Suppose a university wanted to “prepare the leaders of tomorrow.” What kind of education trains upper management? What kind of education fosters a desire to grasp the whole and a habit of mind of seeing the limitations of partial approaches?
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"Do you know what you'll be doing 10 years from now?" You can point out to students the advantages of a liberal education by asking them these questions. "Ask your parents -- did they know, ten years ago, what they would be doing today?”
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Is contemplation doomed when even the teachers of humanities are skeptical?
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When you read a political theorist like Hobbes or like Filmer you find, the gaping canyon between them notwithstanding, a surprising agreement. They both think the power of human sovereigns mirrors the sovereignty of God. That is, they think divine authority and human authority are both species of the same thing—authority—which are considerably alike in nature. Thus, one should take Hobbes seriously when he refers to the Leviathan as the mortal God. The source of the power to bind for Hobbes’ immortal and mortal God is much the same—irresistible power. But what the Christian knows by faith seems clearly to entail something quite the contrary—namely that divine and human authority aren’t much alike at all (perhaps not even analogically similar).
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As Walter Lippmann pointed out a century ago, the habit of defining oneself in opposition to something threatening rather than advocacy of positive has a long history and has often been a crutch Americans have turned to when the task of self-rule has been too much to bear. The remedy to this habit is, as Lippmann stated bluntly, to face reality and grow up.
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Fourth in a brilliant series on Eva Brann's book. Must read if at all serious on the liberal arts!! [editor]
In an age of perpetual innovation – frequently identified with the very core of modernity – it can be difficult to defend tradition as a depository of wisdom. However, Brann proposes to take what is strong and weak of the modern republic’s lax attitude toward tradition, and use them to illuminate the advantages of liberal education for the republic.
Fourth in a brilliant series on Eva Brann's book. Must read if at all serious on the liberal arts!! [editor]
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Men are still free to pursue the good, true, and beautiful (at least in a private manner), even when living in a city is publicly indifferent to or even contemptuous of these transcendentals. Yet, lest we subscribe to the enlightenment, social-contract, state-of-nature, atomized individualist concept of the relation of man to society, we must recognize the inevitable influence of the city’s idols upon individual men, whether it is the true idol of the true religion, a false idol of a false religion, or the idol of pluralism, “the absent idol” of the pluralist regime.
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Do we honor promises – whether those promises made in commercial contracts or in personal relations among friends – chiefly because we have an interest in doing so and because we have procured a “sentiment” that esteems honoring promises? Are promises just social creations invented for society’s interest in preserving a scarcity of goods?
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I’m curious to see what you think of this idea: a “Department” of the Core Curriculum, with its own chair, through which professors (who belong to departments but who teach in the Core) are evaluated for their service to this “general education” department, and encouraging (in the ways that normal departments do) formal and informal conversations.
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John Henry Newman never uses the word "integration" in the Idea of a University. Not once. This is funny, because most people associate Newman with the suggestion that we should become "integrated", meaning that the lines between disciplines should be blurred. In fact some of Newman's best paragraphs are dedicated to a very different vision.
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