A Father Schall Reading List

1) G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy 2) C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity 3) E. F. Schumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed 4) Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov 5) Peter Kreeft, The Philosophy of Tolkien 6) Ralph McInerny, I Alone Have Escaped to Tell You 7) Dorothy Sayers, The Whimsical Christian 8) J….

Today’s One-Liner (#225)

What I call “another sort of learning” is the finding and reading those seminal books that take us to the truth and order of things.  ––James V. Schall, Docilitas: On Teaching and Being Taught

Re-readable

Sometimes, it is sobering to reflect the entire corpus of the New Testament covers a mere 243 pages in the English Revised Standard Edition. Those of us who are fortunate enough to be literate do…

Books You’ll Never Be Graded on Except by Reality

1. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Genesis, the Psalms. 2. The Gospel according to St. John. 3. St. Augustine, The Confessions 4. Plato, The Apology; The Crito; The Phaedo 5. Thomas à  Kempis, The Imitation of Christ. 6. The Epistles of St. Paul….

(Back to) Augustine

But there comes a time when we know that something is missing. And when this time comes, we need to know where to turn. Often, I will suggest, we should turn to Augustine himself. Without…

Aha!

And then a new light, less dazzling, no doubt, than that other illumination which had made me perceive that the work of art was  the sole means of rediscovering Lost Time, shone suddenly within me. …

Today’s One-Liner (#192)

The great benefit to be derived from reading pre-modern authors is to come to realize that after all, we [moderns] might have been mistaken. –C.F.J. Martin, quoted in Sohrab Ahmari, The Unbroken Thread: Discovering the…

Minute Particulars

His father and mother had walked where he would walk as a young man, drifter and dreamer, who would in his fiction delineate each footstep, each bird call, each oval of sand wet or dry,…

Portrait of the Artist as a Kid

 In his new school James excelled at lessons and won prizes for the best English compositions. The money helped to buy clothes and food for the needy family and even allowed for little trips to…