A Patron Saint of Teachers
On Essays and Letters“Your total ignorance of that which you profess to teach merits the death penalty. I doubt whether you would know that St. Cassian of Imola was stabbed to death by his students with their styli. His death, a martyr’s honorable one, made him a...
On the Fixing of Our Gaze
On Essays and LettersWhen college students go to Europe, as so many do, I tell them to be sure to send me a card from this place or that, places they visit, usually randomly. Moreover, I tell them before they depart that, on coming to Ostia Antica, the port of Rome,...
What Everybody Can Enjoy
On Essays and LettersRecently, a former student, Nicholas Wheeler, knowing my proclivities, gave me Volume CLXXII of “The World’s Classics.” The title of this particular volume is A Book of English Essays (1600-1900). The essays were selected by Stanley V. Makower and...The Infinite Anguish of Free Souls
On Essays and LettersIn Albert Camus’ Lyrical and Critical Essays (Vintage, 1968), I found a 1940 essay entitled, “The Almond Trees.” This collection has long been a favorite of mine. It bears much of the somberness of the then up-coming War. Camus himself was from...Returning to the Real
On Essays and LettersHenri de Lubac, the great French Jesuit theologian, had a collection of nineteen letters that he had received from the French historian of philosophy Étienne Gilson (Letters of Étienne Gilson to Henri de Lubac [Ignatius, 1988]). After Gilson’s...
Russell Kirk's intro to Democracy and Leadership is itself a classic.
Join the discussion tonight, 7PM ET, with Tim Goeglein (@FocusFamily).