What does courage actually look like? Why is it that many who can face mortal dangers in battle lack the other virtues? How do you account for a man like Cicero, whose voice trembled at the beginning of every speech and who never distinguished himself in battle, yet who stood up to Catiline and saved [...]
Hidden behind our need for financial support is the profound reality of what our college's education confers upon our students—the tradition that has formed the greatness of the Western world, the great questions, the faith enduring for 2000 years through many different cultures and regimes. The great heritage of our civilization has been imperiled, and [...]
Many educators today have fostered a false enlightenment, a so-called "wokeness," that actually closes off inquiry and darkens the mind. But surely a recognition of this spiritual destitution will convince more and more people to look for real alternatives. Last week, a great friend of ours said that “the moment is good” for Wyoming Catholic [...]
My heart warms when I think of the difference the rosary has made in my life and the difference it steadily makes in the world, even—perhaps especially—for those who shout obscenities at our students saying their beads on the sidewalks near abortion mills to save the unborn. Last night at the monthly Legatus meeting in [...]
Is college education a lost cause? We have reason to hope, but only if we know what real education is. Crisis: “decisive point in the progress of a disease,” also “vitally important or decisive state of things, point at which change must come, for better or worse,” from Latinized form of Greek krisis, “turning point in [...]
If I had to speculate about why more young men are succumbing to nihilism in the culture at large, I would guess that our curriculum has something to say about it. Perhaps young men feel dishonored when the prevailing feminist ideologies that they encounter in their classes at most universities belittle their masculinity instead of [...]
One of the most delightful things about John Keats's early sonnet, “On First Looking into Chapman's Homer,” is that Keats uses images from the age of global exploration and modern science to describe the feeling of first experiencing what the Homeric poems really are. The classics of the deep past become a vast, unexplored expanse, a [...]
The Latin Mass has never been central to my own experience of the Church, though I respect those for whom it is, including many of our students. The point seems to me that our effort should be to seek the presence of Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit and to keep intact both word and [...]
The reader crosses a threshold from the book as an object into a transporting engagement with the surface of the writer’s language, and then through the language into living thought and imagination, into spaces and times and ascendancies of thought. The book that has drawn you into it has disappeared altogether as an object. It’s [...]
The hard question about the wedding guest in Matthew 22 who shows up without the wedding garment is: What exactly does he do wrong? Today’s Gospel reading from Matthew 22 is about the guest, invited at the last minute (or so it seems), who shows up at the wedding not wearing the wedding garment. Far [...]
God loved the world enough to give us His Son, but He also imposed upon the world the high duty of showing forth His grandeur with constant invention. That is the signal task and privilege of poetry—and the freshness of the life of faith. When I was a junior at the University of Georgia, I [...]
The America we saw in our long days of travel remains beautiful, mile after mile—a paragon of nations. It still demands a noble music. But it is hard not to think of what Benjamin Franklin famously replied to the lady who asked him, after the Constitutional Convention, whether we would have a monarchy or a [...]
Katherine Lee Bates’ “America the Beautiful” conveys the incalculable beauty of virtue that America can exhibit by exercising self-control and taking on the high responsibilities of self-rule. Our prayer is that the anomalies of this year do not overcome us, and that our nation will recall itself and find again the greatness of soul that [...]
The imagination required for good reading will not come to life without experience of the real thing. The Fourth of July in Lander, Wyoming, is about parades, barbecues, and fireworks that approximate, say, the shelling of Saipan in 1944. It's about rodeo. The Fremont Toyota Pioneer Days Rodeo on the evening of the Fourth began [...]