Tag: Saint Augustine

Never Out-of-Date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…

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 (#272)

 Yet who can tell how many times each day our curiosity is tempted  by the most trivial and insignificant matters? –Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin

For the Young

 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…

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….

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…