John of Salisbury and the Ideal Scholar
John of Salisbury not only depicts the thorough and balanced measure of the education of the ideal scholar, but he also points to the deficits within our…
John of Salisbury not only depicts the thorough and balanced measure of the education of the ideal scholar, but he also points to the deficits within our…
Here is the grand fact that Protestant theologians always overlook. They, in reality, always present nature and grace as two antagonistic powers, and suppose the presence of…
In 1915, the Irish poet W.B. Yeats wrote a scathing poetic attack on the scholars of his day called, fittingly enough, “The Scholars.” Fourteen years later, in…
Flattering the Demos: Fiction and Democratic Education. Marlene K. Sokolon and Travis D. Smith, eds. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. That America’s institutions of higher education are…
“That’s just your opinion.” My students and my children have given vent to this phrase countless times during dinner table discussions and philosophical conversations, often in response…
Liberal education is the distinctive educational tradition of the West; so, too, is liberty our distinctive political tradition. As Christopher Dawson observed, every society works to “enculturate”…
"Spiritualism seems to me absolutely right on all its mystical side. The supernatural part of it seems to me quite natural. The incredible part of it seems…
Someone might say—and libertarians skeptics often do—that classes in philosophy and literature are given a quite an arbitrarily inflated value by according them credit. Do away with…
I’ve gotten several emails about this article by Joanne Lipman in the Wall Street Journal. The bottom line is that the teachers who get the best results are all about…
So here’s a funny article on the sheer silliness and passive-aggressive hostility of the jargon that dominates the worlds of management, consultants, marketing, and all that. That world, it…
One of the latest fads in the university is being “woke”: a recognition of one’s privilege and therefore the need to empathize with those groups who have…
In today’s world, when the topic of the defects of university teaching and curricula comes up, the most well-known alternative put forward is the “great books programs.” I…
What Villanova should be famous for is its well-funded and brilliantly staffed ”great books” gen-ed alternative program and a real surge in “great books” humanities majors. The…
Plenty of liberals—and not just liberal professors—think there is a conservative conspiracy to use online education and MOOCs, to destroy genuinely higher education in this country. I see…
One reason I can’t buy the claim that conservative intellectual has become an oxymoron is that on our campuses it’s so often the conservatives who defend “liberal…