What is education? It’s a big question for sure. But I think about it every time I read some news story about some school that has instituted a “job skills” program of some kind. The assumption behind such programs is, of course, that the purpose of schools is vocational. But is that really what schools […]
Letter from Provost, Political theory
Trying to read a 4th century, BC book on a 21st century, AD airplane
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Oct
LETTER FROM THE PROVOST: One of the things I like about flying is that it allows me to read unrestricted for however long I am on the plane. There are fewer and fewer places that offer you the solitude that focused reading requires. I recently traveled to Florida to speak at a school event, and […]
The world of Till We Have Faces (1956) presents readers with a thoroughly pre-modern and non-Greek religion. In the land of Glome, located somewhere in the mountains to the north of Greece (whether more Scandinavian or Russian, it is hard to tell), the people worship Ungit, a feminine deity and sacred stone, which emerged from […]
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Oct
Oct
Suppose that you pick up a textbook in an unfamiliar branch of mathematics and thumb to a random page. You might find a statement such as: if there are injections f: A-> B and g: B -> A, then there is a bijection h: A -> B1 Such statements probably strike you as utterly mystifying. […]
About 25 years before writing Till We Have Faces, an unconverted C.S. Lewis met with J.R.R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson for dinner in his rooms at Magdalen College, followed by a stroll together on Addison’s Walk. He recounted this conversation later in a letter to Arthur Greeves. Tolkien and Dyson had helped Lewis to see […]
In 350 B.C., Aristotle wrote On the Heavens, a work in which he laid down his geocentric view of the universe. Earth was at the center, and everything else orbited around it. For roughly 1,800 years, astronomers tried to understand the motion of the stars and planets in the night sky using Aristotle’s view, and […]
The following is an edited excerpt from Dr. Louis Markos’ article “Truth, Goodness, and Beauty in Plato’s Myths,” in the 2025 issue of Meliora, the academic journal of Memoria College. Apart from the order, balance, and harmony that unite Truth to Goodness and Goodness to Beauty, there would be no center around which to organize […]
The following is an edited excerpt from James Hankins’ article “The Christian Humanism of the Renaissance and the Revival of Classical Latin,” in the 2025 issue of Meliora, the academic journal of Memoria College. In my teaching and writing over many years about Renaissance humanism, I’ve discovered that the word “humanism” can be an obstacle […]
Today, Christians are faced with the choice between Scylla and Charybdis: must they bow to the ideals of political liberalism, which is based on the values of the person and personal “rights”, or can they indulge in the nostalgia of a medieval “holy kingdom” and reject the secular state altogether? The first option is hardly […]
In the Republic, Socrates proposes to his interlocutors that in order to understand the principle of justice in the soul, they should look for the principle of justice in a city. If they grasp the principle of justice in the city, then that principle can be understood in the soul. My proposal is to reverse […]