Liberal Learning, Great Books, & Paideia

By |2023-10-24T05:55:19-05:00October 23rd, 2023|Categories: E.B., Education, Eva Brann, Featured, Russell Kirk, Senior Contributors, St. John's College, Timeless Essays|

First, I want to say how honored I feel at receiving this prize named after Russell Kirk, an admirable writer, and Paideia, a noble practice. Even those of you who have not studied Greek may recognize what paideia means. It is the same word you can hear in “pediatrics,” the medical care of children, or [...]

Some Advice to Fellow Lovers of Liberal Learning

By |2023-10-10T18:18:44-05:00October 10th, 2023|Categories: E.B., Education, Eva Brann, Featured, Graduation, Liberal Arts, Liberal Learning, Senior Contributors, St. John's College, Timeless Essays|

A preliminary function of a liberal education must be to serve as a purgative, a cleansing, of those who wish to be free. By its means we can cleanse ourselves of our undigested and unconscious prejudices. When it first came home to me that I would not be a tutor at the Graduate Institute in [...]

Discovering the Truth Through Holiness and Beauty

By |2023-10-04T17:26:14-05:00October 4th, 2023|Categories: Catholicism, Christopher Dawson, David Deavel, Education, Liberal Learning, Senior Contributors|

If we want to win souls for Christ, we must touch their imaginations. Christopher Dawson’s idea of teaching Christian culture was certainly consistent with that idea of facts, events, history, and description. The adventure, the romance, and the beauty of the story of the Body of Christ after Pentecost shows the splendor of the truth [...]

Why We Teach

By |2023-09-30T16:00:17-05:00September 30th, 2023|Categories: Education, Glenn Arbery, Senior Contributors, Timeless Essays|

Our college exists to combat nihilism by opening our students to the integral wisdom of the past—the great tradition—and to the truth of nature directly experienced. We are firmly centered in God, not in the abstract, but in the real world, in what He has revealed about His action in human time, and more specifically [...]

Educating for Wisdom

By |2023-08-31T19:08:38-05:00August 31st, 2023|Categories: Beauty, Books, Education, Truth|

David M. Steiner argues that American education needs a clear and organized focus on ethics, beauty, and academic rigor to achieve its core purpose of preparing students to seek what Aristotle called eudaimonia, or human flourishing. A Nation at Thought: Restoring Wisdom in America’s Schools by David M. Steiner (224 pages, Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) [...]

A Tale of Two Houses

By |2023-08-13T16:59:18-05:00August 13th, 2023|Categories: Christianity, Education, Labor/Work, Liberal Arts, Liberal Learning|

What if the fundamental problem in the American academy is a loss of institutional identity that has nothing to do with conservative or liberal ideology? What if the modern university simply is no longer dedicated to being a house of learning and a community of scholars? Jake Meador’s article in The Atlantic* about the decline [...]

What Is a Classical Education?

By |2023-07-24T13:44:06-05:00July 24th, 2023|Categories: Classical Education, Classics, Culture, Education, Great Books, Timeless Essays|

When most people imagine a classical school, they probably think of a K-12 institution with a compulsory Latin curriculum focusing on grammatical analysis and close translation, an integrated approach to humanities that takes inspiration from the Great Books programs developed over the last sixty years, and some compromise with the conventional STEM-orientation in science and [...]

The Battle for Life After Dobbs

By |2023-06-20T14:57:22-05:00June 20th, 2023|Categories: Abortion, David Deavel, Education, Senior Contributors, Supreme Court|

It is the best of times and the worst of times for the pro-life movement. Though the historic Dobbs decision was a great legal victory, the cause for life continues. And it continues in both states that have severely limited abortion and those that have made it a kind of untouchable secular sacrament. The Supreme [...]

The Adeodatus Foundation: Recovering Roots & Life in Catholic Education

By |2023-06-09T17:11:34-05:00June 9th, 2023|Categories: Catholicism, David Deavel, Education, Senior Contributors|

While much of Catholic education has withered for lack of connection to its roots and the water of Christian faith, the Adeodatus Foundation is preparing to nourish many gardens in the desert. Those who want to be part of this movement of renewal might consider a trip to Pasadena later this month. Much of American [...]

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 [...]

To the Overwhelmed Class of 2023: Don’t Be Underwhelming

By |2023-05-24T23:17:22-05:00May 24th, 2023|Categories: Christianity, Education, Graduation, John Horvat|

The Class of 2023 can overcome its overwhelming challenges by admiring those eternal and permanent Christian ideals that have always enthralled generations. Those who generously give themselves to what they admire and love find meaning and purpose. Indeed, the overwhelmed class of 2023 can become overwhelming by becoming a shining beacon of faith and hope [...]

The Great Books: Enemies of Wisdom?

By |2023-06-11T10:32:45-05:00May 1st, 2023|Categories: Education, Great Books, Philosophy, Timeless Essays|Tags: |

Great Books fanaticism ignores the audience and in so doing reveals its parochialism, its innocence towards history. We no longer live in a book-dominated culture; to treat our students as though we did is to violate their very psychic structure. Today we enter a new kind of Middle Ages, but Great Books people still absent-mindedly [...]

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