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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Rome, 5th century B.C., is a kingdom at risk of complete collapse. Their previous king, the now exiled Tarquin the Proud, stands poised to invade and retake the Roman throne. Little does he know he also stands at the crossroads of history. A moment in which one of Rome’s greatest heroes, Gnaeus Marcius Coriolanus, is […]
Out of all our Famous Men, few have names as recognizable and as legendary as that of Julius Caesar. Caesar’s story is the story of a man who had the potential for greatness, knew he was worthy of greatness, and displayed great actions. He conquered all of Gaul, he created the Julian calendar, which is […]