Whatever hells have been loosed upon the world, here in America and abroad, never forget that our ancestors, even pagan ones, called us to love and cherish that which is best. Every autumn, I have the grand privilege of teaching Socrates (the Apology, the Crito), Plato (Book VIII of the Republic, the Timaeus), and Aristotle [...]
Music assures us that we are not alone: that there is something out there in the world that knows our hearts and may even teach us to know them better. Thanks to music, we experience what it means to be connected to the whole of all things. “Music, too, is nature.” —Victor Zuckerkandl, Sound and [...]
“The city comes into being for the sake of life, and the city exists for the sake of the good life,” (Aristotle, Politics I.2, 1252b27–30). In this quotation from Aristotle’s Politics, he sets out the two reasons any city or nation is founded. The first is a practical reason: “for the sake of life”—i.e., so [...]
In this materialistic age, time has become a commodity that can be bought and sold. This is evidenced by the place that the monetization of time holds in common parlance: “spend your time well,” “I have some free time,” “time is money,” etc. It is tragic to see time itself be corroded by the greed [...]
Should honor and fame no longer be ends of ambition in such a world? The ancient philosophers doubted the ultimate merit of fame, but they also looked for the most spirited students, those most inclined to “undertake extensive and arduous enterprises." In response to my essay about baptizing ambition, a friend from Boston College recommended [...]
Saying that government cannot educate is not a partisan political position, but a simple statement of fact: government cannot educate, because government cannot love. Even more bluntly, government should not even try to run institutions of love, because, slowly but surely, its administrators inevitably pervert them in their desire for security or lust for power. [...]
Friendship is a receptive disposition of the soul which is ready to act for the good of the other when called upon, but which does not demand to be called upon. A man has to respect the freedom of his friend, or else a man will end up seeking out his own will to the [...]
May we always defend like Socrates and Cicero and Thomas More. May we always preserve like the monks of Lindesfarne. May we always see the world through the eyes of Russell Kirk, Christopher Dawson, and T.S. Eliot. May we always cherish the humanity and the divinity of the Second Person of the Most Blessed Trinity. [...]
Ignorance of the great works of music is as bad, for someone who seeks to be educated in Western culture, as ignorance of Dante and Shakespeare in literature, and Plato and Aristotle in philosophy. So important is it to have some sort of understanding of how the noble art of music works, and so important is [...]
In valor, there is hope—namely, the hope that our virtue may be fully complete. It is as men of valor that we will be all we can be. In valor, there is hope. —Tacitus When it played in the movie theaters, the terrific movie Act of Valor (2012) earned notoriety for two reasons. First [...]
Eating together, as a social event, is meant to be time-consuming because it is meant to be an intimate experience where friendship—true friendship—is experienced, rekindled, and love stands at the center of the dinner table. It is, in its own way, a call to sacrifice. Aristotle identified man’s eating habits as one of the cornerstones of civilization—one [...]
In “Nicomachean Ethics,” Aristotle offers students a refreshing alternative to the instrumentality of modern life: the pursuit of goodness. Goodness inspires honor, and mutual honor is the stuff of friendships of virtue. These are the friendships which yield the greatest happiness. Recently, I had the great pleasure afforded by technology in our chaotic, pandemic times [...]
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. [...]
To understand the journey of the human imagination across civilizations and centuries, one must grasp how the utterly fascinating Hellenic invention of the “democratized” concept of moral judgment in the afterlife came into its beautiful philosophical maturity. And so they came to Rome —Acts IV. “I was not, I was, I am not, I do [...]