Music pervades our lives and always has. It has taken you outside of yourselves and taken you deep within. It has been associated with things divine. There comes a time in every year when I find myself saying to a friend or a prospective student that this is a very musical College [Convocation, St. John’s [...]
The students of a classical education are part of nothing less than a civilizational renaissance, the revitalized intellectual tradition of a distinctive and vibrant Christian culture. Patrick Henry College recently brought more honor to the exciting renewal of classical education nationwide. Not only has the small liberal-arts school in Purcellville, Virginia, won nine of the [...]
In the transcendence of God, the truth is not a collection of dispiriting facts about our meaningless emergence from chance combinations of matter, but justice and mercy and ultimate harmony. Our approach ought to be to reveal Who God is, not to close off the way to Him. At last week’s meeting of the Philadelphia [...]
We should not try to right one historic wrong by committing a new one. After enduring over a century of white racism, now the Asian-American community must cope with a more subtle but just as sinister form of liberal racism: the harsh Orwellian reality that in modern America all minorities are equal, but some minorities [...]
“Critical thinking” is one of the most popular buzz words used by the education system today. Unfortunately, as education expert Martin Cothran notes, modern educators have no idea how to actually define “critical thinking skills”: “Modern educators love to talk about ‘critical thinking skills,’ but not one in a hundred even knows what he means by [...]
Eva Brann’s latest book, “Pursuits of Happiness,” is a collection of essays which range from Aeschylus to Austen, with topics spanning the nature of time itself to Sacred Scripture. Interspersed here are two parts constituting the whole of an ideal education. Pursuits of Happiness: On Being Interested by Eva Brann (640 pages, Paul Dry Books, [...]
The protagonist of the film “Groundhog Day” discovers that what makes life worth living is not immediate gratification, or moral autonomy, or flippant cynicism, or self-deification, but rather encountering those things that give meaning and purpose to our lives. Today, we are experiencing nothing less than a renaissance of classical education throughout the United States, [...]
Every time I reread the “Protagoras” or “Meno,” I am surprised anew that a man of Plato’s towering intellect and searing insight into human nature could have been so mistaken about the human propensity to sin and rebellion. Plato never cared much for the sophists, viewing them as amoral peddlers of a relativistic kind of [...]
Rules are good things to have. We need to learn not to wipe our noses on our sleeves, not to take stuff that isn’t ours, not to scream at people when we’re debating them on television, not to shout abuse at politicians even if they deserve it. But as useful as rules like that can [...]
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 [...]
In a moment when the forces of ideology seem to threaten to overwhelm the voice of sanity and civility, Eva Brann’s imaginative conservatism offers another way—a way rooted in, as she has put it, “talking, reading, writing, listening.” Editor’s Note: This essay is part of a series dedicated to Senior Contributor Dr. Eva Brann of St. [...]
A liberal education is free in the sense that it is free of practical goals. We study our language and our literature or biology and chemistry and psychology just because it is a human instinct to do so, and because it is enjoyable to do so. Everything is Political Just as I began my college [...]
Fr. Ian Boyd was one of the most beautiful representatives of that culture that goes by the name of “conservatism.” His name will forever remain linked to that of G.K. Chesterton, and especially to "The Chesterton Review." The founder of The Chesterton Review, emblem of a conservatism we miss, passed away at 88. Fr. [...]
There have been theories about literature nearly as long as there has been literature, beginning with Plato and Aristotle. But the ancient theorists all assumed that they were thinking about something that had its own functions and ends, which they might help to explain. When the new professors think of theory it is exclusively more [...]