A key precept of classical education involves understanding the development of Western literary genres through study of the acknowledged masterworks. Classical educators enthusiastically trace the lines from ancient literature through Dante and Shakespeare. Optimally, they continue to draw that line, examining Baroque style, moving through the era of timeless novels by Austen, Dickens, and the […]
07
Jun
Jun
In academic circles, the study of “pedagogy” has taken a fair beating. This is not a recent phenomenon. In 1929, the literary critic Irving Babbitt proclaimed that professors of pedagogy “are held in almost universal suspicion in academic circles, and are not infrequently looked upon by their colleagues as downright charlatans.” The subsequent years have […]
07
Jun
Jun
I would like to see fewer biographies of great individuals and more biographies of great families or villages. We tend to overrate the singular man of original genius, while ignoring the slow accumulation of culture built up layer upon layer, century upon century, that makes the individual man of genius possible in the first place. […]
07
Jun
Jun
Most people will know H. G. Wells as the author of pioneering works of science fiction, such as The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, and The War of the Worlds. Yet one of his most popular and influential works was not a work of fiction but a history of the world. Wells’ The Outline of […]
06
Jun
Jun
Reading changed for me over the torrid summer of 1968. Which was just in time for the rest of the world to change too. A child braves the wider world in his own way, mercifully unaware of the storms that grownups natter about while tossing back highballs and filling rooms with loud opinions and cigarette […]
24
Mar
Mar
In recent years I have come to love the cinematic genre known as film noir. Noir has always had a fairly substantial following among film aficionados since its heyday in the late 1930s through the early 1950s. That has been helped in large part by the continuing general popularity of a few of the […]
04
Mar
Mar
The following is an interview with architect Allan Greenberg about the relevance of classical architecture in the modern world. This version of the interview is adapted from an essay originally published in the Fall 1996 issue of American Arts Quarterly and was published in the March/April 1997 issue of The American Enterprise. It is […]
02
Mar
Mar
Memoria College professor Dan Sheffler’s new article in The Classical Teacher: The study of logic is the study of that which makes sense, the study of those structures that necessarily must be in order for things to hang together without contradiction. The Greeks called the intelligible structure of something its logos, and this is […]
08
Feb
Feb
Memoria College tutor Thomas Cothran, writing at Eclectic Orthodoxy, about St. Thomas Aquinas’ position on the problem of predestination: God causes all of our actions, including our acts of choosing. He does not merely give mankind the power of choice, he causes the act of choosing itself. We are mere instruments of God’s will. […]
Atheism, Bertrand Russell, Christianity, Existence of God, Frederick Copleston
The Most Famous Debate on the Existence of God
02
Feb
Feb
An excellent article on one of the great modern philosophical events: On January 28, 1948, the BBC brought together two of the century’s brightest minds for a radio debate about the existence of God. To be sure, the debaters were not just lightweight showboats, blowing off steam. The two men represented the cream of the intellectual crop. Bertrand […]