Your very hands, once folded peacefully beneath the earth, will once again be vigorously poised up high to the praise of God. And in that eternal moment of sharing God’s perfect victory, we can even enjoy a most glorious high five with our triumphant Savior, our Lord, and our friend. After straining your whole being [...]
Human beings are not simply producers; they are also lovers of beauty and contemplators of truth. They are wasters of time. The liberally educated person has a rich inner life that allows him to waste time well. As an undergraduate, I went for walks in rural Michigan. Sometimes alone, sometimes with others. Romantic walks, friendly [...]
We are all brothers because of the love of God the Father for us. It turns out that brotherhood does not have to remain broken after sin. Jesus Christ, in showing us the love of the Father, reveals that true brotherhood is beatific. Brothers do not have a good record in the Bible. The book [...]
I had not seen my former student, Adam, for a decade or so after his graduation from Hillsdale College when I ran into him and his young family at the supermarket. "You once asked me" he said, "for what purpose was the soul of man made. I had little in the way of an answer [...]
The ultimate purpose of virtue is to make us capable of friendship, of sacrificing our own good for the good of another, thus nurturing that mutual happiness and trust with another self. We know good families, totally devoted to their children, who’ve been blind-sided by woke “identity politics,” confusing and hijacking their kids. In three [...]
In "Pride and Prejudice," Elizabeth Bennet is vehement that the character of the person must be determined in order to make a good choice. While spouses may change over time in superficial ways, the essentials remain constant. While one may hope for the conversion of a scoundrel or a fool, it is not worth banking [...]
We all know the dangers of too much noise, the dissipating distraction of too much chatter. Yet not all silence is good. There is a painful silence when a conversation has died because no one knows what to say. Even worse is the silence that follows a quarrel. But of course, silence can also be [...]
Crushed into near despair by a particularly nasty cold, a man reaches blindly into his pocket searching for relief. He grasps a cough drop—the sole salve for his burning throat—and unwraps it. Something catches his eye. He finds printed on the wrapper lines such as “Impress yourself,” “Bet on yourself,” and “Elicit a few ‘wows’ [...]
A free mind is necessary for our personal happiness, for living a good life, the life suited to our nature. Fifty years ago I shook the hand of our president, signed the College Register, and sat where you freshmen are sitting today, awaiting the happy start of a four-year adventure into the books and conversation [...]
Patience encourages us to accept humbly that we will not be as good as soon as we want to, due to being part of the fallen world. This understanding need not lead to despair, but rather to hope, for if we keep patiently at it, eventually we will look back on the struggle as well [...]
“Jolly” is a gem of a word, and its decline in usage is a pity. To be jolly is truly a profound thing. It is to recognize the winsomeness and levity present in the world around us, and to appreciate it by responding with an exuberance of joy. Jollity, in its proper time and place, [...]
The more religious I am the happier I am. But I actually argue that there are very earthly reasons for why that link might exist. To the extent that religion provides me greater communality, it offers me some form of purpose and meaning, it allows me to have greater bonds of reciprocity within group members—those [...]
In Samuel Johnson’s novel “Rasselas,” the eponymous character discovers that happiness does not derive from a beautiful place, luxurious palace, or constant entertainment, but depends upon a composed state of mind in possession of truth. Throughout the eighteenth century, novel theories of happiness and utopian ideas of perfect societies gained respectability and popularity. The exploration [...]
It is easy to dismiss adult toy-buying as a craze of little significance. But the appearance of the "kidult" is troubling from several perspectives, for it speaks of the state of a decadent culture that embraces childish and immature things. The kidult idea also participates in the postmodern desire to be what one is not. [...]