Category: Classics

If Not Now, When?

For I felt that I was still the captive of my sins, and in my misery I kept crying ’How long shall I go on saying “tomorrow, tomorrow”? Why not now? Why not make an…

Chaos of the Now

Yet of Plutarch, the Ancilla to Classical Reading says, “He has indubitably had more European readers than any other pagan Greek and has been the greatest single channel communicating to Europe a general sense of…

Never Out-of-Date

Cicero lived some five hundred years before Augustine. He himself sent his own son to Greece to study philosophy. Cicero wrote to his son a famous letter, the famous On Duties, which attempted to explain…

Today’s One-Liner (#297)

I take it for granted that we read what are rightly called “great books”—Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, the Greek tragedians, Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, the Bible, St. Augustine, some Church fathers, St. Thomas, Shakespeare, and into the…

Things Have Changed

The Bible has profound things to tell us, things we clearly ought to know. We now have students in class, even those who have gone to church or synagogue all their lives, who have not…

Inexplicable, and I Most of All

“And I shall also tell you, dear mother, that each of us is guilty in everything before everyone, and I most of all.” At that mother even smiled, she wept and smiled: “How can it…

These Two

[Dale] Carnegie commanded anyone wishing to acquire truly extensive and precise diction to give over his days and nights to the Bible and Shakespeare. So I began to read these two sacred texts at bedtime. …