Learning to Read “the Book in Front of Us”
As the fall semester looms, the minutia of meetings and syllabi revisions threatens to drain the excitement from my impending return to the classroom....
Fierce Velleity: Poetry as Antidote to Acedia
In “Lying,” the late Richard Wilbur diagnoses one of our age’s endemic ills with the paradoxical phrase “fierce velleity.” For those of us who...
What Groucho Marx Can Teach Us About Liberal Education
The world wearies of defenses of liberal education and the humanities. What cannot be denied is that all over the country the liberal arts...
Educating Humans to Subvert Technocracy
Alan Jacobs’s new book, The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis, traces a fascinating intellectual debate that arose...
Dissecting Hospitality
The virtue of hospitality has enjoyed something of a minor renaissance. Over the last few decades, theologians and ethicists have sought to make a...
“Torches of Freedom”: The Anti-Literature of Advertising
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate...
Education and the Quest for Association
Plato remarked in the Republic that if one wanted to know the health of a city, we could simply look at the souls of...
College and its End(s)
“College and its End(s)”---that was the title I had given to the section of senior seminar I taught this past fall. The class was...
A Call for a Politically Inclusive Classroom
Teaching Tolerance in a Time of Trump sounds like a short-course a firebrand professor might offer, though I mean it in a more comprehensive...
Res Idiotica
South Bend, IN
My students are know-nothings. They are exceedingly nice, pleasant, trustworthy, mostly honest, well-intentioned, and utterly decent. But their minds are largely empty,...