The beautification of life, the highest “household art” of making people happy and places pretty, also encompasses the adornment of the soul. Because life is more than work, economics, and money, the life of the heart and spirit need constant replenishment. What do decorating a room, wearing tasteful clothes, expressing cheerfulness, offering friendship, enjoying Mayday, [...]
In a broken world, wholeness shines. Moreover, the beauty of this wholeness can put the world on a new path because seeing beauty is one of the first steps toward wanting to make the assent to it. Integrity comes from the Latin adjective “integer,” meaning entire, whole, complete, and sound. It is a beautiful word [...]
Aristotle says that friendship makes life worth living, but despite being a central feature of daily life for almost every human being who has ever lived, friendship seems curiously absent from many philosophies of education. Aristotle, however, reminds us that education should focus on what is central to a flourishing life, and so it must [...]
Sin, on the whole, is choosing our will over God’s, and it leads to our greatest unhappiness, even if we don’t always realize it in the beginning. The darkness and mire of sin, however, melts away against the backdrop of the Father’s love. According to the National Catholic Register, “the Catholic jubilee has added spiritual [...]
In a democratic age, how can greatness come to be? Edmund Burke offers a way forward: prudence as a form of excellence. Our conference is subtitled “equality and the survival of heroism.” My concern is the survival of prudence amid the longing for heroism—in particular, the misalignment between ambition and circumstance, the persistent pursuit of [...]
One of the greatest adventure stories in exploration history was a dismal failure. The ill-fated voyage of the ship Endurance never reached its destination. However, the story of its heroic captain, Sir Ernest Shackleton, survives as a stirring inspiration for all time. The 1914 expedition sought to be the first to cross Antarctica. It failed [...]
Sherrard Billings, one of the three founders of Groton School—and the American Mr. Chips—did his part to develop good and wise habits among the “Grotties.” Through his own life of suffering, he taught them to how to live, pursue the truth, love the good, and pass on wisdom. The Groton School The New [...]
Customs and outward forms signal that one’s duty is greater than one’s self, and neglect of them is an exercise in egotism. Accounts vary, and a few say that the story about our civil Founders is apocryphal, but it would seem that the story is true. As one of the more jovial national patriarchs, Gouverneur Morris, [...]
Each great teacher locates the fundamental problem of human living differently: The Buddha cites suffering; Socrates points to ignorance; and Jesus identifies faulty love. In addition, all three Masters teach that the task set for each human soul is to travel from illusion to reality. Unlike the Age of Faith, in Postmodernity, or more accurately [...]
Contemporary culture encourages cowardice as the human norm. This new emphasis, including the decade-old insistence on “safe spaces” at colleges, is something more dangerous than anything we might encounter otherwise. Not long ago, I heard a psychologist saying that the most important thing in his practice is the safety of his clients. Understandably, patients in [...]
In his “Essays,” Michel de Montaigne rejects notions of virtue as a quasi-divine state and instead embraces Stoic and Epicurean notions of virtue as a sort of tranquility of mind and soul. A virtuous man restrains his natural vices and lives an orderly and moderate life. For the French nobleman and philosopher, Michel de Montaigne, [...]
The left has long understood the power of the arts in furthering radical ideas, in a way conservatives have largely failed to grasp in defending theirs. Conservatives with the financial means must increase their support of conservative artists for the sake of a culture in immediate need of the wisdom that a long intellectual, cultural, [...]
The virtuous soldier is prudent in military matters, possessing a love for the homeland. The one who serves virtuously does so with perseverance and honesty. A soldier who takes virtue to heart is not only a valiant servant to the nation. The virtuous soldier is also a faithful servant of God. Today’s celebration of Veterans [...]
Authentic righteousness for a nation of natives, settlers, immigrants, and refugees requires the same whether for America or Vergil’s Rome: pietas. This is devotion to family, community, country, and deity. One so devoted does not fear the sublimation of the self in the fulfillment of these duties, for it is in the pursuit of these [...]