“one of the most remarkable things about the great philosophical books is that they ask the same sort of profound questions that children ask. The ability to retain the child’s view of the world, with at the same time a mature understanding of what it means to retain it, is extremely rare – and a person who has these qualities is likely to be able to contribute something really important to our thinking. We are not required to think as children in order to understand existence. Children certainly do not, and cannot, understand it – if, indeed, anyone can. But we must be able to see as children see, to wonder as they wonder, to ask as they ask.”

Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren How to Read a Book

“Nothing can be clearer than that we require a story to explain to ourselves why we are here and what our future is to be, and many other things, including where authority resides.”

Neil Postman Building a Bridge to the 18th Century

In my other speech to the Augustine College Summer Seminar in June, and again I apologize for the delay in getting it edited and posted, I talked about what classical Greece and Rome got right about political freedom and what they did not, how medieval England completed the picture with Magna Carta to limit government in theory and parliament to limit it in practice, and how and why things went wrong in the modern world.

“Pessimism insists on the shortness of human life in order to show that life is valueless. Religion insists on the shortness of human life in order to show that life is frightfully valuable – is almost horribly valuable. Pessimism says that life is so short that it gives nobody a chance; religion says that life is so short that it gives everybody his final chance.”

G.K. Chesterton, “Nicholas Nickleby”, in Appreciations and Criticisms of Charles Dickens, quoted in “Chesterton’s Mail Bag” in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 10 #4 (Jan.-Feb. 2007)

“Odd comparison: ‘Believing in God is like believing in Zeus.’ They aren’t even ‘gods’ in the same sense of the term. Zeus was a contingent being which something else caused to exist. God is the necessary being who causes all else to exist.”

J. Budziszewski in "Underground Thomist" email Feb. 25, 2019

Here’s a video from the past. It’s a talk I gave at the Augustine College Summer Seminar in June 2019 so I’m tardy making it available. And it’s about the Middle Ages which were, far too many people think, necessarily awful because they were long ago and old is bad and new is good. In fact there are a great many modern horrors that would have appalled people in the Middle Ages and one of them is widespread ignorance about the period.

Sorry to take so long to get around to editing and posting it. Life got in the way.