Near the end of his essay "The Inner Ring," C.S. Lewis says, “To a young person, just entering on adult life, the world seems full of ‘insides,’ full of delightful intimacies and confidentialities, and the desire to enter them. But if he follows that desire, he will reach no ‘inside’ that is worth reaching.” In [...]
We can encourage openness of expectation in ourselves and in one another, so that the mysterious gifts of experience, strange exhilarations and wonders, gifts from we know not where, will not be lost on us. A just expectation of life may include an expectation of moments that seem mysterious gifts from we know not where. [...]
Like the person who ascends out of Plato’s cave, you too are now obliged to go back down and help others to ascend, to draw others from shadows and images into the truth. Who raises the bar? The servant of others. Many have raised it for you, but you are challenged to go forth to [...]
It is mainly little places which permit the modesty of pace needed for long thoughts, and the conditions of closeness under which human beings begin to stand out and become distinct in their first and second nature. These places are the veritable harbors of refuge and recovery for civilization. Today, the same day on which [...]
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 [...]
Across the nation commencement speakers bid the graduates, “Go forth and change the world” or “make a difference.” But should you want to change the world? Parents and Relatives, Fellow Tutors and Mr. President, Board Members and, above all, Santa Fe Seniors and Graduate Institute students! Some of you will remember that radio-telephone distress signal [...]
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 following is the text of Dr. Eva Brann’s Commencement Address at Zaytuna College, the Muslim liberal arts college in Berkeley, CA, delivered during a virtual ceremony on May 23, 2021. Hello to the about-to-be alumni of Zaytuna College! How I wish I could be with you face-to-face and hear your individual accounts of the [...]
A true, life-giving education is an education that recognizes and embraces a world filled with goodness, truth, and beauty. It is also an education that requires virtue from those who undertake it. Editor's Note: The following is an abridged version of the commencement address that Joseph Pearce gave to the graduating class of 2018 at [...]
Your world needs you; it needs your desire to understand it, your openness to what it has to teach you, your acceptance of its imperfections, and your sincere wish and best efforts to be useful to it because you care for it as it has cared for you, however unconscious that care may have been. [...]
Paying attention to the guidance of the heart is no guarantee of prudent action, as Mark Antony and Cleopatra demonstrate with grand style, but there is something nobler in giving the heart its whole due than in bypassing its counsel and resorting to mere calculation. According to the 17th century mathematician and Catholic apologist Blaise [...]
My prayer for you graduates is that you will be mature, responsible, hardworking people of conviction. God will empower you to do it. He will use you for His glory and that will be the best life you could have. This address was given at the 2020 graduation of the Augustine School in Jackson, TN. [...]
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 is [...]
Here is an array of poetry that just might fit your needs as you consider presents for any type of graduate… I have a privileged position. I really do. The graduating class at our small high school has only sixteen seniors this year. Most years we have fewer than thirty. Last year, I chose to [...]