Category: leisure
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Review- The Book of Man: Readings on the Path to Manhood
As the recently released film Courageous shows, 21st century American men are going through something of an identity crisis. One need only look to the plethora of websites and books geared toward men to see this. Sites like The Art of Manliness and 1001 Rules for my Unborn Son provide both advice and an outlet…
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Josef Pieper: Leisure, the Basis of Culture
Readers of my previous writing project may recognize this essay- it is about one of my favorite philosophical books. As I have recently shut down my old site I am in the process of migrating a few essays that seem to fit A Certain Quality of Life. If you have read this before, I apologize,…
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The Great Books Project: A Re-boot
A couple of weeks ago I posted about self improvement and the 5-foot shelf, a collection of books gathered by Harvard’s legendary president, Dr. Eliot. I wrote in that post that I was going to test his premise that 15 minutes a day spent reading these classics could provide you with an adequate liberal education.…
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Why Charity Matters
Does this sound familiar? It is dinner time and you have just sat down when the phone rings. It is yet another charitable organization looking for a donation. You feel for the caller, after all he is just doing his job and the cause is a good one, but you just don’t have any extra…
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What This Blog Is Not
A plethora of sites inhabit the blogoshpere that purport to teach you how to make the most of your life. They use terms like risk-taking, unconventional life and doing the impossible to motivate you to do more and live better. To steal a quote made famous by the US Army, they try to enable you…
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The Value of a College Education
A classical education is defined as one that focuses on the seven liberal arts. According to Andrew Kern over at The Circe Institute, “[c]lassical education is the only hope for democracy. It is the only form of education that can make people fit to rule themselves.” While I tend to agree with Mr. Kern, I…
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Living & Finding Meaning in Work
One thing I really enjoy is the reading of older self help books. By older I mean ones written between 1850 and 1920. The advice they give is often more clearly grounded in tangible acts of virtue than much of the modern,feel-good platitudinous works. The best resource for these treasures is Google Books. My latest…
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Plato and Our Current Culture
We like in a culture that feeds on itself. We build people and organizations up simply to tear them back down. Little attention do we devote to our own moral development. without each doing his part the whole of society can not improve. Does this sound like the current state of affairs in the modern…
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C.S. Lewis and Political Virtue
I have been rereading C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity over the past few weeks and a section really got me thinking about the whole idea of the need for virtue in the political world. I apologize for the long quote, but I certainly can’t summarize Lewis’ point better than he does himself. When people say in…
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Re-imagining The Bible Through Art
Today is The Annunciation according to the traditional Catholic calendar. This is when Catholics celebrate the announcement by the archangel Gabriel to the Virgin Mary that she would become the mother of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. A site I sometimes read had a unique representation of The Annunciation that got me thinking about…