On this the fifth day of the fifth month in the year 2020, The Saint Constantine Strategy will turn five. After four high school graduations, this spring marks the first graduating college class to go through the program. We make a classical higher education available to everyone who can do the work. Practical Questions, Practical Answers There is no golden age of higher education. When class size was good and professors were valued, too many people were denied access to that... Read more
Pandemic times spawn tyrants, little dictators offering security in exchange for our liberty or the life of “someone else.” We are worried so they offer us a golden calf as a savior and if we are not very careful, then we hide our fears in the play, bread and circuses, they offer. Plato and Adelia Prado know tyranny from the inside and are a good vaccine to that virus. Plato does so by exposing us to a story of tyranny to... Read more
Adelia Prado is a primary teacher that embeds a doctoral seminar in her simplest lessons. She gives us an alphabet to spell the words that can capture real life, both what is and what should be. Adelia Prado begins simply and helps us build a complex view of God’s world that we inhabit. We are helped because Prado is tied to her region of Brazil, to her language, and only after expressing that experience does she move to the universal.... Read more
Here my powers rest from their high fantasy, but already I could feel my being turned-instinct and intellect balanced equally as in a wheel whose motion nothing jars-by the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars.* Easy to forget how odd the first time instinct, usually trustworthy, and intellect jarred against each other. As a little boy, my instinct, quite correct given my experience, was that Mom and Dad may not be always right, but were better... Read more
This is the first day that many “non-essential” businesses in Houston are open. The shelter in place order has expired. What to do? My rule in this pandemic continues. Opine about nothing on which I have no expertise. Support what my God-given authorities tell me to do: bishop, governor, president. Take the advice of experts when there is a consensus. Everyone thinks we should wash our hands. Most think a face mask does some good in some situations. Hand shaking... Read more
To feel is human, passionate living is divine. The place of the rational in human life is not made greater by downplaying the need of experience and revelation. From Plato to Part, the wise have known that head listens to the heart and the heart is guided by reason. To live must include doing, making, creating. In his wonderfully profound, comic, and literary work Timaeus, Plato suggested the liver as the organ of revelation. The gods would give wisdom to the liver... Read more
We find ugliness easier to describe than perfect beauty. Stories of villainy or of complicated people are easier to write than the deeply virtuous: Lancelot is easier to write than Galahad. Peter Jackson could not make Aragorn as Tolkien made him, but introduced “growth” into a character that was already mature and kingly by the time Tolkien presents him to us in Fellowship of the King. Ugliness also can be more memorable as many readers of Dante’s Comedy demonstrate. Most of... Read more
If “these are the times that try men’s souls,” then we are blessed. To see this we must understand purgation and we have no better guide in this life than Dante.* When souls arrive in purgatory in Dante’s divine comedy, they are full of joy, because hope does not have to be abandoned and redemption is possible. However hard is the purgation or great the needed repentance, there is time and so the soul will inevitably, surely, see the face of... Read more
Hope told her daughters this: “Never marry an angry man or a man with an angry father.” This advice has served my daughters well and reminds us that the vice of excessive anger is a terrible danger. Righteous anger is the appropriate response to injustice. The excess of anger becomes an injustice itself and consumes all around. The excessively angry man often sees every action that crosses his will as injustice, because he knows he is right. The angry man is ready with... Read more
“There is no such thing as a bad question.” This is wrong, sort of. There are bad questions, though there are very few bad sincere questions. Imagine a “question” that is just a set up for a lecture or a social media shaming. This is the insincere question and it is worse than asking no questions at all. An insincere question is a bad question, because such a question kills any genuine conversation. The insincerity is a virus that sickens the conversation... Read more
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