January is the best time to curl up with a good book and a cup of hot cocoa. I’m using these cold winter nights to read the Challenge II literature because my oldest will be reading those books next year. I read the Challenge literature ahead of time so...
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You have probably heard about the protests going on in Ukraine. As I write this, it has been four weeks since they began and there are still hundreds of thousands to a million people protesting in the center of Kyiv. In November, the Ukrainian president dropped his support of...
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“What’s the use of philosophy?” This is a fairly common question posed by philosophy students, one often followed by: “Why do we have to study the things a bunch of dead guys said years ago?” The question is reasonable, but it is a “top floor” question. To sufficiently answer...
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The mythos represents man’s imaginative and, ultimately, spiritual effort to make this world intelligible; the logos sets forth his rational attempt to do the same.1 Humans have two basic tools with which to make this world intelligible: the mythos and the logos; anything else results in incoherence and a rejection of order and purpose. The former,...
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Last month, we dealt with those pesky third declension nouns. This month, we will take a look at third conjugation verbs. For some reason, thirds are always a bit difficult in Latin. Please keep in mind that the Romans did not order declensions and conjugations; rather, those who...
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During the holiday season I enjoy the opportunity for reflection. At the year’s end life can be busy, but I like to make time to take a deep breath and think. I find it helpful to take a few steps back and look at my life. I see how...
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In the Christmas of 1838, Danish author Hans Christian Andersen published The Steadfast Tin Soldier. In it, a one-legged tin soldier endures an adventure filled with many trials—including a passionate love for a beautiful paper ballet dancer—only to be spontaneously thrown into a fiery furnace by a capricious boy. The...
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Christmas is the celebration of the incarnation of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. He came to do a lot of things: forgive sins; defeat sin, death, and hell; establish His Church; be enthroned as King of kings and Lord of lords; redeem creation; and so on. He came,...
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Last year, I had the opportunity to study T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Journey of the Magi” with a high school student whom I was tutoring. I had read the poem before and my graduate school roommate was an Eliot aficionado, so I felt reasonably confident as I approached the...
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In Homer’s Iliad, Achilles refuses to accept gifts from the hand of Agamemnon precisely because he refuses to become “the king’s man.” Agamemnon had wronged Achilles—grievously—and to receive his gifts would amount to admitting that it was within Agamemnon’s authority to commit such a wrong; it would equate with accepting the...
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This week was a busy one in my Challenge III class. Students completed study guides in philosophy, turned in American history notebooks, gave a philosophy lecture, and completed finals in US history and chemistry. There were several important reasons for a classical education to include these tasks. The finals...
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Our current world is obsessed with quantitative thinking. Frankly, I am, too. Numbers are extremely helpful in gauging all sorts of things in life, from the output of the economy to the number of people who show up in church each week. The problem, however, is that in order...
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