Historical consciousness is to civilized society what memory is to individual identity. Without memory there are no workable rules of conduct, no standard of justice, no basis for restraining passions, no sense of the connection between an action and its consequences. A culture without memory will necessarily be barbarous. I am delighted to be with [...]
The “Paradiso” has much to tell us about happiness, the perfection of the intellect, the nature of true freedom, the flourishing of community, the role of love in education, and the profound connection that the good and the true have to beauty. “For we shall see him as he is.” 1 John 3:2 The focus [...]
What is the duty of government? What are the rights of man in a civilized society? What is the purpose of law? Mortimer Adler, scholar of, and advocate for, the Great Books, attempts to answer these questions and more in the following interview. Interposed with scenes of discussion from a seminar conducted at St. John's [...]
Abraham Lincoln did all that he could to preserve constitutional rule by trying to teach his fellow citizens what it means to be an American. The paradox of Abraham Lincoln’s appearance in the United States’ sectional conflict becomes manifest if one considers a passage written by James Madison in Federalist No. 10. In that paper, [...]
Great books are more than just great teachers, friends, and wrestling partners. They are also great beauties—things to be cherished over the course of our lives like fantastic flowers ever in bloom, or gems resplendent and many-faceted. St. John’s College and the Great Books Program here at Mercer University have much in common. Both programs [...]
Several centuries before Edmund Burke, Thomas More warned against theorizing about the perfect society and advised statesmen to do their best with the form of government their people have passed on to them. Though he himself favored one form of government over another, he admitted that we rarely have the power to create the government [...]
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 [...]
Music and rhythm find their way into the secret places of the soul. –Plato Music transcends the classroom, the concert stage, and professional recordings. It pervades life. Mankind has long used music in all sorts of ways, to celebrate, to lament, to dance, to pray, to soothe or arouse, to woo, to infuse courage and [...]
The mysteries of the human heart, and of the soul within you, are every bit as wondrous as the mysteries of the political and the natural worlds. And so you have asked questions of the world, in part because it is your nature to wish to know, in part because you wish to know your [...]
Any counsel to the stand out class of 2026 is rather simple: In the face of the wickedness of the times, stop, reflect and question. Have recourse to God and the Blessed Mother. One cannot be outstanding without grace, which makes up for shortcomings and leads to Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Way, the Truth [...]
Lawyers are illiterate, most of them anyway. Trust them to handle your real estate closings or to manage your negligence claims, to finalize your divorce or to dash off angry letters to your competitors, but do not trust them to instruct you on plain living and high thinking. Webster’s defines “intelligent” as “endowed with intelligence [...]
Christian schools must not follow their secular counterparts in their educational approach. They must surround their students with the noble, the beautiful, and the true in all areas of the curriculum and the academic environment, encouraging them to become like what they see. In the cultural wasteland of the ’70s, where peace and love had [...]
If schools truly seek to form students capable of philosophical inquiry, they must recover the ancient understanding of "arithmetike" as a pathway to truth. Only then will mathematics resume its rightful place among the liberal arts, serving not as a practical tool but as a means of intellectual and spiritual formation. Walk into any elementary mathematics [...]
Meindert De Jong’s "The Wheel on the House" is not merely about what we like. It is about what we need. Too often, announcements in our world that “We’re all in this together” are merely announcements from powerful people that they are in charge. De Jong’s beautiful tale is something different. Meindert De Jong [...]