Humans alone stand upright. For the Christian philosopher Boethius, this was no small thing. “Man alone, erect, aspiring, lifts his forehead to the skies.” Our upright posture testifies to our ability to see ahead and, more importantly, to see above, to see that which transcends this world. Drawing on Ovid
On a late-June day, during a very hot summer, without a cell phone and without Google Maps, I got into my stick-shift Toyota Camry and drove across the American South, from Little Rock, Arkansas, to Jacksonville, Florida. I was 18. My friend, Bill, played on a baseball team at a
What on earth, you might be thinking, is a journalist doing talking about poetry? Poets have a great deal to teach journalists about language, but what might a journalist have to say to poets? What I have to say is this: journalists write about life in public, and what they
The prestige of the French intellectual begins at the very moment in which the prestige of the clergy fades. It is a matter of a substitution. It was during the eighteenth century that the power of people who think, those who played no small part in the revolution, started to
Catholic higher education is entering a period of profound change. The pressures are well known: declining enrollments, rising costs, shifting cultural attitudes toward Catholicism, and an increasingly transactional view of education that treats college primarily as job preparation. These forces challenge Catholic colleges and universities to clarify their identity and
If Aquinas’s solution emerges from all of Kant’s problems, in what sense, then, can there be a resurrection of Thomas? Is the only possible characterization of Aquinas one where his philosophy and theology resemble to no small degree the artistic world of his fellow Dominican Fiesole, both of whose clearly
I have the honor of responding to Bishop Boyea’s magnificent reflection on the “spirit of governance.” I love the focus specifically on the “spirit” of governance. Using that phrase drawn from the prayer of episcopal ordination, Bishop Boyea is able to emphasize that the munus regendi, the office of pastoral
In October 1994, I arrived for the first time at Hyde Park as an invitee of my friend Daniel Garber to serve as a visiting professor in the department of philosophy. While I was unfamiliar with many of the names of my new colleagues at the University of Chicago, one