Here is a little article I wrote on the connection between higher education and civic engagement. It refers to a longer and more solid article written by our friend Joe Knippenberg. I don’t want to create the impression that I know how to teach. As Socrates says, the complete theory of education would include the [...]
It is notoriously difficult to prove a negative, to catch, as it were, non-being by the tail, but perhaps even harder just to get it in your sights: “Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?” “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.” “The dog did nothing [...]
I have been asked to speak just a bit about my position as the second holder of the titles Scholar in Residence and Visiting Scholar of Conservative Thought and Policy. Two weeks ago, my college roommate and still one of my closest friends, asked me what it felt like to be entering a place with CONSERVATIVE [...]
At an earlier session I spoke about Socrates as a model for imitating heroes, because he shows us how to use the lives of extraordinary people to help us make and remake a life worth living for ourselves. Now I’d like to speak about Socrates as a model for teachers to emulate. Teachers have chosen [...]
It is our tradition that the first lecture of the year should be dedicated to our freshmen.* They have newly joined a community whose program of learning centers on the scheduled reading of a preset list of books and on the twice-weekly discussion that takes place in the seminar. They have come to us chiefly [...]
Higher education should expend all its efforts to place self-development at the center of its activities, relegating other activities to the ancillary roles for which they are suited. In doing so, it can find no better model than Socrates, the master of intelligent imitation, and the most imitation-worthy practitioner of the Imitation of Heroes. Imitation, [...]
Friends, “I should like to have a word with you, here, on this very spot. We shall be parting soon. Let us agree here that we will never forget one another. And whatever may happen to us later in life, even if we do not meet for twenty years afterwards, let us always remember” what [...]
What is Love? This ancient question concerns all living souls. In this age of moral chaos love seems to be in the belly of the beholder. Most people reduce love to the phenomenological level. Although some do still hold the abstract notion of love in the mind, fewer still see love as universal law of [...]
One reason to have a liberal education—one that’s usually neglected by all those experts these days who are saying that the value of an education is measured by the money you earn after graduation—is that it’s indispensable for understanding the political teachings of the better summer blockbuster movies, such as the very thoughtful new Superman [...]
The Oracle of Delphi foretold countless fortunes, futures, prophecies, and mysteries over many centuries and is the same ancient fount of wisdom who declared Socrates to be the wisest man in the world. A great sign above the entrance to the Temple at Delphi exhorts all who enter her sacred halls to “know thyself,” for without [...]
To the classical philosophers, history was cyclical. J.B. Bury observed that thought in ancient Greece was dominated by the idea of cycles, and that time was itself the enemy of man to the degree it eroded the value of the corporeal world. Marcus Aurelius wrote that the rational human mind “stretches forth into the infinitude [...]
Peter Kreeft There are at least 19 different kinds of judgment that we should distinguish. I’m sorry I could not find a 20th, to match the number of digits on our fingers and toes. But 19 does match the digits of Frodo Baggins, one of my heroes. (I’m sure you remember Frodo of [...]
I imagine that on Parents’ Weekend there might be some parents attending this once weekly occasion when the college assembles to hear a lecture. By its very name, a lecture is read—but read out loud, delivered in the writer’s voice. Thus, the sequence goes: I thought, I wrote, I read, I speak. Although this is the principal way of [...]
Let me begin by citing two passages that graphically underscore the themes that I wish to consider here—the things of leisure and culture, of what is and its surprising origins. The first lines are from Gregory of Nazianzen, the great Eastern theologian: What benefactor has enabled you to look out upon the beauty of the [...]