College, as most know it, is Elbert Hubbard’s Scrapbook. Nobody reading this has heard of Elbert Hubbard, but he is education today. His “scrapbook” promised four thousand years of education in one slim volume with beautiful binding. How big was he? Luminaries judged your education if you did not have the Scrapbook on your end table. My [...]
Jesus saved a hurting T.S. Eliot. And Eliot, the greatest poet of the twentieth century, thought Jesus could save us as well. A person can hate the conclusion, but if English is your mother tongue, then you cannot ignore Eliot or his ideas. He shaped the twentieth-century imagination through his poetry and use of language. [...]
In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Brutus, the noblest Roman of them all, ends his life working with people he cannot respect, haunted by visions of the friend he has murdered, and in a cause that fails and deserves to fail… The man fighting for a bad cause is always in a hurry, chased by the guilt of [...]
The first fragment of Plato's Timaeus is worth a lifetime of study. There is a whole education in just these few lines. The attention drawn to mathematics from them and the elevation of mathematics in the rest of the Timaeus made Western thinkers look to mathematics for truth... Science started when Christians thought hard about two books: [...]
To the extent that I am a human person, Homer’s Iliad speaks to me, but my particular circumstances are my own. As a result, a great question will help all people, including me, and so might be applicable to my peculiar place in space and time without being exhausted by it… In one week I’m [...]
Young Socrates needed to learn how to clarify and defend an argument. He had to learn to push tirelessly against convention, if convention had no defense… As parents none of us are Mary or Joseph, so educating a young Jesus is beyond our skill set, but what about a young Socrates? If you were [...]
We did not discard most of the image of reality from the Middle Ages. The lovely whole image was smashed like stained glass under the hammer of zealots, but later people recovered fragments and used them to create the world in which we live… C.S. Lewis wrote a book of profound scholarship, The Discarded [...]
Dante reminded us that this world is good, as far it goes, but it is not the ultimate. We love this land well, but not as the final resting place for our bones. We are exiles until the New Heaven and the New Earth… Only the exile can create a home where he cannot [...]
Wind. All he could hear was wind. The voice of Max and the others vanished in the gale of his waking nightmare. It was dark, the kind of perfect darkness modern people rarely know and so find disorienting. And then he saw a circle, spinning like the outside rim of a wagon wheel and [...]