In 1965, on the small island of Tonga in the South Pacific, six schoolboys, ranging in age from thirteen to sixteen, “borrowed” a local fisherman’s boat and took it on a joyride that lasted over fourteen months. They were bored, and so they decided to sail for Fiji, another South Pacific island five hundred miles […]
In 47 B.C., a promising young Roman statesman set sail for Hispania. He had only recently donned the toga, the Roman sign of manhood, at the age of 16 and taken on ambitious responsibilities. Despite a shipwreck and getting lost deep in enemy territory, he persevered and reached his great-uncle, Julius Caesar, and fought alongside […]
The year was 67 BC. Roman seas and coastal towns faced the bloody terror of the Cilician pirates. The presence of pirates disrupted trade and halted agricultural development, and destroyed many Roman lives. The people knew something needed to be done and there was only one man for the job: Pompey the Great. Pompey was […]
Charlotte’s Web, written by E. B. White in 1952, is a quintessential book for children. While conveying important truths about the nature of people and the world, it is also an imaginative, happy story about life on a family farm. The book gives us a clever glimpse into the lives of our animal friends while […]
I was going to write an essay about why everyone should read Jane Austen’s novels. I was going to make an impassioned case that her books are not just the smart girl’s romance novels or guides for men seeking to understand the female mind but truly great books, as insightful in their way into the […]
The Door in the Wall is a slim work of children’s literature that welcomes a student into the world of the Middle Ages, enchants his imagination, and shares a poetic knowledge of life itself. More than this, the little book also embraces all that we hold true in Simply Classical by helping us as parents […]
One of my favorite children’s books happens to be Uri Shulevitz’s How I Learned Geography. Touchingly illustrated by the author, the story is based on Shulevitz’s actual childhood. Born in Warsaw in 1935, he fled with his family after the Nazis incinerated the city center in 1944 and razed Warsaw to the ground. The family […]
If we seek to conserve the Western tradition, then what are the principles that constitute it? There is a recognizable tradition of Western civilization in which we all participate, one governed by the concept of beauty. Let us consider six key insights about the nature of the cosmos and of the human person that constitute […]
When discussing the heliocentric (sun-centered) view of the universe, the brilliant astronomer Johannes Kepler wrote, For in the sphere, which is the image of God the Creator and the Archetype of the world … there are three regions, symbols of the three persons of the Holy Trinity—the center, a symbol of the Father; the surface, […]
In his book The Idea of a University, John Henry Newman argues that the goal of education in a university should be the cultivation of a “liberal” type of mind. In Latin, liber means a “free man” as opposed to a slave, and the education appropriate for such a man is an education in the […]