“The world is too much with us,” Wordsworth wrote over 200 years ago, and we certainly understand what he means—but perhaps we do not understand well enough what the recourse might be. During their junior and senior years, students at Wyoming Catholic College move from a solid grounding in ancient thought into the complexities of [...]
In these strange times, the arrival of ChatGPT, a dispassionate voice that draws upon vast resources of knowledge (far beyond human capacity), might seem like a good thing. Late last semester, the mother of one of our freshmen sent me an article about a professor who had stopped assigning essays. He had realized that with the [...]
“The dragon sits by the side of the road, watching those who pass," St. Cyril warned. "Beware lest he devour you. We go to the Father of Souls, but it is necessary to pass by the dragon.” Lent is not an occasion to pass the dragon, but to prepare for the confrontation. In the first [...]
To most of the world outside the Church, a controversy over a brief part of the Mass will seem absurd, especially since it is called “the sign of peace.” My column last week, “The Snub of Peace,” drew more substantial direct responses from people on our mailing list that anything else I’ve written, and the republication [...]
After all these years, I am still sometimes taken aback when someone in church refuses the sign of peace. Converts to Catholicism, as everyone knows, bring a fresh perspective to the experience of the Church. Going to confession is new and harrowing and liberating in ways that a “cradle Catholic” might not quite appreciate. Participating [...]
When I think of what our graduates will do, I mentally pose a question for those out in the greater world who are in the position to make choices. What kind of person do you want for your business or your school? Sometimes it strikes me that what we do at Wyoming Catholic College — [...]
Why is St. Augustine’s conviction of his own sinfulness the true path? Because he acknowledges that his misery is his own fault—in other words, that he had real agency in his turn away from what was truly good and beautiful. A few days ago, I happened upon a review of Deepak Chopra’s latest book, Living [...]
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, [...]
This Advent season does not center on our achievement; it is not the time of puffing ourselves up, but of waiting for God to reveal, as only God can, the new thing under the sun that breaks the great cycle of vanity. The greatest things are born from humility. There is something essentially comic about [...]
As our culture seems increasingly to reject its own hard-earned wisdom, it is good to remember that we wait in hope. It was disconcerting this week, reading Plato’s Phaedrus with my section of freshman at Wyoming Catholic College, to realize once again that the sophisticated Athenian world of the 4th Century BC was a glittering [...]
In these uncertain times, we are constantly being urged to historicize Christ, as though He were merely a symbolic figure in a moribund and culturally discredited system of thought. But Advent reminds us of the deep promise of the Nicene Creed. He was, He is, and He is to come. In this Advent, we await [...]
In this age of irreverence, we have much to recover, and we cannot achieve that recovery without the hard work of self-mastery in the outdoors and the classroom, but especially without worship of the true teacher, who is Christ the King. This past Sunday, Catholics across the world celebrated The Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus [...]
“How is this relevant?” someone might ask about some venerable work from the tradition, such as the Aeneid or King Lear or Aristotle's De Anima. The one doing the asking might seem to be in possession of a burning truth about the uniqueness of the present moment, but the more we commit the past to [...]
A radical polarization is going on in our own day. Knowing better, people interpret others as short-sighted and selfish, demonize their affiliations, and tar them with imputed evil. The hard question facing us is a political one: how long will we be able to sustain our constitutional forms? The still harder question, though, is what [...]