All-time Greats
By the novel of ideas I mean realist fiction, focused on the complexities of human psychology and the social conditions peculiar to a specific time and place, that tests theories by examining the sources of…
Category: Classics
Tears Every Time
Thank you, Andrew Ivers, for sending this to me again!
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…
Today’s One-Liner (#310)
Everyone should read at one point in his life Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. –James Schall, S.J., A Student’s Guide to Liberal Learning, 34
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Never Out-of-Date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…
Today’s One-Liner (#278)
And I looked and saw a whirling banner which ran so fast that it seemed as if it could never make a stand, and behind it came so long a train of people that I…
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…