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Pillar

Education & Culture

The fourth pillar, education and culture, is built upon the recognition of two essential realities. First, the Western intellectual tradition requires a dedication to and desire for truth. Second, education takes place not only within colleges and universities but within our broader culture, whose institutions and practices form us as whole persons.

A Gentler Christian Nationalism: Social Scientific Correctives to a Reductionistic Theory

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Christian nationalism

A Gentler Christian Nationalism: Social Scientific Correctives to a Reductionistic Theory

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Various trends in American religion and right-wing politics further indicate that as the political influence of Christian nationalism is waxing, that of religious conservatism is waning. This need not be a fixed situation, but it does mean religious conservatives will have ample need of God’s grace as they consider how to avoid moral and spiritual compromise while navigating a particularly treacherous political landscape.
The Iliad

A New Iliad

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The first word of Emily Wilson’s new translation of the Iliad signals that this is not quite the Homer we’re used to. You may well ask whether anyone today can be used to an epic, conventionally attributed to a blind bard named Homer, that was composed some 2,750 years ago in a stylized form of Greek that no one spoke natively. But surprisingly, there have been more than a dozen translations into English in the past thirty-five years alone.
American schools

If We Want Better Schools, We Need to Be a Serious People

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Our schools are failing not because of what happens in the classroom, but because of what happens—or more to the point, what doesn’t happen—at the dinner table. If we wish to be a serious people, then we must bolster our institutions with the power to humanize and domesticate the bedlam within us all.
Cafe and discussion of art and politics

Art and Politics in Roger Scruton’s Conservative Philosophy

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Hörcher adeptly elucidates how Scruton’s belief in the intertwining of aesthetics, morality, and politics stands as a bulwark against the often fragmented worldview of today’s modern thinkers.
Don Quixote and Sancha Panza statues

Don Quixote and Our Quixotic Youth

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The scope of the crisis of masculinity is unchartered territory for America and the broader West. Yet many of the most exaggerated masculine traits have an ancient ancestry and can be traced back to one of the greatest works of the Western canon.
Civic education for two cities

Civic Education for Two Cities

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A parallel challenge exists in preparing active participants for life as citizens and as members of church communities. Similar strategies can help both.
Art as virtue

The Art of Virtue and the Virtue of Art

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By co-creating with God, we imitate his goodness, participate in his governance, and bring more of creation into the divine unity.
Book reviews

The Bookshelf: Let’s Review

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A book review is not an opening-night party for a book’s author, and it is not a quarrel carried on with brass knuckles. It is an exercise in considered, contextualized judgment for the benefit of readers.
AI and education

Artificial Mediocrity: The Hazard of AI in Education

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Many students may not appreciate the importance of applying themselves rather than using AI, but we must encourage those who do. We should fortify promising students with the assurance that excellence in education is worth pursuing but requires taking a hard road.
Science vs. religion

The Entanglements of Science and Religion

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Nicholas Spencer’s new book is an important resource for anyone who wishes to understand the scientific and religious entanglements that have shaped, and continue to frame, our views of God, humanity, and the cosmos.
Great books programs

Timeless and Timely: A Defense of the Great Books

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A liberal education pursued in good faith, that is, with civility, generosity, humility, and an earnest desire (among teachers and students) to think for oneself and to learn from and with others, tends to render us all more thoughtful, reflective, and humane.
Classical education

Classical Education’s Remedy for America’s Loneliness Epidemic

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Classical schools embrace an older understanding of education, one that prepares students for festivity and friendship, rather than socially handicapping them. Like their ancient and medieval predecessors, classical educators maintain that a crucial purpose of education is to liberate students from a calculative, utilitarian mindset by teaching them how to enjoy intrinsically worthwhile activities for their own sake.
Franciscan Education

The Merits of a Franciscan Liberal Arts Education

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The point of a Christian liberal education is to take on the mind of God and to be conformed to Christ, or at least to begin to do so, for such a project is endless. This means that a Christian liberal arts school will seek to impart to its students some measure of wisdom and holiness.
The study of theology

In Defense of the Liberal Arts and the “Queen of the Sciences”

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The problem with the way that discussions surrounding university education are often framed is that they seem to accept as inevitable a pernicious anthropology that presumes students are autonomous subjects, consuming in order to be consumed. But we are more than what we achieve, more than we produce, more than our billable hours.
Watching the news

Subsidiarity and the Ethics of Attention

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If our immediate surroundings and concrete responsibilities constitute the arena in which we are most uniquely competent, then reserving our attention for those objects is not quietism, but the pinnacle of activism.
Christian conventions

Christians Need Stronger Conventions, Not State Power, to Influence Culture

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Deep, broad cultural change often results not primarily from government imposition or propagation of ideas, but from committed social entrepreneurs who pilot alternative conventions. Public pronouncement of Christian values, absent change in underlying social conventions, is a poor substitute for deeply rooted change internal to the church.
The Vatican

Pius XII and the Politics of the Mystical Body

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Pope Pius XII exhorts the faithful to participate in daily Mass, frequent confession, personal prayer, mortification, and works of mercy. These practices are not minor, weak, or irrelevant responses to a world crisis; on the contrary, the pope believes they are powerfully efficacious and necessary, strengthening the bonds uniting the mystical body of Christ and sowing the seeds of peace. His counsel is spiritual in nature, but socio-political in its effects.
desert

The Hidden Riches of the Desert

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In her new book A Philosopher Looks at the Religious Life, Zena Hitz situates her philosophical ponderings within the context of her own life, here spotlighting a crisis precipitated by her conversion to the Catholic faith. Like Abraham about to sacrifice his son Isaac at the Lord’s behest, Hitz realizes that unconditional love of God, “wholehearted commitment without compromise,” might demand the renunciation even of what she has held most dear.
Literature

How to Justify the Study of Literature

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John Guillory’s Professing Criticism is a thorough and complex work of scholarship. It’s also a bracing call for literary scholars to significantly reform how they think about their profession, and its relationship to their students and reading public in general. At its core is a challenge that is simultaneously reasonable and radical: professors of literary study must be more modest in their aims and promises to suit the realities of their field in the twenty-first century.
Summer camp

Summer Camp: An Ailing American Institution

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The original rationale for summer camp is more valid than ever. Young people are struggling with mental health, addiction to technology, disconnection from the body, isolation, and many other painful realities. Summer camps cannot fix these problems. But for many adolescents, the experience of traditional summer camps might help them see that life is about more than accomplishment, and that is a start.
Woman in headphones listening music in nature and at the mountain (intentional pale color style)

The Bookshelf: Audiobooks and the Recovery of Leisure Reading

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Audiobooks’ greatest potential is to encourage a sense of receptivity and leisure throughout the rest of life, not just one’s reading life. Listening to a novel, accepting its rhythms and flow of detail on the book’s own terms, is a gentle reminder that life’s most glorious things demand quiet, silent admiration, and loving acceptance.
Clear circular glasses on the table with blurry background

Is Bias Actually Bad?

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If we take seriously Thomas Kelly’s ideas about bias blind spots, then we should seek public universities composed of a high degree of biased parts. Such universities would intentionally hire faculty members and administrators who harbor contrary views on divisive cultural issues. This would probably create campuses that can boast of having teaching and scholarship that have much less pejorative bias than their peer institutions.
Image of Barbie

Barbie’s Quiet Rebuke of Transhumanism

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The movie’s most profound insight is its distillation of pop feminism: a praise of women so unceasing that we no longer feel comfortable being normal human beings with blemishes, weakness, and fertility.
Karyatides statues, Erehtheio, on the Acropolis in Athens, Greece

The Past As Enemy Country: Why Teachers of Great Books Should Be Teaching History, Too

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We need to study history as a subject in its own right, acquiring a deep appreciation for the story of Western civilization, with all its abysses of failure and all its deservedly celebrated achievements. We need to help our students understand old texts at a deeper level, in less anachronistic ways. Above all, we need to arm them against the hostility to their own tradition that has become such a destructive force in our culture.
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