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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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Flannery O’Connor and Modern Education
Flannery O’Connor was an American novelist, short-story writer and essayist, who wrote two novels and many short stories, as well as a number of reviews and essays. O’Connor’s writing usually reflected her Roman Catholic faith, and frequently examined questions of morality and ethics. (As an aside, one of my personal favorites of her is A…
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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…
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Art is a lie whose secret ingredient is truth.
The title for this post comes from an article by Ian Leslie that deals largely with the idea that actors and writers are at heart artistic liars, whose lies are seeded with a deeper truth. The full quote follows: Given the universal compulsion to tell stories, art is the best way to refine and enjoy…
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The Founding Fathers, Classical Education & a New Hope
“Americans view the Founding Fathers in vacuo, isolated from the soil that nurtured them,” says Traci Lee Simmons in his book, Climbing Parnassus: A New Apologia for Greek and Latin.It is certainly true that little thought is given by the everyday American as to what the foundation of our own founders was. This is to…
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New Scholarship
…well, not dummies, but the uninitiated anyway. Scholarship that is digestible to the common man is a prerequisite for a modern virtuous society. The pursuit of happiness is really the pursuit of Wisdom. Wisdom prompts virtuous action, which in turn leads to a virtuous society. So how do we make scholarship available? We start by…
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David Hume at 300
I first read David Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding while in college and while I enjoyed it at the time I have to admit that like much of my college reading it fell from my memory. That is until I read The Authentic Adam Smith, where Hume was an influential minor character, and I…
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Is Christianity Eroding?
In Part One I discussed how many in the Protestant sect of Christianity were having issues with Rob Bell and his apparent embrace of universalism. But the controversies swirling around Christianity extend beyond Protestants to the Catholics as well. “At a recent Sunday mass at St. Edward Catholic Church in Bloomington, a woman stepped to…