I started learning Latin many years ago with an old “Jenney” text that I picked up in a used bookstore. I made it about halfway through the text before I broke down in frustration. When I discovered the Henle Latin series, I was thrilled to find a text with which I could really learn Latin. […]
Tag Archives: romans
American government and political science will come alive when you read the Greeks and Romans, the same way that words come alive when you study Latin and Greek. There were many influences on the Founding Fathers, and certainly the modern philosophers—Locke and Hume—were important along with the tradition of English liberty. But separation of powers, […]
REASON #5: Natural Law What did the first Continental Congress mean when it appealed to “the immutable laws of nature,” or Thomas Jefferson when he referred to the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God and the unalienable rights of man”? Natural law. The principle of natural law is embedded in Western civilization, the Declaration […]
Reason #1: Architecture The power of the word classic cannot be underestimated, communicating as it does the idea of excellence, truth, order, discipline, and beauty. The word “classic” brings to mind something that has withstood the test of time, and by virtue of this fact, participates in some way in the timeless and the eternal. And […]
The Old Testament is replete with examples of God’s people conquering their enemies. They never fled, except as a ruse. When we discuss the issue of how Christians should deal with the writings of the pagans, that is an important thing to remember. Culturally speaking, Christianity conquered Greece and Rome. And when you conquer something, you can do two things with […]
From earliest times, Christians have argued about the role of pagan learning in Christian education. The debate has never gone away, but generally speaking, the church has preferred rather to use the learning of the pagans than to repudiate it. An essential part of the classical Christian education that held sway in schools from the […]
SOME CRITICS HAVE SAID that the value of Roman literature is that it has been the vehicle which conveyed Greek ideas to the world. The Romans took their art and, as far as their civilization rests on these, their civilization from Greece. Why, then, do we study Latin? Some of the reasons are given by Cicero […]
We have begun to see a world in which the classics have virtually disappeared—though they have been woven so tightly into the patterns of our culture that meaning, for us, is hardly separable from them. For a while we may be able to get by on the echoes of their past glory; but when they […]