If you have an open mind and inquiring heart, you will recognize something incomparably wonderful in Plato’s writings, if only their profound resonance with Christian teachings. The Cave is a masterful metaphor for the soul trapped in sin. “All education is conversion” —Pierre Hadot I. Why Read Plato? We know as Catholics, from the Divine [...]
Truth, beauty, and goodness are the terms by which we understand the whole of reality and the terms that give coordinates to all of human life. And so, if you want to live well, you need to know what truth, goodness, and beauty are… I sat down with James Matthew Wilson over a beer after his [...]
In a distorted world, the Christian poet is ultimately like the blind man whose vision Christ restored to see truth through grace, and those who read the poet’s words will find their vision restored as well. Editor’s Note: This essay was originally given as a part of a lecture series for the Cambridge School of [...]
Logical positivism and countless similar philosophies have all eventually passed. Thus, it seems, that postmodernism will likely suffer the same fate. However, until that day arrives, let us be Cheerful Soldiers, emboldened by the knowledge of just how temporary those foundations are upon which philosophical fashions are rested… “The vogue of each particular maxim of [...]
The mystery is how one person whom I never met, through recountings down the ages of how many others whom I also have never met, could shed light on each other, eventually to enlighten me. In The Apology, Socrates brought up the question of whether he was paid for being a teacher, like the Sophists, who were paid [...]
Religious dogma is true— indispensably true—but Truth is truer, and bigger than dogma in the same way that a map is true, but the journey is truer and bigger than the map… Editor’s Note: This essay is an abridged version of a chapter in Fr. Dwight Longenecker’s book The Romance of Religion. When I was [...]
If rights are real, and are founded on reality, then perhaps we should also be skeptical of Rod Dreher’s notion of a “Benedict Option.” Being in the world is a necessary condition for not being of it and for generating a genuine cultural flourishing… No doubt Rod Dreher’s book, The Benedict Option, has Imaginative Conservatives talking about the [...]
The country appears to be radically divided. We even hear talk of a new kind of civil war. Civic unity depends on an agreed vision of what man is and what the world is. When this agreement is lacking, nothing can really hold that society together… Civility means to act as one would in a [...]
Today, both in our schools and wider society, the True, Good, and Beautiful are now whatever one wants them to be. There is simply no divine obligation apart from that which each person chooses to impose upon himself… Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords readers the opportunity to join Stephen Turley as he [...]
In the post-truth society, your facts are not my facts, and lies by political figures are greeted with indifference. Judged by past standards, citizens of a post-truth society have no real experience and no capacity for critical thinking. We Americans have virtually no interest in history; for us, the past pales in comparison with the [...]
The tragedy of modern education is that it has left us perilously ignorant of who we are, where we are, where we have come from, and where we are going. We are lost and blissfully unaware that we are heading for the abyss… Many years ago the English writer G.K. Chesterton claimed that the “coming [...]
When politicians succumb to the temptation of turning policy into spectacle—even if it is good policy—it makes the show more important than the policy… It has become trendy to call everything fake. This is helped by the fact that so many things are fake. The world is awash in “fake news.” So much of what [...]
Christians who live so that they are never contaminated are useless, and they are liars, because we are all contaminated more seriously than we can imagine if we have ever seen a human soul as it was meant to be. When first a more serious, idealistic Christian, I didn’t think this was even a possibility. [...]
We were preparing the annual financial report to the parish the other day, and the tricky part of the debate was how to present complex details in a simple way that was not misleading or open to misinterpretation. I commented that we must aim for complete transparency, at which point a member of the committee [...]