Be Pro-Active

“What is this song or picture, this engaging personality presented in life or in a book, to me? What effect does it really produce on me? Does it give me pleasure? And if so, what…

Today’s One-Liner (#239)

I hope to read the whole Bible once a year as long as I live. –Dr. Samuel Johnson, quoted in Fiona MacMath, The Faith of Samuel Johnson: An Anthology of His Spiritual and Moral Writings…

These Two

[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. …

Soulwork

“One big thing is to develop a strenuous accountability (you see it’s moral, no gadgets invade man’s true necessity), and the habit, the daily labor of writing en passant, keep a vast and cosmic diary….

Today’s One-Liner (#231)

The writer wakens you, the reader, he rouses you out of your indifference, he shows you the things you had not seen before, he makes your imagination work, he gives you wings, and you see…

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….

Today’s One-Liner (#225)

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

Re-readable

Sometimes, it is sobering to reflect the entire corpus of the New Testament covers a mere 243 pages in the English Revised Standard Edition. Those of us who are fortunate enough to be literate do…

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…