Our civilization has danced on the edge of the volcano for so many years now, recklessly testing its footing in ever more vulgar and precarious ways, defying the moral interdictions of the past and gradually losing a sense of its own fragility and vulnerability, that it is hard to imagine that we will survive our [...]
A free mind is necessary for our personal happiness, for living a good life, the life suited to our nature. Fifty years ago I shook the hand of our president, signed the College Register, and sat where you freshmen are sitting today, awaiting the happy start of a four-year adventure into the books and conversation [...]
The intellectual virtues are not enough. Christendom’s rich Catholic culture must continue to be born anew each day from prayer and the liturgy, be constantly ordered to the sacraments, and continue to develop in accord with the Church’s two thousand years of experience in forming its people. On July 1, 2024, Dr. George Harne took [...]
“Brethren, what shall we do?” (Acts 2: 37) Such was the response of “devout men from every nation under heaven” (Acts 2:5) to St. Peter’s Pentecost Discourse. The Holy Scriptures tell us that “that they were cut to the heart” (Acts 2:37). St. Peter had proclaimed to them the truth of the Redemptive Incarnation with [...]
Lately, I have found myself increasingly involved in the pioneering adventure of helping to start new schools and colleges in the classical liberal arts tradition. I am on the boards of both Rosary College and another college, the name of which I am not yet at liberty to disclose. The former is a two-year undergraduate [...]
I would like to take this opportunity to propose what I call “The 2 Ism Rule”: In any piece of academic writing, especially those written for the media or popular magazines, writers are allowed a maximum of no more than two “ism” words. Screenshot I read recently that a dean at Harvard University suggested [...]
William F. Buckley did not resist the ideas of collectivism as successfully as he thought. Instead, he chose to aim for winning a contemporary battle rather than defending the Permanent Things. Conservatives today would do well to guard against falling into the same trap. William F. Buckley’s God and Man at Yale is one of [...]
The most prevalent of all human ills are these two: a man’s discontent with the work he does and the necessity of having to kill time. Both these ills can be, in part, cured by liberal education. In support of this thesis, that liberal education is to be understood in terms of leisure, I should [...]
Our need for the classics is intense. Yet any defense of them in our time must come from a sense of their absolute necessity—not from a desire to inculcate “cultural literacy,” or to keep alive a pastime for an elite, but to preserve the full range of human sensibility. What is needed is to recapture [...]
If we fail to inspire this next generation to pursue that which is True, Good, and Beautiful, I shudder to think at the consequences. Groupthink will destroy all that we hold dear. We want our students to polish their reason and to prepare to guide and navigate their chariots along the track of life. It [...]
Ignorance of the great works of music is as bad, for someone who seeks to be educated in Western culture, as ignorance of Dante and Shakespeare in literature, and Plato and Aristotle in philosophy. So important is it to have some sort of understanding of how the noble art of music works, and so important is [...]
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 [...]
Long before our own time, the customs of our ancestors moulded admirable men, and in turn these eminent men upheld the ways and institutions of their forebears. Our age, however, inherited the Republic like some beautiful painting of bygone days, its colors already fading through great age; and not only has our time neglected to [...]
Some familiarity with the ancient world really does enliven one’s appreciation of the arts and literature of the European tradition and its geographical and cultural penumbra. I was reminded of this recently in an apparently trivial—but, for all that, rather delightful—way. Are there any “benefits of a classical education,” as Hans Gruber puts it in [...]