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…
I found there was great bliss in just watching Ma. Her simple movements and actions displayed a freedom, dignity and beauty that cannot be described in words, and filled the beholder with a strange, inexplicable…
Back and forth from my desk to my shelves, ten, twenty, thirty times a day. The sources swirl around me. I am drugged by books. The sweet savor rises from the pages. A delirium of…
Studying Torah day and night means positioning oneself at every moment to acquire Torah, which is itself a function of bearing the burden of another. –Ira F. Stone, A Responsible Life: The Spiritual Path of…
The Church’s claim is that we reach our fulfillment as human beings not by asserting ourselves, but by giving ourselves—by making ourselves into the gift to others that life itself is to us. –George Weigel,…
One use of his commonplaces was to supply mottoes for his own and others’ periodical essays. Johnson’s adeptness in providing epigraphs suggests something about how he read and filed away crystals of literature that…
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…
The four cardinal natural virtues are fertilizer for the spiritual soil in which the three theological virtues are to grow. –Peter Kreeft, Practical Theology: Spiritual Direction from Saint Thomas Aquinas, 113
Let us look at our own shortcomings and leave other people’s alone; for those who live carefully ordered lives are apt to be shocked at everything and we might well learn very important lessons from…