The document entitled “To the Honorable the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Virginia, A Memorial and Remonstrance” is a jewel of republican rhetoric.[1] Nor has this choice example of American eloquence gone without notice. And yet, compared to the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address, it has remained obscure—more often quarried for stately [...]
If Plato’s extended metaphor of the mind as depicted by the city is true, every human mind has the capacity to train its Guardians, curb the appetitive part of the soul, and live on the grassy plains in the sun above the cave. It’s a question of true learning. When Eva Brann describes a liberal [...]
Intellectual life provides an escape in that it is beyond “straitened circumstances,” but the escape is again a flight into realities beyond oneself: animal behavior, astronomy, and the mechanics of the inner life. The intellect has no limit to its subject matter: It reaches greedily for the whole of everything. In 2001 I was a [...]
Across the nation commencement speakers bid the graduates, “Go forth and change the world” or “make a difference.” But should you want to change the world? Parents and Relatives, Fellow Tutors and Mr. President, Board Members and, above all, Santa Fe Seniors and Graduate Institute students! Some of you will remember that radio-telephone distress signal [...]
Beauty is found in art when there is connectedness to something beyond novelty and originality. This connectedness must exist between the artist and the source of what inspires the particular medium of art. Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.[1] Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever [...]
Although myths and novels belong to different categories, they are alike in being the venues of human figures who are not presented as images of actually existent, “real-world” people. They have their being in a specific work of art, a drama or a narrative, such as the “Oresteia,” or a novel, such as Edith Wharton’s [...]
Trained to believe that every object as well as every act in the universe is matter, an aspect of matter, or produced by matter—that is, schooled to be a materialist—I scoffed at the two fellow students of mine in graduate school who regularly attended church. For me, at that time, the brain was the mind [...]
I am to write about my hero Odysseus and to connect him to Liberal Arts. A tall order, you might think, considering that this clever young king of Ithaca and wily old warrior at Troy probably — no, certainly — never read a book in his life, and that to me, at least, the liberal [...]
An odyssey is an adventurous and searching journey, or an intellectual or spiritual quest. It is the proper name for the life of learning. One can shape one’s own odyssey into a journey that lacks neither enchantment nor definition. My title is a question: “Do you know what an odyssey is?” I am asking each of [...]
Distinguished scholar Eva Brann, of St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, shares her thoughts, discusses how St. John's is truly unique among American colleges, why students should read Homer first, how Aristotle speaks to us today, and why Yogi Berra is one of her favorite philosophers. Ms. Brann is Senior Contributor to The Imaginative Conservative. [...]
Essayists are like poets and novelists in writing what is uncalled for. But essayists differ from poets, the masters of the genre of concentrated concision, by being long but not overlong. Dear— The dash signifies that you are reading the answer to a question unasked, the reply to a letter unreceived. No one’s written beseeching [...]
Modernity consists of perversions of notions drawn from Christianity; to be a modern means to be deeply enmeshed in them. The part of the title of this talk which I asked to have announced is “The Roots of Modernity.” But there is a second part which I wanted to tell you myself. The full title [...]
At this celebratory time of year, when sparks of magic dance on the cold night air, let us wonder about the worlds we want to live in, and give thanks for the miracle of imagination. Making choices about life depends critically on the ability to imagine possibilities. Speaking as an advocate for liberal education, I [...]
This is an edited version of a conversation between Eva Brann, the longest-serving tutor at St. John’s College, and Hamza Yusuf, President of Zaytuna College, recorded in March 2019. You can listen to the full podcast here. Hamza Yusuf: We’re really fortunate today to have with us, I think, one of the treasures of our [...]