The idea of joy is to me inseparable from the idea of culture. Joy in truth gives rise to culture—human accomplishment and creativity in all its wealth and richness—and culture in turn gives us joy again, the impetus to go on living. A self-dedication to culture in its fullest sense, and to discovering truth and [...]
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. [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
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) [...]
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, [...]
Poetry is the still, small voice of calm in a world gone mad with distraction. It finds us space to breathe. It allows us time to think. It takes us out of time and space into the realm of metaphysics. It takes us from the transient things to the permanent things, from the things of [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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) [...]
The world needs works of literature with a moral message that will inspire readers to virtue and bring people closer to God. But today's literature reflects only a debased wasteland. Let there be no Noble Prize for literature until writers can present a moral order that will return to the long-forgotten quest for the good, [...]
How can the use of reason lead to so much wrong-headedness? The answer is that wrong-headedness is always connected to wrong-heartedness. It is pride, the absence of love, which poisons the intellectual faculties, thereby preventing reason from serving its purpose of pursuing objective truth. There is a world of difference between wisdom and cleverness. In [...]
If Socrates reveals anything about the moral life, it is how uncertain and unstable it is without grounding in knowledge of the Good; and yet he confesses that such grounding is beyond his reach, beyond the reach of human reason itself to attain. In this way Socrates reveals the genuine problem of moral relativity that [...]
Our kids don’t need arguments, they need a childhood. They need to have their healthy imaginations nourished and their innate prejudices in favor of truth, beauty, and goodness affirmed. It’s hard to be a kid these days. Your blue-haired teachers appear on Libs of Tik-Tok videos bragging about selling you into sex slavery, and people [...]