R. J. Snell lives and gardens (or at least watches his children garden) just outside of Philadelphia in Havertown, a place where Sinatra, baseball games, and cigar smoke waft from his neighbors' porches onto his own. If Philadelphia had colder and longer winters, as this Canadian thinks natural and fitting, it would be almost perfect. The fact that his four children and wife live there (almost) redeems the overly warm weather. He directs the philosophy program at Eastern University, in St. Davids, PA. He also co-directs the Agora Insitute for Civic Virtue and the Common Good, a research center devoted to understanding and sustaining the virtues and institutions of human flourishing. The author of Through a Glass Darkly: Bernard Lonergan and Richard Rorty on Knowing without a God's-Eye View, and the forthcoming (with Steve Cone) Authentic Cosmopolitanism, he writes and teaches on Thomas Aquinas and contemporary Thomism, Bernard Lonergan, natural law, decent life, and the liberal arts.
R. J. Snell
Articles by R. J. Snell
Impiety and Enforced Forgetfulness
I’m struck at the vanity of those impious folks infatuated with their ability to improve the situation without having first served a long apprenticeship under the tutelage of the old.…
Take-out Death Eaters
Well, if drive-through Ash Wednesday services weren't enough, the Dutch have finally invented mobile euthanasia units to do house calls when your own doctor won't. A town in Wisconsin I…
Call an Assembly: The First Duty
In The Supper of the Lamb, a delightfully odd book, Robert Farrar Capon suggests as an exercise in reality an extended session with an onion. “Once you are seated,” he…
Creative Fidelity and Weighty People
In Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the character Tomas is an inveterate womanizer, a man who takes notes on the particular physical differences, however minute, of the women…
Tradition and Critique: On Wanting to Know
I think Walker Percy uses the following to illustrate contemporary life, although I don’t remember where. But it goes something like this: When his grandfather walked down the street, everyone…
Gifting Children
Some friends and I are celebrating the good news that one of our company was expecting another child. None of us are the Duggars, and the offspring of the three…
The Lovely Real and the Long Game
One pernicious aspect of our age is its commitment to techne, the quasi-religious belief that all manner of things shall be made well with the right tool, expertise, specialist, or…
Small-souled Masters of the Universe
The Spring 2011 issue of The City includes an insightful piece by Wilfred McClay on “The Illusion of Mastery” in public policy. When the “will of God” no longer suffices…
A Sense of Owingness
Like so many others, I spent too much time hoodwinked by the story of liberation, emancipation, and autonomy. What it meant to be free, I supposed, was to be free…