The origins of human things are flawed, no question, and inequalities remain. But should we not try to honor the principles of Washington or Jefferson and distinguish them from the prejudices of the day that they shared? The curriculum at Wyoming Catholic College has much wisdom to offer in the current crisis, much that should [...]
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 [...]
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 help [...]
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 of [...]
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 or [...]
William 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 I’m [...]
Forming good manners and helping to make our country beautiful—not cynically undercutting our institutions—is part of the task of education. Our students must know that we can never concede the fight to those who would plunge our institutions into the abyss of ideological slavery, and who wish to undercut the understanding of shared responsibility and [...]
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 in [...]
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 doing [...]
I love the idea of the energy of hope. What we want to see in students is the presence of some inner drive, some fire of ambition toward a worthy end. This end needs to be good, in the future, difficult to achieve, and possible. Without hope, the soul goes flat and sour. In his [...]
Will Arbery’s “Heroes of the Fourth Turning” is intelligently written, beautifully directed, well-acted, and gripping from the very first scenes. Certainly, it’s a play that demands extended conversation. When I told my wife that I was going to be writing this week about our son Will’s play, Heroes of the Fourth Turning, she asked me if I [...]
While in London, my wife and I went to evensong at Westminster Abbey. Throughout the trip, evensong somehow gave us the symbol—high, formal, and beautiful—of the end of the day, both of British greatness and the vitality of Europe. After the Vanenburg Conference at Oxford earlier this month, my wife and I went to London [...]
Europe would not be Europe without the current of tradition once inculcated by classical education. It is such an education we must seek to preserve. Though its immediate effects are not manifest, without it the culture would be ceded to those who wish to shape it for a radically secular agenda, perhaps even a posthuman one. [...]