One of the more remarkable trends in the past five years in Catholic education is the noticeable increase of schools embracing a “classical education.” Ten or twenty years ago, the Catholic classical school was a start-up by disgruntled laity. Now one can find here and there whole diocesan school systems that have embraced the classical […]
Three proposed ends of liberal education — career, democracy, and a free mind — do not pierce the dome of the bourgeois workaday world. Let us begin anew with a question: “How can liberal education pierce the dome that encloses the bourgeois workaday world?” This essay was originally delivered at Magdalen College on October 25, […]
Our students read the greatest books of the tradition, a challenge to the brightest minds, and risk themselves repeatedly in conversation, until those who are seasoned “invariably deem it a special privilege to be in the front,” as General William Tecumseh Sherman said of veteran soldiers. Years ago, when my wife and I taught at […]
Music pervades our lives and always has. It has taken you outside of yourselves and taken you deep within. It has been associated with things divine. There comes a time in every year when I find myself saying to a friend or a prospective student that this is a very musical College [Convocation, St. John’s […]
In the transcendence of God, the truth is not a collection of dispiriting facts about our meaningless emergence from chance combinations of matter, but justice and mercy and ultimate harmony. Our approach ought to be to reveal Who God is, not to close off the way to Him. At last week’s meeting of the Philadelphia […]
Eva Brann’s latest book, “Pursuits of Happiness,” is a collection of essays which range from Aeschylus to Austen, with topics spanning the nature of time itself to Sacred Scripture. Interspersed here are two parts constituting the whole of an ideal education. Pursuits of Happiness: On Being Interested by Eva Brann (640 pages, Paul Dry Books, […]
The protagonist of the film “Groundhog Day” discovers that what makes life worth living is not immediate gratification, or moral autonomy, or flippant cynicism, or self-deification, but rather encountering those things that give meaning and purpose to our lives. Today, we are experiencing nothing less than a renaissance of classical education throughout the United States, […]
In a moment when the forces of ideology seem to threaten to overwhelm the voice of sanity and civility, Eva Brann’s imaginative conservatism offers another way—a way rooted in, as she has put it, “talking, reading, writing, listening.” Editor’s Note: This essay is part of a series dedicated to Senior Contributor Dr. Eva Brann of St. John’s […]
A liberal education is free in the sense that it is free of practical goals. We study our language and our literature or biology and chemistry and psychology just because it is a human instinct to do so, and because it is enjoyable to do so. Everything is Political Just as I began my college […]
Fr. Ian Boyd was one of the most beautiful representatives of that culture that goes by the name of “conservatism.” His name will forever remain linked to that of G.K. Chesterton, and especially to “The Chesterton Review.” The founder of The Chesterton Review, emblem of a conservatism we miss, passed away at 88. Fr. Ian […]
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