As a professor who values intelligence, I tend to like most those students who talk to me about books and ideas. Yet recently when a student, unasked, quietly shoveled the snow from my sidewalk, he taught me a lesson about a profound depth of goodness that I need to study up on. G.K. Chesterton joked, [...]
Founded in 1696, St. John’s College has a unique history as one of America’s first, and leading, liberal arts institutions. St. John’s (campuses in Annapolis and Santa Fe) explores the great books of Western Civilization through seminar discussions. As Christopher Nelson (President, St. John’s College, Annapolis) has said: “Our books and our program demand more of us [...]
Economics is not a stand-alone science, as disciples of the Enlightenment claim, but a branch of philosophy. In short, economics is one of the liberal arts… My recent essay seeking an adequate definition of capitalism prompted an intriguing comment from a usually eloquent interlocutor, who wondered how those who “have no economic training… think that [...]
The humanities can fill us with a kind of reverent admiration for a place in its particularity, and fill us with a delight that such a thing exists, untouched, un-owned by us. It can help us open our grasping hands and let beauty be, whether or not it is possessed by me… I would like [...]
There seems to be very little cultural space for humanistic studies. It is difficult to perceive how literature, philosophy, or theology could contribute to technological capitalism… I would like you to imagine the following situation: Sometime after graduation a college student is hired as an intern at his university’s newly founded Center for Leadership Studies [...]
At the end of each semester, I inevitably have one or two well-meaning students who are still unsure why they were asked to devote so much time and care to reading, annotating, and discussing archaic Greek literature. They enjoyed reading Homer. They liked our conversations in class, but, at the end of the course, lacking [...]
After his lecture to a packed house recently, Dr. R.R. “Rusty” Reno was answering questions from the audience, when one student asked him about how Wyoming Catholic College students should deal with the misconceptions others have about the liberal arts at Wyoming Catholic. Dr. Reno said he hated to have to tell him, but most [...]
I have always sought to instill into my students that a knowledge of literature is not possible without an adequate knowledge of history, philosophy, and theology. I stress, for instance, that we cannot know the plays of Shakespeare unless we know something about the time and culture in which he was living and the philosophical [...]
It is necessary for the perfection of human society that there should be men who devote their lives to contemplation. —St. Thomas Aquinas The trouble with mere pragmatism is that it doesn’t work. —G.K. Chesterton What is education? I emphasize “is” because I am not here asking what education is thought to be, or what [...]
When Max Weber suggested in 1917 that the world had been disenchanted, he meant that modernity was best understood by the expansion of “technical means” that controlled “all things through calculation.”[1] The real power of these technical means lay not in the techniques and technologies themselves but in the disposition of those who used them, in [...]
“College professors are overwhelmingly liberal. You know it. I know it. Everyone knows it.” This statement was not made by a conservative academic, columnist, or businessman. It was made by sometime professor and left-wing commentator Damon Linker. There is some good news in the fact of Mr. Linker’s acknowledgement of the obvious—but not much. American [...]
A surprising number of people who know about the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948 and a focus of rights discussions around the world ever since, are unaware that its primary author was Jacques Maritain, a prominent Catholic philosopher. Much of the document’s language and reasoning might seem more in keeping [...]
In this essay, I propose that the paradigm presented by Matthew Arnold on the meaning of culture can and should be a response for understanding the eroding arts and humanities today. The Unmapped Classics The twentieth century economist E. F. Schumacher recounts in A Guide for the Perplexed that while in Leningrad, 1968, he was [...]
I want to steal four minutes of my talking time to speak of the role that the Santa Fe campus has played in my life. I remember vividly the atmosphere around its founding in the years before 1964, but only confusedly the arguments pro and con—though among the latter one worry was predominant: Were we [...]