The Culture of Infinitude

By |2024-02-27T19:53:26-06:00February 27th, 2024|Categories: Freedom, Religion, Truth|

What’s needed at this juncture in our cultural evolution is a rebirth of healthy modesty about human being and human fate, a realization that we are imperfect and imperfectible, particular and embodied, with all our warts and blemishes, but for that very reason valuable beyond measure. Infinitude is an appealing concept to many, not mathematically, [...]

God’s Truth

By |2024-02-24T21:37:57-06:00February 24th, 2024|Categories: Christianity, Classical Education, Glenn Arbery, Liberal Learning, Timeless Essays, Truth, Wyoming Catholic College|

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 [...]

Eva Brann, National Treasure

By |2024-01-20T14:33:05-06:00January 20th, 2024|Categories: Eva Brann, In Honor of Eva Brann at 90 Series, Liberal Learning, St. John's College, Timeless Essays, Truth, Wisdom|

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. [...]

Chasing Lions: Don Quixote in Pursuit of the Beautiful

By |2024-01-15T18:05:45-06:00January 15th, 2024|Categories: Beauty, Culture, Featured, Great Books, History, Literature, Love, Timeless Essays, Truth|

When man pursues beauty, he takes it into himself and becomes beautiful through it; a perpetual beauty-seeker, such as Don Quixote, is, therefore, a beautiful man. He conceived the strangest notion that ever took shape in a madman’s head, considering it desirable and necessary, both for the increase of his honor and the common good, [...]

Love to Learn, Learn to Love

By |2023-12-18T11:41:39-06:00December 17th, 2023|Categories: Beauty, Catholicism, Classical Education, Classical Learning, Classics, Education, Great Books, Liberal Learning, Truth|

To get the most out of your time here, I have some advice: Love to learn, ignore your grades, and learn to love — and then I promise that Thomas Aquinas College will radically change your life. Before I arrived here on campus for the first time 23 years ago, my high school classmates had [...]

Russell Kirk & Pope St. John Paul II on the Redemption of Man

By |2023-10-22T07:38:12-05:00October 21st, 2023|Categories: Catholicism, Christianity, Conservatism, Faith, Featured, Hope, Imagination, Russell Kirk, St. John Paul II, The Imaginative Conservative, Timeless Essays, Truth|

Pope St. John Paul II and Russell Kirk defended freedom within the limits of truth and its authentic or right use. They knew it was crucial to distinguish license and liberty. But they have different approaches to truth. As we discussed the work of Russell Kirk, written in 1954, revised in 1962 and 1988, I [...]

Educating for Wisdom

By |2023-08-31T19:08:38-05:00August 31st, 2023|Categories: Beauty, Books, Education, Truth|

David M. Steiner argues that American education needs a clear and organized focus on ethics, beauty, and academic rigor to achieve its core purpose of preparing students to seek what Aristotle called eudaimonia, or human flourishing. A Nation at Thought: Restoring Wisdom in America’s Schools by David M. Steiner (224 pages, Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) [...]

Learning From Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard Commencement Address

By |2023-08-06T14:31:14-05:00August 6th, 2023|Categories: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Featured, Timeless Essays, Truth|

Solzhenitsyn knew in 1978 what we know now: Americans are by and large not altogether capable of acknowledging our moral, political, social, and religious shortcomings. He told his Harvard audience what they needed to hear, and what he spoke has echoed throughout the decades since. I. “The Farther A Society Drifts…” As the generations progress, [...]

Did Fulton Sheen Prophesy About These Times?

By |2023-02-12T10:32:33-06:00February 12th, 2023|Categories: Catholicism, Christendom, Truth, Western Civilization|

“Why is it that so few realize the seriousness of our present crisis?” Fulton Sheen asked in 1947. “Partly because men do not want to believe their own times are wicked, partly because it involves too much self-accusation, and principally because they have no standards outside of themselves by which to measure their times. Only [...]

The God in the Cave

By |2023-12-24T08:26:36-06:00December 24th, 2022|Categories: Christendom, Christianity, Christmas, Existence of God, G.K. Chesterton, Myth, Philosophy, Religion, Timeless Essays, Truth|

Christ was not only born on the level of the world, but even lower than the world. The first act of the divine drama was enacted, not only on no stage set up above the sightseer, but on a dark and curtained stage sunken out of sight. This sketch of the human story began in [...]

Is Specialization Killing Culture?

By |2022-12-11T16:31:38-06:00December 11th, 2022|Categories: Beauty, Civilization, Community, Culture, Michael De Sapio, Modernity, Permanent Things, Senior Contributors, The Imaginative Conservative, Timeless Essays, Truth, Western Civilization, Western Tradition|

If culture is simply a matter of private enthusiasms and hobbies, of small details and specialties, then what of a common culture? What about the collective project and shared sense of purpose that built Western civilization? “The expert takes a little subject for his province, and remains a provincial for the rest of his life.”—Jacques [...]

STEM is for Grandmothers: Educating for Truth & Freedom

By |2022-12-07T10:03:04-06:00December 7th, 2022|Categories: Catholicism, Christianity, Education, Freedom, Imagination, Liberal Learning, Moral Imagination, Truth|

At a time when a child should be exposed to wonder, awe, play, and fairy stories, the STEM brigade tells us we should instead prepare children for careers in engineering and the sciences. My mother-in-law, a wonderful grandmother and award-winning artist to boot, is fond of buying my nine-year-old daughter STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) [...]

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