By Emily Dewind “Attention ladies and gentlemen. Because of the Islamic holiday of Ramadan, an international day of fasting is taking place today. Eating and drinking of any kind will not be permitted in public. Thank you.” This was the cheerful announcement made...
By KATHARINE SAVAGE Where I live, mention the Great Books or the Western tradition, and you are likely given a polite sneer, at best. At worst, you’ll hear the all too familiar string of adjectives: “racist,” “post-colonial,” “bigoted.” And this is a real conundrum...
Men are not Angels Thomas Hobbes, describing a condition without government called the “state of nature,” said that the life of man without authority is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” Human beings are naturally ambitious, greedy, interested in their own...
In the year 410 AD, a new “order” for governing nations emerged, not from a king, but from a theologian. His idea remained with us into the twentieth century. Its slow loss threatens our freedom in the twenty-first. The sacking of Rome by Aleric the Visigoth inspired...
By JARROD RICHEY The year was 1824 when then 15-year-old Felix Mendelssohn was given by his grandmother a copy of the score of Johann Sebastian Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. Little did he know that five years later that same gift would introduce a more lasting global...
"EVERYONE IS RESPONSIBLE FOR HIS OWN FAITH, AND HE MUST SEE TO IT FOR HIMSELF THAT HE BELIEVES RIGHTLY.” --Martin Luther Literacy in the West From the start of the reformation in 1519, literacy rates across the West skyrocketed. See the interactive literacy rate chart...
By ANTHONY M. ESOLEN The first time I visited the Sistine Chapel, I didn’t know much about Christian painting. I did know a lot about the faith, though now I see that I was just starting on that journey. I remember there were crowded lines down the stairs, and...
By DR. BRIAN A. WILLIAMS “Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? … For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and...
By LOUIS MARKOS Plato's Idea of Standards “Behold,” wrote the ancient Greek philosopher Plato some 2400 years ago, “we are deceived about the very nature of the world in which we live. We are like men who have been imprisoned since birth in the deep belly of a cave....
In my years as a headmaster, I had hopes of making every child understand the ideas of the West, and live out the good, the true, and the beautiful ones. Some did. But others did not. Looking back, more than any idea we taught, the family made all the difference....
Shown above: Icon depicting the Emperor Constantine, accompanied by the bishops of the First Council of Nicaea (325), holding the Niceno–Constantinopolitan Creed of 381. Required memory work at many classical Christian schools, this statement of faith was...
By DOUGLAS WILSON If you are willing to indulge me for a moment, picture two different whales. One of the whales inhabits an ocean that we might call “reality,” or “all that exists.” He is the biggest and strongest resident of that ocean, but he is nevertheless...
The ideas of the West are central to much of the way we live and perceive the world. The Summer 2019 Special Issue of The Classical Difference provides several unique perspectives on these important ideas. Want to dig deeper? The Classical Difference: "The West"...
View LargerThe sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing … to find the place where all the beauty came from.—C.S. Lewis, Till We Have FacesLiberal Arts in the Hortus Deliciarum In the late 1100s Herrad of Landsberg, a nun at the Hohenburg Abbey, put together...
Spring 2019 By Rob Sentz, EMSI As Christians, we can agree that education is about a lot more than securing a good job. In his essay “Our English Syllabus,” C.S. Lewis writes that the purpose of education is to produce the good man, “the man of good taste and good...
Spring 2019 Lent: March 6 - April 18 In my young mind, Mardi Gras was bright purple, yellow, and green. Lent was brown, on the spectrum somewhere between the colors of dust and sackcloth. Brown still seems like a good color for Lent, but in a peaceful and anticipatory...
