What a treat is it for a group of amateur string players, busy in their everyday lives, to spend a week in a far-off place and inundate themselves in practice and education concerning a single piece of music and its composer—the sort of exercise usually reserved for professionals. […]
We need to draw distinctions. The words we use are crucial to this endeavor. They matter. To deny this is to become a deconstructionist, and engage in self-defeating activities like writing lengthy books on how words have no meaning. Splitting hairs seems a far worthier past time… Our modern means of communication favor brevity, be [...]
I met a traveler from an antique land, Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert…. Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these [...]
In a groundbreaking study, researchers have shown that handwriting is better than typing as a means of retaining information precisely because handwriting is slow, whereas typing is fast… We all know Aesop’s fable about the Tortoise and the Hare but few of us really believe, in the real world, that slowcoaches like the tortoise have [...]
T.S. Eliot reminds us that the answers to our soul’s depravity are all around us, in our collective culture—the books we read, the places we inhabit, the music we listen to—but also that culture can only survive if we remember it and keep it alive. “These things I do within, in that vast chamber of [...]
In freeing the student in his studies and liberating man socially through education and through every sort of technique and social institution, John Dewey remains an interesting and commanding philosopher… We will first mention decisive influences on John Dewey and then give a résumé of his philosophy of education. It is only within such a [...]
The fear and suspicion of ideas and intellect rest on historical foundations buried deep in the American consciousness. Many Americans, in fact, have long disparaged the life of the mind, and populist democracy has increasingly required an appeal to vulgarity and ignorance… The mistrust of ideas and intellect that has long prevailed among a substantial [...]
Of all John Adams' published writings, two works provide an especially fruitful resource for an inquiry into his deepest political reflection: his "Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America" and "Discourses on Davila." As a political writer, John Adams is most remembered today for the constitutional prescriptions by which he [...]
Longing for the enchanted world underlies the poetic imagination, but it’s the light of common day that we inhabit, thus we should value realism in the imaginative realm… One of the themes of frequent discussion at Wyoming Catholic College is Charles Taylor’s idea of disenchantment—the disappearance in modern times of an “enchanted” relation to the [...]
Trade has always existed, and rich merchants have always been a part of the economic and political picture, but merchants have not always been the rulers, as they are today… In a recent essay for The Imaginative Conservative, I claimed that capitalism had its origins in England. I had expected such a sweeping statement to raise [...]
Hunting Will Shakespeare will be a continuing pursuit. It is almost as if the hunt for him is a hunt for humanity and a search to understand ourselves… My oldest son, Benedict has rightly observed that TV series are now more interesting than movies. Many of the series are well written, well budgeted, and well [...]
What we need today to re-create the beautiful city, an icon through which to see the glorious City of God, is a new “Iliad,” a new story that will manifest “what the many do together,” for what the many do together “rarely lacks a certain nobility, or beauty.” In his Metamorphoses of the City, Catholic [...]
Even when addressing non-Christians, Christian humanism’s willing receptiveness of the supernatural opens itself to the truths of revelation and of the human religious experience, allowing it to speak intimately and truthfully to the whole person… The Return of Christian Humanism: Chesterton, Eliot, Tolkien, and the Romance of History by Lee Oser (University of Missouri Press, [...]
It is our loss that Amos Kendall, who helped Andrew Jackson rid government of corruption, remains to this day one of the least known of all nineteenth-century American statesmen. Of all of those in his informal circle of advisors during his presidency, none mattered as much to Andrew Jackson as Amos Kendall, a steadfast friend [...]