As it happened with Henry Adams, a robust study of history is enough to prove the indispensable role that Christianity has played in true human progress, and it might just be enough to spark an interest in seeking an alternate, unified, form of meaning in our modern age, moving us back to God. Studies [...]
There is always room in the temple of poetry for another voice, another perspective, another way of tackling the great themes of humanity. So listen to me, now, you who will grace this earth 2000 years after I’m dead and gone: Be the person you were created to be. Author’s Introduction: Imagine if Homer, [...]
The renewal of Catholic literature is happening before our very eyes through the efforts of many very good Catholic writers. The problem is that our eyes are closed. We do not see the glorious fruit of this literary revival because we are not looking for it. I am presently in the midst of reading [...]
Thomas Aquinas’ cosmology and doctrine of the soul are vitalistic. Everything has a particular soul to it, and these souls have particular life-forces destined for particular ends. As a whole, the cosmos is meant to reflect and embody the graces of God: his beauty, love, and goodness. Such is to what all things are [...]
Approach this charming collection of writers’ conversations with an expectation to encounter some thought or piece of advice that you didn’t know you needed or wanted, and you will find yourself delighted with a fresh dose of enthusiasm for thoughtful, meaningful writing and story-telling. Writers on Writing: Conversations with Allen Mendenhall, edited by Allen [...]
Unprecedented in history is the development of the adolescent—a period of life in which one is isolated from childhood and maturity. Child-rearing practices vary from culture to culture, and many Americans are shocked to discover that the most turbulent period of their lives was a cultural phenomenon. The confusion, rebellion, and search for identity [...]
Those who address graduates usually speak about the struggle to obtain success in life. Graduates are told that they must now face the difficult challenges that await them. They should accept no limits in their quest to change the world. Armed with their new skills, they can now face whatever life can throw at [...]
As this year’s seniors take their last exams and prepare to walk across the stage on Saturday morning, I’m led to think about the effect of this whole unique education at Wyoming Catholic College on them. How will it all come together—all the theology and philosophy, the literature and history, the Latin, music, and [...]
All over the country this spring graduating seniors are being told that the future is before them, that they are the future. This is heady but dangerous talk. The future is not a place or a being. You can’t get there from here or be there except through a series of fulfilled nows. This [...]
Only fools would send their children to school to listen to some teacher’s opinions, unless, of course, those opinions also happen to be true. Discussing St. Thomas Aquinas’s love of teaching, Josef Pieper writes: Teaching does not consist in a man’s making public talks on the results of his meditations, even if he does [...]
To my mind texts, like people, are serious when they have a surface that arouses the desire to know them and the depth to fulfill that desire. I think that for us human beings only depths and mysteries induce viable desire. Many a failure of love follows on the—usually false—opinion that we have exhausted [...]
This morning, I had the privilege of speaking to the entire student body and faculty of Portsmouth Abbey School on the eastern shore of Narragansett Bay, nine or ten miles north of Newport, Rhode Island. My topic was “why literature matters,” but my emphasis was on the way that identity politics ruins both literature [...]
We say of people that they have intuition. We apparently mean that they apprehend things directly without belaboring them by analysis or even without accosting them with too close an inspection. Intuition is what we long for, thinking is what we can do. What follows? You asked me to speak about “Intellect and Intuition,” [...]
America’s everybody-gets-a-trophy syndrome has apparently made its way deep into the corridors of academia. Many times I’ve run into those who profess expertise in some field, only to scratch the surface and discover their academic credentials to be less than stellar. Ambrose Bierce defined education as “that which discloses to the wise and disguises from [...]