Advice for Grad School Students

It took me five years of graduate school to realize that my study is a vocation. My thinking about this was prompted by finally reading A.G. Sertillanges’s The Intellectual Life, which along with Josef Pieper’s Leisure: The Basis of Culture and Elizabeth Corey’s “Learning in Love” make essential reading for anyone considering graduate work or a career in the intellectual world. Culling insights from those thinkers and from my own time in graduate school, I thought I would offer some thoughts for those beginning graduate school. Continue Reading »

“The Art of the Beautiful” Lecture Series

Announcing the the Art of the Beautiful Lecture Series. The Catholic Artists Society and the Thomistic Institute present a series of lectures on a Catholic understanding of the Arts. Eminent artists, theologians, and writers will be exploring the nature of art and its role in society. Continue Reading »

Women and the Culture of Evangelicalism

Last Friday the Gender Parity Project released the results of its study of the role of women among evangelical non-profit organizations. Most of the men surveyed affirmed an egalitarian stance toward women in leadership positions, but the study also found that women have barely broken the twenty percent barrier in terms of board and paid leadership positions. Such findings should not surprise. Women play complicated roles in Evangelicalism, all worked out within the framework of Protestantism’s emphasis on maximizing lay participation. Continue Reading »

Rescuing Warriors from Muscular Christianity

Mathew, I don’t think we can reduce the role of the warrior in the Bible as low as you place it. Believe me, I share your desire to bear witness against the degraded, culturally captive self-parody that “muscular Christianity” has always been. But it seems to me that warfare as a purpose of human life is, unfortunately, much more central than you allow. Continue Reading »

Millennial Idol Lena Dunham Talks Politics

The Planned Parenthood Action Fund has sent out an email message about the upcoming election from Lena Dunham, creator and star of Girls, author of Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s Learned, and representative Twenty-First-Century Young American Female. Indeed, a recent New York Timesprofile termed her book “a primer for millennial women negotiating the path to adulthood,” so we should examine her words closely when she drifts away from the youth habit of talking about her life and shifts to politics. Continue Reading »

What Old Age Has to Offer

In a much-discussed Atlantic essay, “Why I Hope to Die at 75,” Ezekiel Emanuel—physician, public commentator, and prominent supporter of the Affordable Care Act—argues that we’d all be better off if we died at 75. That way, we would escape the debility and indignity that accompany old age and avoid being burdens to our children and other loved ones. And we would have the solace of not outliving our productivity. After all, he writes, “by 75, creativity, originality, and productivity are pretty much gone for the vast, vast majority of us.” Emanuel has no plan to commit suicide if he reaches 75, he says. But he plans to reject all medical treatments, even routine ones, that go beyond the palliative. Continue Reading »