaken the poetic powers urgently necessary for the long rebuilding that lies ahead. For the past month or so, I have been doing [...]
Most of us Americans sense a great underlying health that has paradoxically reemerged during and despite this pandemic. Most of us feel a fresh appreciation for our families, our homes, our friends, our daily bread. This situation has given us a renewed appreciation for the freedom to make our own decisions, to exercise prudence, and [...]
The first spark of genuine engagement with great writers most often comes from a teacher, and the ever-fresh immortality of the great work has its ironic contrast in the aging and death of those who made the introduction. So it is for me with Shakespeare, who was first truly impressed upon my imagination during [...]
Our college, like most others, has adopted the new mode of “distance learning” during the current crisis. What if our students begin to learn a new kind of engagement with the written word precisely because of this momentary break from the habits of life at school and of absence from each other? I can’t [...]
Many in our society consider religion merely an instrument of power, and they believe that the “correction” of inherited beliefs and practices can be forced upon the unwilling. But there’s an enormous difference between people who choose the real common good and people forced to submit to a state ideology. Today’s offering in our [...]
No one knows what will happen with COVID-19—whether it will spread and peak and go away, or whether it will stay around for years, even centuries, as the plague did in Europe. It is good nonetheless to remember that true culture arises out of the joy and beauty we find anyway in the midst [...]
We were all riding high only recently, and suddenly, there’s not enough on the shelves of the grocery stores. How should we think about it all? The virtue of a curriculum like that at our college is that the sweep of it encompasses the memory of the most extraordinary challenges to human nature. Pandemics [...]
Wordsworth’s introspection in “Tintern Abbey” leads him to attempt to answer the question we ask with our curriculum at our college: How does the experience of unforgettable natural beauty in the full vitality of youth affect the moral and spiritual life that follows? As all the world should know, the curriculum at Wyoming Catholic [...]
What are women? Despite my daily presence to my daughters’ lives, their sisterhood remains an enigma. A complex emotional bond exists among the seven of them, a self-enclosed feminine world that I can see and understand, but never truly enter. “Little Women” reminded me of that. What are women, anyway? I’m confused. Recent events, not to mention what [...]
An interesting thing—somewhat alarming, always surprising—happens at Wyoming Catholic College and probably at other small, strongly Catholic colleges like ours. A number of students express dislike, even disdain, for politics. We have noticed it for years. They don’t see what contemporary events have to do with real education. […]
Abortion long ago became a natural symbol for the loss of a spiritual center. Not divine law, but individual will is the measure, and rejecting the child within the body becomes its expression. Challenging Roe v. Wade is not a matter of standing in judgment against women, but of changing a culture of death. [...]
In this Advent season, we wait in expectation, we hope for the coming of the Lord Who has come and Who is coming and Who will come again. We remind ourselves of His absence from the lives of so many in the world today, and we pray that graces may come to cure us [...]
To be truly grateful means that one holds oneself in the grace of owing. It means alert and noble attention to the good intended by the giver. Giving thanks is such a beautifully natural gesture that it seems almost perverse to admire someone for not making it. But Dr. Samuel Johnson earns such admiration [...]
The whole thrust of the modern world is toward a slighting of memory. These days, most of us worry more about how much memory our computers have than about developing this profound faculty in ourselves. At Wyoming Catholic College, our students continue a practice of great antiquity—they memorize poetry. Although people have never stopped [...]