The qualities that I would love most of all to see in all our students could not be better described than by Edmund Burke’s account of the chivalric demeanor: “that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom”… As a [...]
On Tuesday, after my monthly coffee hour with the students, one of the graduating seniors caught up with me to ask what exactly it meant to say, as we do in our mission statement, that our mission involves “remaking the culture.” Practically speaking, what does that look like? Since I took office in 2016, I [...]
Everything in nature changes—but love strives for the immortal. What keeps the form of a college supple and stable must be love for something essentially unchanging and yet eternally young, the “beauty so ancient and so new.” Listening to this year’s seniors present their orations last week at Wyoming Catholic College, I found myself subject [...]
Of all the public arts once honored, oratory might have fallen the farthest. It is now hard to imagine the great hunger that audiences had for political speeches, sermons, lectures—anything that demonstrated the power of language to educate, persuade, or inspire—in the days before the technological revolutions of the past century. They would stand all [...]
Tradition in action gives rise to new work, and the new work changes the tradition… At a gathering of Wyoming Catholic College faculty and staff on Monday morning, I had occasion to mention T.S. Eliot’s seminal essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Eliot still had an overwhelming ascendancy in literary circles even in the 1960s and early [...]
For much of contemporary thought, God is an invention. But the idea of God accords with the nature of reality. Belief in God is useful for human order, as it centers and grounds all knowledge... On Tuesday, the United States Senate voted not to ban abortion after five months. To say that this decision is unbelievable [...]
What happens to the Romans in the absence of their greatest man, Camillus? Crushing losses, near-obliteration. Not to honor what is best and highest—in fact, to insult it, to belittle it, to attribute base motives to it: What can follow except an arrogant forgetfulness that preludes disaster? Titus Livius (or Livy), the Roman historian whose [...]
Like it or not, final exams provide a better analogy to the Last Judgment than one would like to think: All that was hidden comes to light… Finals: the very word does something alarming to the spine. This week, as students at Wyoming Catholic College go into the classroom for a three-hour test or wait [...]
Transformation of a life or a culture begins with a wound, a sacred weakness—wonder, love, openness to grace… Being on the road for Wyoming Catholic College leads to a certain benign distortion in my view of contemporary American culture. Meeting donors, parents who want the best education for their children, or prospective students fascinated by [...]
The students of our college talk to each other without electronic distraction, they look adults in the eye, they laugh often and easily, they exercise wit without reflexive cynicism, they love dancing and singing and playing instruments; they love the classics and the outdoors… When Wyoming Catholic College admitted its first students ten years ago, [...]
Language has an extraordinary place in an education like ours because our aim is the restoration of the world and the transformation of culture through Christ the Word. Earlier this week, I was having lunch in the cafeteria with a group of new freshmen and one of their teachers, Dr. Kent Lasnoski, who is working [...]
Longing for the enchanted world underlies the poetic imagination, but it’s the light of common day that we inhabit, thus we should value realism in the imaginative realm… One of the themes of frequent discussion at Wyoming Catholic College is Charles Taylor’s idea of disenchantment—the disappearance in modern times of an “enchanted” relation to the [...]
Making art is a mode of revealing the world in new ways… For the past two weeks, I’ve been writing about the opportunity to make a new Catholic culture, not from scratch and not from attempts to appropriate whatever happens to be popular at the moment, but from the immense resources available in the tradition [...]
The more silence can become a way of life in this noisy age, the more a new culture will radiate from its blessings… Last week I suggested that, despite the drift of Western culture, a time like ours can actually shelter a deep hope for renewal. The Catholic historian Christopher Dawson, with his long perspective, has [...]