What is the intention of a Great Books education? Does it need to make the student feel at every moment as though there were a palpable design upon him? I ask because making things “intentional” seems to have become something of a buzzword, even in spiritual matters. Guided tours can be a wonderful thing. I [...]
The ordinary daily life of men in Christian culture, who work not only in the sweat of their brows, but for the love of their families, there is also love of work. When men cut wood or go to war or make love to their wives, and when women spin or wash and reciprocate that [...]
Real silence (always recommended by the saints) allows us to escape our own conceptual frames and be open to the world as it is in God's first book. The world repeats itself, as it has done and will do, a little differently each time, each time worth seeing and hearing differently. Several years ago, in [...]
Learning the language of Christian culture begins with God-given reality, which explains our emphasis on the outdoors and on horsemanship; it explains our technology policy, which helps students avoid an algorithmically manipulative virtual reality; and it explains our four years of classes centered on the Great Books, an encounter with the greatest thought of the [...]
My father was first and foremost a true philosopher, a lover of wisdom, a student, a seeker of truth, and in addition to this and as a necessary result, he became a great teacher, and more than that, a converter. Everyone who ever met him, even briefly, was affected by his intense love of truth, [...]
Every summer, I look forward to reading new books in the months between classes, but this year I'm determined to finish the ones I've started. The word "graduation" in most people's minds means something like "the end of an education," even though the word "commencement" (used for this ceremony at least since 1387, according to the Oxford [...]
Why is the true Fourth such a powerful image of liberty? Because the things that most deepen us and rouse us are dangerous. An appetite for the real good means being willing to face danger, and the whole point of the liberty we celebrate is that we learn to handle danger, to face it responsibly, [...]
Sometimes, looking at the Church from a new perspective can remind us of what it’s all about. Wyoming Catholic College is unique among its peer institutions for a number of things, but one of them is that we breathe with “both lungs” of the Church, as John Paul II described the complementarity of the Roman [...]
The greatest books of the Western world have relied upon the knowledge of horses whose natures have so influenced and symbolized our own. When my wife Virginia and I first came to Wyoming Catholic College in 2013, we had only notions about horses. Each of us had been astride some poor rope-led nag or other [...]
I wonder what happens when we turn the lifelong, emotionally charged, familial relations central to who we are into some culturally inflected abstraction called “parenting.” The way back to the good life—and there is a widespread sense that we have lost it or forgotten it—depends much more than we realize on the language we use [...]
The obvious question is rarely asked: what is the end of this enlargement of human control and this endless technological reaching? I sense a communal dread about it. Are we building the Tower of Babel—a recurring trope this week? Are we headed for the annihilation of humankind? This past week, adults from across the country [...]
Classical schools honor the old. Reading and discussing a great work in high school give the mind a preparatory receptivity until greater experience can broaden and deepen the field of reference, at which time studying the same work in college can be an experience formative for life. These past two weeks, I have had occasion [...]
In classical education, we are not talking about tradition as the acquisition of monuments, but as a permanence gathered from moments of participation capable of being lived and lived again and then passed on to be taken up yet again by generations yet to come, with our own additions and our own achievements of greatness. [...]
Of all the phenomena of a human life, few surpass friendship in importance. In fact, looking back from early in my eighth decade, I find that I most clearly remember the inner meaning and importance of the past in terms of friendships. Too infrequently as we age, it becomes difficult to open the heart as [...]