This year's graduates must accept the challenge of being thrust into this world of sin and disorder and the obligation to fight for Christian order. At this point, it is not an option but a matter of survival in an interrupted world. One thing that characterizes the Class of 2024 is that it has suffered [...]
Both free thinking and innovation depend on having the imagination to see alternate ways of being, to envision worlds that we do not yet see before us, to reconsider what is there, and to conceive what could be there in its place. As the president of an American college with a distinctive approach to liberal [...]
Liberal education is about absorbing the great traditions of the past in order to form one’s own faculty of judgment, aiming at the end of living well. There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the ‘wisdom’ of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had [...]
What makes freedom possible is beyond all knowing, but what makes the moral law possible is freedom itself. The fact that we have a faculty of freedom is the critical ground of the possibility of morality. I have called this lecture “Kant’s Imperative” so that I might begin by pointing up an ever-intriguing circumstance. Kant [...]
Rosary College is the first-ever college in South Carolina to offer a tradition-oriented education in the Catholic tradition. Apart from offering affordable college-level education for local students, the college will also offer its courses online, enabling students to enroll from anywhere in the world. Father Dwight Longenecker needs no introduction to readers of The Imaginative [...]
The end of the scholar is not to be a scholar; but a man, doing that which cannot be done without scholarship. The end is never the production of a work of art, however grand in conception, successful in execution, or exquisite in finish; but the realization of a good to which art is subsidiary. [...]
One of the more remarkable trends in the past five years in Catholic education is the noticeable increase of schools embracing a “classical education.” Ten or twenty years ago, the Catholic classical school was a start-up by disgruntled laity. Now one can find here and there whole diocesan school systems that have embraced the classical [...]
The everyday conversation of a free society depends on trust in our commonsense experience of reality. Contemporary errors about the True, Good, and Beautiful are not simply mistaken explanations. They are lies, distorting and misrepresenting the experiences themselves, and cannot explain our real experience of Transcendence. Many parents are discovering that there is something seriously [...]
If faith cannot be included within classical charter schools because of secularist State requirements, then what is the purpose of such education? Classical charter schools have surged in number over the past thirty years in response to the decreasing quality of education and the often-disordered learning environments of American public schools. Aided both by this [...]
Education follows the same law as the physical universe, which is sustained and carried on in dependence on certain centres of power and laws of operation. Education has its history in Christianity, and its doctors or masters in that history. A Benedictine Education, by John Henry Newman (160 pages, Cluny Media) As the physical universe [...]
In the “St. Matthew Passion,” Bach indulges his gypsy soul. It is as though Bach, in his broad and deep humanity, his capacity for feeling all kinds and degrees of sorrow and joy, was reaching out to all his fellow human beings, believers and non-believers alike, and impressing upon them what was for him the [...]
Three proposed ends of liberal education — career, democracy, and a free mind — do not pierce the dome of the bourgeois workaday world. Let us begin anew with a question: “How can liberal education pierce the dome that encloses the bourgeois workaday world?" This essay was originally delivered at Magdalen College on October 25, [...]
According to Socrates, to save Philosophy, to save young souls destined for greatness, to save human society itself, the true, philosophic nature must be freed from the corruptive influences that have formed him and receive the best education. The soul must be turned around. I forgot that we were playing and spoke rather intensely. For, [...]
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 [...]