Should pleasure define our sense of beauty or should beauty define our sense of pleasure? This is the essential cultural question of The Divine Comedy, and that of our lives as well. Every person follows one or the other of its directives. The world treats beauty as the outgrowth of personal preference. Its definitions of […]
Education, it has been said, should knock windows into the world for us. We are born into a closed and darkened room: As the windows are opened, we see, here, man, with all his character and capacities, experiments, endless achievements, and possibilities, there, the material world itself, the elements that compose, and unexpected laws that […]
Children’s literature could save the world. I believe that. Stories and books are the primary means of passing culture on to children and have been for countless generations. If we claim to want authority over our children’s education we should refuse to relinquish the privilege of educating them to technology in our homes, cars, and […]
We late twentieth and early twenty-first century Americans are the first people in history who do not know poetry. Every civilization prior to our modern American civilization has read and heard and memorized poetry. This was still done in schools when I was young. We use poetry to a certain extent every day, of course, […]
What I Learned From My Mother Julia Kasdorf I learned from my mother how to love the living, to have plenty of vases on hand in case you have to rush to the hospital with peonies cut from the lawn, black ants still stuck to the buds. I learned to save jars […]
Because our most fundamental realities are immaterial—like love and death—few artistic forms remain as capable as fairy tales and poetry for housing such depths. Fairy tales carry us from the prosaic landscape of our workaday rhythm to mountain streams of simple wonder and truth. No filter necessary to drink of this pure water, just the […]
How Poetry Helps Us Fathom the Unfathomable You’ve probably noticed that it can be difficult to explain why some things are true or obvious—like common sense, your grandmother’s wisdom, the distinct feeling of Sunday mornings, that you have a soul, or why your child should play outside rather than stare at a screen. This is so because […]
By Andrew Kern The classical purpose for teaching literature is the same as the classical purpose for teaching anything: to cultivate wisdom and virtue so that the student is better able to know and enjoy God. Classical literature exposes the student to models of virtue. It also places demands on his intellect, thus developing his […]
The great books speak to us of honor and love and sacrifice; but they do not always speak in familiar phrases. They do not tell us what we already know. Transcending current opinion and fad, through symbol and metaphor they reveal a clear and uncluttered access to the realities that determine our lives. Sometime back, […]