Being in Front

By |2024-03-08T19:23:50-06:00March 3rd, 2024|Categories: Catholicism, Education, Liberal Arts, Liberal Learning, Wyoming Catholic College|

Our students read the greatest books of the tradition, a challenge to the brightest minds, and risk themselves repeatedly in conversation, until those who are seasoned “invariably deem it a special privilege to be in the front,” as General William Tecumseh Sherman said of veteran soldiers. Years ago, when my wife and I taught at [...]

Invasion of the Ultra-Subtle

By |2024-01-22T22:08:04-06:00January 22nd, 2024|Categories: Books, Liberal Arts, Russell Kirk|

More and more I am convinced that our ultimate human fate will depend on whether or not we succeed in wresting the intellectual life from the professoriate. Doesn't the whole intellectual world stand or fall on this distinction: whether our intellectual understandings are mere inventions, or whether they are authentic discoveries? One purpose of cultivating [...]

Advent and Melancholy

By |2023-12-02T20:54:45-06:00December 2nd, 2023|Categories: Advent, Catholicism, Christianity, Christmas, Glenn Arbery, Great Books, Liberal Arts, Liberal Learning, Timeless Essays, Wyoming Catholic College|

Nothing breaks through melancholy like a baby. During Advent, we wait for that moment of absolute newness that we need within but cannot muster, that moment when the whole of the divine nature, the whole meaning of universes beyond number, lies helpless before us. On Monday of this week, students met with me in the new [...]

A World in Need of Re-Enchantment: A New Leader at Wyoming Catholic College

By |2023-11-11T08:26:35-06:00November 10th, 2023|Categories: Catholicism, Education, Liberal Arts, Liberal Learning, Wyoming Catholic College|

We live in a world in need of re-enchantment; but re-enchanting love is rekindled in the hearts of people one at a time. To reclaim that sense of loving delight in God and the world, we need to give our students a break from the busyness and distraction that surrounds daily life, let them digitally [...]

Poetry & Politics?

By |2023-10-25T05:58:29-05:00October 24th, 2023|Categories: Dante, Featured, Glenn Arbery, Humanities, Liberal Arts, Poetry, Timeless Essays, William Shakespeare, Wyoming Catholic College|

Great poetry can come from deep engagement with the problems of politics, but it is especially moving to see how exile—often the consequence of that engagement—subtly becomes the symbol of the condition of fallen man. Students at Wyoming Catholic College memorize many poems in the four years of the humanities curriculum, but few of the [...]

Some Advice to Fellow Lovers of Liberal Learning

By |2023-10-10T18:18:44-05:00October 10th, 2023|Categories: E.B., Education, Eva Brann, Featured, Graduation, Liberal Arts, Liberal Learning, Senior Contributors, St. John's College, Timeless Essays|

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 [...]

Intending the Unintended

By |2023-09-13T19:06:58-05:00September 13th, 2023|Categories: Catholicism, Glenn Arbery, Humanities, Liberal Arts, Liberal Learning, Senior Contributors, Timeless Essays, Wyoming Catholic College|

What is the intention of a Great Books education? Does it need to make the student feel at every moment as though there were a palpable design upon him? I ask because making things “intentional” seems to have become something of a buzzword, even in spiritual matters. Guided tours can be a wonderful thing. I [...]

A Tale of Two Houses

By |2023-08-13T16:59:18-05:00August 13th, 2023|Categories: Christianity, Education, Labor/Work, Liberal Arts, Liberal Learning|

What if the fundamental problem in the American academy is a loss of institutional identity that has nothing to do with conservative or liberal ideology? What if the modern university simply is no longer dedicated to being a house of learning and a community of scholars? Jake Meador’s article in The Atlantic* about the decline [...]

Why Intellectual Work Matters

By |2023-08-30T17:51:58-05:00June 4th, 2023|Categories: Compassion, Culture, Education, Essential, Great Books, Liberal Arts, Liberal Learning, St. John's College, Timeless Essays|

Intellectual life provides an escape in that it is beyond “straitened circumstances,” but the escape is again a flight into realities beyond oneself: animal behavior, astronomy, and the mechanics of the inner life. The intellect has no limit to its subject matter: It reaches greedily for the whole of everything. In 2001 I was a [...]

On The Recovery of the Liberal Arts

By |2023-05-21T12:43:28-05:00May 21st, 2023|Categories: Bradley G. Green, Christendom, Liberal Arts, Liberal Learning, Senior Contributors, Timeless Essays|

It just may be the case that the only real and meaningfully hope of the recovery of the liberal arts lies in the recovery of the gospel itself, and in the recovery of a Christian understanding of God, man, and the world—including a recovery of what education truly is. “One ought not grow old in [...]

Odysseus: Patron Hero of the Liberal Arts

By |2023-05-21T11:28:41-05:00February 19th, 2023|Categories: Classics, E.B., Education, Eva Brann, Featured, Homer, Liberal Arts, Odyssey, Senior Contributors, St. John's College, Timeless Essays|

I am to write about my hero Odysseus and to connect him to Liberal Arts. A tall order, you might think, considering that this clever young king of Ithaca and wily old warrior at Troy probably — no, certainly — never read a book in his life, and that to me, at least, the liberal [...]

The Recovery & Renewal of the Liberal Arts of Language

By |2023-01-31T17:53:13-06:00January 31st, 2023|Categories: Christianity, Classical Education, Education, Language, Liberal Arts, Liberal Learning, Rhetoric, Timeless Essays|

The liberal arts allow us the freedom to become more fully human by sharing as fully as possible in that which makes us distinct, and the freedom to flourish through the reality of our nature, our humanity, and, yes, perhaps even our divinity. Why My Favorite Nun Was Right: The Recovery and Renewal of the Liberal [...]

The Necessary Island

By |2023-01-21T10:44:55-06:00January 21st, 2023|Categories: Catholicism, Glenn Arbery, Liberal Arts, Liberal Learning, Senior Contributors, Wyoming Catholic College|

The end of a liberal education should not be escape from the corrupt contemporary world or the achievement of a purity that increasingly excludes others, but rather the cultural incarnation of the Word in our own time and our own history. Almost fifteen years ago, my wife and I took a trip to Ireland—part vacation, [...]

The Roots of Modernity in Perversions of Christianity

By |2023-05-21T11:28:45-05:00January 14th, 2023|Categories: E.B., Education, Eva Brann, Great Books, Liberal Arts, Modernity, Senior Contributors, St. John's College, Timeless Essays|

Modernity consists of perversions of notions drawn from Christianity; to be a modern means to be deeply enmeshed in them. The part of the title of this talk which I asked to have announced is “The Roots of Modernity.” But there is a second part which I wanted to tell you myself. The full title [...]

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