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 [...]
My first and last care is not politics but education. Education seems to me inherently conservative, being the transmission, and thus the saving, of a tradition’s treasures of fiction and thought. But education is also inherently imaginative. Author’s Note: I wish to dedicate this essay to a writer of books whose greatness is at once [...]
The “Eumenides” is not a tragedy of the unresolvable impasse, of the unavoidable fatality. It is a “pragma,” an affair practically handled, whose outcome is not all-round cleansing by devastation, but a future of good daily living. Aeschylus invests this drama of sweet reason, of moderation triumphant, with exhilarating solemnity and participatory splendor. Aeschylus’ Eumenides is [...]
“Waldzell” is the name Hermann Hesse gives to the school in a “Pedagogical Province” brought to life in the book called “The Glass Bead Game.” St. John’s College is an American school with two campuses. The features in which Waldzell is like St. John’s as well as those in which it differs are responsive; they [...]
Eva Brann’s contributions to American Political Thought are a starting point that allows the student to grasp the heart of her pursuits—that is, education. For Dr. Brann, the effort to understand the principles of the Declaration of Independence or discern how best to educate the citizens of a democratic republic can take place between students [...]
Among the many reminders to us that we do not live in the very best of all possible worlds is the fact that the texts that edify do not invariably delight and the tales that are salutary to the soul do not always give the most pleasure. I do think the well-balanced reading life should [...]
There is a moment in every class when students’ eyes light up, or go wide, and they have a moment where it clicks and makes sense, where you can see they are learning something that they will never forget—these are the very highlights for Eva Brann, longtime tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis. It was [...]
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 [...]
A preliminary function of a liberal education must be to serve as a purgative, a cleansing, of those who wish to be free. By its means we can cleanse ourselves of our undigested and unconscious prejudices. When it first came home to me that I would not be a tutor at the Graduate Institute in [...]
Greek myths have had an unbroken authority over the imagination of the West, and among them the Antigone legend is paramount in both shaping and expressing the moral constitution of Western humanity. Antigones, by George Steiner (Clarendon Press, 1984; Oxford Paperback, 1986; 328 pages) Anyone who has reread the Antigone about as often as is [...]
Douglas Allanbrook’s memoir, “See Naples,” is not only a memorial to the many dead, but also an exorcism, half-a-century later, of some particular ghosts. See Naples: A Memoir of Love, Peace, and War in Italy, by Douglas Allanbrook (A Peter Davison Book, Houghton Mifflin Company, New York and Boston, 1995) Douglas Allanbrook came to St. [...]
Jacob Klein presents the model of teaching best fitting a stable community of liberal learning. He was a master of the somewhat mysterious art of leading from behind—by solicitous listening, by intimating questions, even by expectant silence. The subtitle of my talk might be “Liberal Education: Program and/or Pedagogy?” The reason is that I think of Jacob [...]
The Pre-Socratics may be thought of as deficient, lacking something, primitive in the derogatory sense. But there is also the opposite perspective: These men were not primitive, without sophistication, but primeval, deeper, more receptive to origins. Think how peculiar this appellation is: “Pre-Socratics.” A whole slew of thinkers, poetical, aphoristic, prosaic—condemned to be known as [...]
Liberal education ought to be less a matter of becoming well-read than a matter of learning to read well, of acquiring arts of awareness, the interpretative or “trivial” arts. Some works, written by men who are productive masters of these arts, are exemplary for their interpretative application. Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is such a text. Liberal [...]