Liberal Arts 17
The Liberal Arts: Take it or Leave it
Let’s point to the wiser and the well off and ask people if they want what those people have–often they do. Many times, those people have a love for the…
A Humanist Manifesto of Our Times: A Review of The Soul of Civility
In her introduction, Hudson calls The Soul of Civility “a humanistic manifesto.” And she’s right: the book is steeped in humanism, in more ways than one. First, Hudson underscores the…
The Art(s) of Liberation
None of us gets to choose where we land. But if we cannot choose the times in which we live, we can choose how we live in the time we…
Taste and See: A Review of The Liberating Arts
Perhaps people defended the liberal arts to me, and I was too dense to hear, but I truly cannot remember anyone ever setting out a vision for the liberal arts
A Journey to Right Worship: A Review of Learning to Love
I was encouraged by Sosler and all the many ways he connected love and knowledge to the journey that a rightly ordered education invites students to take. The infilling of…
Education as Pilgrimage
"We seem to be born homesick, and that homesickness is meant to lead us into a life of pilgrimage.” Walker Percy Black Mountain, NC. Where are you going? At its…
Awkward Family Dinner: A Review of Reforming Classical Education
Any reformation requires a standard. How else could you measure progress? The standard of reviving classical learning should plainly include those revered authors who inspired and contributed to that tradition.
Planting and Tending the Lost Seeds of Learning
Donnelly’s scope of transformation may seem like an impossible undertaking, yet even if it is not possible for everyone to achieve the level of faith integration suggested here, anyone can…
Liberal Learning for All: A Review of Rescuing Socrates
Montás deserves great credit for illuminating the perverse priorities of American higher education throughout Rescuing Socrates. It must be admitted, however, that the book suffers from occasional missteps. A fuller…
The Liberal Arts for Loss and Lament
The main posture of a liberal arts education is slowing down, rest, seeing. But if we just train students to only strive, reach, stretch for something more, then suffering will…
The Instrumentalization of the Liberal Arts
The liberal arts aren’t for some utilitarian purpose; they’re to free young people to love rightly.
Protestants and Western Civ.
Hillsdale, Michigan. Which is more surprising? To read that a Great Booksy curriculum—which you, a fairly committed Protestant who tries to keep faith under wraps, happen to teach in—turns Protestants…
Regional Universities Educate for Merit—It’s too Bad Our Elites Just Want Prestige
The Varsity Blues parents didn’t really care if their children learned anything; they were concerned that they got their ticket to success stamped by the right institution.
What Groucho Marx Can Teach Us About Liberal Education
The world wearies of defenses of liberal education and the humanities. What cannot be denied is that all over the country the liberal arts are dying out, with students abandoning…
College and its End(s)
“College and its End(s)”---that was the title I had given to the section of senior seminar I taught this past fall. The class was conceived with two animating questions in…
A Call for a Politically Inclusive Classroom
Teaching Tolerance in a Time of Trump sounds like a short-course a firebrand professor might offer, though I mean it in a more comprehensive way than one might imagine. While…
Monday Morning Brass Spittoon: Roundtable on a Liberal Arts Education
Higher education in America has many challenges, and in many ways has become a rather strange place. The satirical novel, such as Richard Russo’s Straight Man or James Hyne’s The…
