I don’t know what the experience of St. John’s College would have been like if I had enrolled just after high school. What I remember most vividly about that season of my life – I graduated in 1995 – was relief that high school was finally over, frustration at having no particular idea of what […]
Editor’s Note: Joshua Sturgill has returned to college eighteen years after trying the first time. He’s blogging his way through this first semester. I’ve decided that the only way I can make sense of my return to college as a return to the heart is to think of it as a fairytale. A simple description
Editor’s Note: Joshua Sturgill has returned to college eighteen years after trying the first time. He’s blogging his way through this first semester. In case you missed it, here’s part one. The Way of learning is nothing other than to seek for the lost heart. – Mencius There is only one war left to fight:
I derive a particular enjoyment from having to fight through a book because I entered the text without the intellectual prerequisites to fully understand it. Rene Guenon’s The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times provided just such a challenge. As one of those books too often quoted to be ignored, I decided
I’m 36 and I’ve just applied for the undergrad program at St. John’s College. Besides the humor of being categorized “non-traditional”, my age is also symbolic: 36 is twice 18, the age of my soon-to-be fellow students. I will be attending college with kids who were born the year I graduated from high school. The
A friend and father of three recently asked me about books and parenting. I asked if he could remember his own reading habits early in life, and I told him about my own. When I was elementary-school-young, I was an intractable “genre reader.” I liked science-fiction and fantasy only. Occasionally, I would pick up a
No less than in Rome or Greece, heroes abound today. The explosion of yesterday’s-comic-book-turned-today’s-blockbuster-film indicates with no uncertainty that our heroes are as meaningful to us in the twentieth century as they were to the ancient world. Even a brief comparison of ancient and modern heroes reveals the deepest aspirations and fears of current culture.
Superman or Abraham?: On Modern Conceptions of Heroism Read More »
One of the best (and most challenging) books I’ve read in recent months is Walter J. Ong’s extraordinary Orality and Literacy – which documents the invention of writing and its effect on culture. Ong calls writing a “technological revolution” that not only transformed societies, but also re-structured the way individuals think and feel in the
Cover via Amazon A friend once commented that the Classics are the books everyone knows but no one has read. This seems especially the case with classic stories that become part of popular culture through cinematic adaptation. “Disneyfication” can describe many things, but applied to literature, it is a metamorphosis from pedagogy to sentimental entertainment.
Pulitzer Prize-winning literary matron Marilynne Robinson has earned our respect and attention as the author of such superb fiction as Gilead and Housekeeping, and of sharp-yet-compassionate criticism as in The Death of Adam. Her latest offering, The Absence of Mind, issues a challenge to ‘new atheists,’ to politicians, to psychologists, to all who campaign against
