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  1. Education

Dissenters from Disenchantment

Monterey Peninsula College is a two-year school in California. Students in the Great Books Program there don’t want to live in a disenchanted world. They told me so last month, when I spent a day interviewing them and their teachers. Some followed up on email. Nobody mentioned . . . . Continue Reading »

Letter to an Aspiring Intellectual

You’ve asked me how to become an intellectual. You’re young, it seems (only young people ask questions of that kind), and you think you might have an intellectual vocation, but you can’t see what to do about it. What should you do in order to become the kind of person an intellectual is? What . . . . Continue Reading »

Fenton Returns

The Church of Christ:  A Collection of Essays by Monsignor Joseph C. Fenton by joseph clifford fenton edited with an introduction by christian d. washburn cluny, 362 pages, $25.95 Laying the Foundation:  A Handbook of Catholic Apologetics and Fundamental Theology by joseph clifford fenton . . . . Continue Reading »

Sacred Sociology

The Sacred Project of American Sociologyby christian smithoxford, 224 pages, $28.95 Things wouldn’t be so bad if the sacred project of American sociology were just the sacred project of American sociology. Allowances are made for sociologists. The problem is that all the human sciences as . . . . Continue Reading »

The Two Universities

In January, news came out that Emory University received a $400 million gift from the Woodruff Foundation. All of it will go to healthcare and research. That’s $100 million more than Michael Bloomberg’s foundation gave to the school of public health at Johns Hopkins in September 2016. Emory’s . . . . Continue Reading »

No Patrimony

The age-old distinction between schoolchildren and university students is fast losing its meaning. On many campuses, the infantilization of university students has become institutionalized. College administrators treat students as if they were biologically mature children rather than young men and . . . . Continue Reading »

Phenomenology of the Hand

If you teach high school or college students, or have kids who are passing through those ­places, and if your duties include grading papers, or you watch your kids struggle with writing assignments, I have a piece of advice. Tell them to try composing by hand, with pen and paper, not on the . . . . Continue Reading »

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