Category Archives: Late Summer 2022

Sacrificial Friendship In Charlotte’s Web

a young farmer's daughter sits on a log with her piglet friend thinking contemplatively

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 […]

Befriending Books

a Woman in an eclectic orange dress reading book

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 […]

Give Them a Door

Door sits under an arched stone doorway

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 […]

Mapping the Imagination

a small walled town of quirky homes, churches, and businesses

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 […]

The Vision of the Soul

Women dance and converse together in painting

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 […]

Science and Imagination

Science and Imagination

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, […]

The Three Cultures

man plays harp in graphic

they have become hard to distinguish from one another. These three harmonic cultural voices speak to us out of the past and are sometimes hard to disentangle. But we can draw some basic distinctions. Greek culture was artistic, literary, and philosophical. The Greeks invented representative art, drama, and philosophy as we know it today. The […]

The Mind of a Gentleman

Man sits in chair

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 […]

Letter from the Editor Late Summer 2022: One True Sentence

hand writes on paper

In Ernest Hemingway’s book A Moveable Feast, he gives the best advice I have ever read on dealing with writer’s block. He tells you to sit down, take up a pen, and write one true sentence. That’s it. Just one true sentence. For example, I had writer’s block as I sat down to write this […]

Top 10 Reasons for Studying Latin

In this day of computers, and the triumph of science and technology, when there is so much to learn and so little time, why study a dead language? Why not study something practical and useful? Like Spanish, for instance. While we agree the study of Spanish is a very good thing, what I propose to […]