Tag: James V. Schall

Experience and Expectation

Let me also recall Samuel Johnson, whose famous biography by his devotee Boswell is, I think, something along with the Bible that you should read a bit every day, if only for the delight of…

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Never Out-of-Date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 (#306)

The best place to begin for any young man or woman today can be stated in two steps: 1) the step of self-discipline and 2) the step of a personal library; both of these together…

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…

Today’s One-Liner (#293)

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…

Readiness Is All

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…

Today’s One-Liner (#281)

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,…