The body of Socrates may be gone but the Real Socrates has stayed with Phaedo, his friends and with all of us who will take up a life devoted to philosophy. I am grateful for the opportunity to have reflected on the life of Socrates as I wrote this evening’s lecture. Of course, it’s not [...]
Ultimately, the two catecheses—of our Faith and our civilization—should go hand-in-hand. That’s the way it’s always been: the West informed our Faith, and our Faith has indelibly formed the West. If we want both to survive, and perhaps flourish in America, our children will need the intellectual and cultural tools and imagination that a true [...]
Is the presumptuous mapping of all material reality a boon to humankind, or will it prove a curse? Might an acknowledgment of mystery as a steady and enduring feature of our condition be key to our mental and moral health, and our sense of our own freedom? This essay was co-authored with Donald A. Yerxa.* [...]
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 [...]
Are there men and women in America today possessed of virtue sufficient to withstand and repel the forces of disorder? Or have we, as a people, grown too fond of creature-comforts and a fancied security to venture our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor in any cause at all? “The superior man thinks always [...]
“Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story of that man skilled in all ways of contending, the wanderer, harried for years on end, after he plundered the stronghold on the proud height of Troy.” So begins Homer’s Odyssey. Long ago I launched my ship in pursuit of the true, the good, and [...]
The Nation-State possesses an absolute moral authority that overrules the authority of any religion and every individual citizen.The new barbarians gave to the Nation-State a weapon that Genghis Khan never dreamed of, a “technically-sweet” marvel that could destroy humankind thrice over on a lazy Saturday afternoon. I am a Romanian gypsy from a long line [...]
Our readers have come to know and to admire Eva Brann, Senior Contributor to The Imaginative Conservative and tutor at St. John’s College, who always challenges us with her insightful writings on liberal learning, the hidden treasures in Homer’s poems, the artful devices of the dialogues of Socrates, and the wonders found in “the conservatory of the imagination.” I [...]
To question is not merely to know that one lacks knowledge but to love knowledge passionately, to pursue it and never give up. “…by indirections find directions out…” ~Hamlet, 2.1 The Meno holds a distinguished place in the St. John’s curriculum. As the first Platonic dialogue that our freshmen read, it is the gateway to [...]
Like prayer and meditation, writing helps make sense of things, to cut through the clutter of life, to find mental clarity and order—both for the writer himself and in turn for the readers. The act of writing helps the writer to know himself and the reader in turn to know himself, to know that he [...]
That which makes education liberal is not the acquisition of virtue, for that would subordinate such education to some extrinsic good, and the essential characteristic of an education that makes it liberal is precisely its intrinsic good, the fact that its value does not depend on some good outside itself. I wish to offer some [...]
Now I, too, would like the university to be a safe space, but a safe space for rational argument about the pressing issues of our time. If a university stands for anything, surely it stands for that idea of truth, as a guiding light in our darkness and the source of real knowledge. Free speech [...]
To justify the Classics and Humanities, some have tried to argue that they remain a practical option for students, couching their praise in terms readily amenable to the outcome-focused mentalities of today’s high-achieving students. But does reducing the Classics and Humanities to a series of “practical” stepping-stones do the subjects any justice? Colleges and universities [...]
Jane Austen’s world is as merry as it is good. All the novels are perfect comedies—mirthful throughout and happy in outcome. Despite their brightness and lightness, these novels are in no way trivial—they are simply not concerned with those terrific follies presented to the scourge of public laughter in classical comic drama. Since this lecture [...]