“B-b-but, Lord Satan,” stammered the imp, reluctantly raising one claw to announce a question. Although he headed one of Hell’s most effective departments, technically speaking he was still an imp, and everyone knew what happened to the last one when the boss was in an exceptionally foul mood. “Our invention, called IT, shares knowledge but [...]
G. K. Chesterton once remarked that we don’t live in the best of all possible worlds but in the best of all impossible worlds. Such apparent optimism might seem a little glib, at best, or outrageously naïve at worst. Wouldn’t it be much more true to say that we are in the grip of vice-like [...]
By an old tradition the first lecture of the year is dedicated to the new members of our college, to the freshman students and the freshman tutors. It is a chance to tell you something about the shape and the spirit of the Program that governs St. John’s College—and not only to tell you but [...]
Milton’s Paradise Lost is a poem of such panoramic grandeur and such human acuteness as may wean one—and has even weaned me—from a lifelong exclusive Homerophilia. Partly its attraction is that it is insinuatingly suspect. I keep having the sense that something is going on that runs right counter to the overt text. There seems [...]
Well-behaved women are always making history. They make history by means of maternity, teaching their children and their husbands how to be well-behaved. They make history because the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world. The inanity of many bumper stickers continues to astonish me. Take, for instance, one which proclaims that “well-behaved women [...]
Today, the same day on which you cease to be transient members of the College, is the day on which you join us as its permanent members. Our polity provides for it to be so, and our common studies confirm the communion. Therefore I would like to speak to you today as members-at-large of the [...]
In the Tanglewood Tales Nathaniel Hawthorne retells famous classical myths with imaginative charm that captures the universality and moral wisdom of the stories. Hawthorne’s lively, fresh retelling of six famous myths—“The Minotaur,” “The Pygmies,” “The Dragon’s Teeth,” “Circe’s Palace,” “The Pomegranate Seeds,” and “The Golden Fleece”—captures the essence of great stories that always possess, in Chesterton’s words, [...]
You have been reading and talking about virtue for quite a while now; therefore, that is what your teachers asked me to talk about to you. So I drew a hot bath (since the mind is freest when the body is floating) and thought what might be most to the point, most helpful to you. [...]
Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House remains one of the most sobering novels I have encountered in my life. The protagonist, Godfrey St. Peter, a native Kansan who has spent his career teaching history and culture at a small college on the Great Lakes, has more than a few similarities to your present author (me!). On [...]
I want to steal four minutes of my talking time to speak of the role that the Santa Fe campus has played in my life. I remember vividly the atmosphere around its founding in the years before 1964, but only confusedly the arguments pro and con—though among the latter one worry was predominant: Were we [...]
It is notoriously difficult to prove a negative, to catch, as it were, non-being by the tail, but perhaps even harder just to get it in your sights: “Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?” “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.” “The dog did nothing [...]
There is a book that caught my attention and may well hold it to the end of my life. Written by an English hermit—Priest-Monk Silouan, a convert to Orthodoxy now living in a retreat on the Shropshire hills—Wisdom Songs is a collection of “Centuries”, chapters of a hundred meditations each, on a series of spiritual [...]
Dear New Sophomore, I would call you by your first name, but I haven’t met you yet. I will, in about a week, and then I really need to know your name, because it is important to call people by their names. In fact, I am so excited to know who you are, I want [...]
Tonight I shall commit the deliberate indiscretion of trying to say what may be, all in all, unsayable. Let me, therefore, begin with a little disquisition on ineffability. First, there often exists an insuperable inner resistance to speech. We may declare something to be unspeakably terrible, or unmentionably shameful, or, again, unutterably beautiful or inexpressibly [...]