While stuck at home during the COVID-19 pandemic, I participated in an online reading challenge. I don’t remember the exact requirements, but I recall one prompt in particular standing out; it instructed me to read an author I knew I ought to read but didn’t think I would enjoy. I wasn’t thrilled. That meant it […]
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Every year, when I teach Plato’s Republic, something subtle happens to the students. At first, the students are confident. They are articulate, well-read, informed. They have opinions about justice, politics, freedom, identity. They have listened to podcasts, read articles, absorbed arguments. Their minds are not empty. And yet, somewhere around Book VII, the atmosphere shifts. […]
While stuck at home during the COVID-19 pandemic, I participated in an online reading challenge. I don’t remember the exact requirements, but I recall one prompt in particular standing out; it instructed me to read an author I knew I ought to read but didn’t think I would enjoy. I wasn’t thrilled. That meant it […]
There is a kind of education that chills the soul. It operates with impressive order, produces well-timed outputs, and maintains impeccable discipline—yet something essential is missing. No spark leaps between minds, no encounter lingers after the lecture, no personal memory anchors the learning. The institution runs smoothly, but no one remembers why it began. It […]
“[…] we have seen beauty to result from the highest ideal and must therefore be sought in the most perfect union and equilibrium possible between reality and form.” When Friedrich Schiller published his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man in the 1790s, Europe was reeling. The French Revolution had promised liberty, equality, and fraternity—and […]
The first line of A. T. Murray’s 1919 translation of Homer’s Odyssey reads thusly: “Tell me, O Muse, of the man of many devices, who wandered full many ways after he had sacked the sacred citadel of Troy.” It trips off the tongue: “Tell Me, O Muse, of the Man of Many devices, who Wandered full Many Ways after he had Sacked the Sacred Citadel of Troy.” In […]
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 […]
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 […]
For over forty years, the Reading and Writing Project at the Teachers College of Columbia University influenced the way at least one in four American schools taught children how to read. Spearheading this reading initiative was the program’s director, Lucy Calkins, who advocated for an approach called “Balanced Literacy.” It claimed to put an end […]
“A precis from Simmons about being civilized can go like this: The mind must be tethered to the fundamentals and aspirations of a higher culture. Gratitude to the vast swatches of high inheritance is key. Although a few of us know a great deal, most of us should understand we do not know a great […]