About Zena Hitz

Dr. Zena Hitz is a tutor at St. John's College in Annapolis, MD. She is the author of Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life. Miss Hitz is a graduate of St. John's College, Cambridge University, and Princeton University.

Why Intellectual Work Matters

By |2023-08-30T17:51:58-05:00June 4th, 2023|Categories: Compassion, Culture, Education, Essential, Great Books, Liberal Arts, Liberal Learning, St. John's College, Timeless Essays|

Intellectual life provides an escape in that it is beyond “straitened circumstances,” but the escape is again a flight into realities beyond oneself: animal behavior, astronomy, and the mechanics of the inner life. The intellect has no limit to its subject matter: It reaches greedily for the whole of everything. In 2001 I was a [...]

The Crisis of the Intellectual Life

By |2022-11-06T15:45:29-06:00November 6th, 2022|Categories: Aristotle, Featured, Humanities, Liberal Learning, Plato, St. John's College, Timeless Essays|

The removal of intellectual life from the world, the withdrawn person’s independence from contests over wealth or status, provides or reveals a dignity that can’t be ranked or traded. This dignity, along with the universality of the objects of the intellect—that is, that they are available to everyone—is what opens up space for real communion. [...]

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