History must be constantly corrected and moderated by the seeing and handling of things. —Hilaire Belloc There are many reasons to collect books: admiration of an author, fascination with a subject or time period, love of the physical beauty of specially-printed or what are called “press books,” beautiful bindings, illustrations, even because it was a […]
Before we drove home from the Memoria Press Sodalitas Gathering this past summer, a family friend met my daughter Michelle and me for breakfast. John has a degree in theological languages and a deep interest in philosophy, and he inquired about our work. More broadly he asked about the endeavor we call classical education that […]
Here, between the shelves, I escape everything worrisome, petty, mundane. In late afternoon, as the weak winter sun begins its slide, pale yellow light washes through the west-side window of my office in Fairhope, Alabama, and something like magic floods the room. I sit in a big, soft chair, and the words that are bound […]
There are some questions we ask of science that it is ill-equipped to answer. The question of how human beings are different from animals is one. I thought about this when I read Kevin Laland’s article in a recent issue of Scientific American. “[H]ard scientific data have been amassed across fields ranging from ecology to […]
Why should the student learn Greek? No shortage of pragmatic reasons comes to mind, and parents and teachers will delight to know that Greek has utilitarian value, although it seems uncouth to speak of it as such. While usually a hybrid of Greek and Latin influence, most existing English words come from the Greco-Roman vocabulary. […]
In 1929, children’s book author Anne Parrish was visiting Paris. She left her husband at a cafe to visit one of the city’s many bookstores. There she found a copy of Helen Wood’s Jack Frost and Other Stories, a favorite of hers from childhood. She returned to the cafe, sat down, and showed her husband […]
There are people who believe that the story at the center of Christmas—that a virgin conceived and bore the Son of God—is a myth or a fairy tale. And they are right. It is. In his book The Everlasting Man, G. K. Chesterton points out that the ancients (at least those who were not privy […]
Aristotle’s Politics, a treatise on political philosophy, explains that language is the defining feature of humanity with the old dictum “and of all the animals, only man has speech.” Unlike the other creatures in the world, man possesses the power of reason and the ability to speak; he is a language animal. As a unique […]
In The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis summarizes the heart of classical education: “Augustine defines virtue as ordo amoris, the ordinate condition of the affections in which every object is accorded that kind and degree of love which is appropriate to it. Aristotle says that the aim of education is to make the pupil like […]
Big Think has printed another of a class of essays written by scientists, common these days, announcing in triumphant tones all the things that science can do outside its particular and limited domain. Almost without exception, these essays, which implicitly aspire to philosophical eloquence, fly too close to the sun. The only difference being that, while Icarus […]