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…
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…
This is that conquest of the world and of ourselves, which has been always considered as the perfection of human nature; and this is only to be obtained by fervent prayer, steady resolution, and frequent…
Every time I re-read a book of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, or Aquinas, I shake my head and wonder why I had not seen that before. The answer is most likely that I was not ready…
Within the Christian tradition more than a suspicion exists that the more intelligent we are, the more we consider ourselves to be “intellectuals,” the more difficult it is to save our souls. –James V. Schall,…
In a touching essay, Professor Ralph McInerny recalled listening as a young man to the last lecture the French Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain gave one autumn night in 1958 at the Moreau Seminary on the…
[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. …
St. Augustine’s famous Confessions is a book directed to the very heart of each young person. No other book is quite like it. In it, Augustine excitedly tells us about his reading of Cicero’s now…
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….
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