Featured Essays
It is easy to think that the incremental move away from bare survival in the woods is a move away from nature. But culture is natural to man because human nature is to cultivate, in all the senses of that word’s root, the Latin word colo: to till the soil, to reap the fruits, to inhabit the same estate generation after generation, to devote oneself to the perfecting of something beautiful, to worship. Man is the cultural animal. We are Homo Colens.
An exploration of the concepts of personhood, personal identity, and personality in Dietrich von Hildebrand’s Liturgy and Personality, presented at the Hildebrand Colloquium on the Sacred, Catholic University of America, October 2021.
If any people in history knew it, the Romans knew how to be serious over serious things. Next to the cultured poets and philosophers of Athens, the Romans saw themselves as a race of soldiers and farmers. The religious rites that Numa instituted early in Rome’s history cultivated a deep reverence for ancestry and custom, for bonds between neighbors, and for those boundaries that designate and hallow sacred ground.
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A poem I wrote about the beauty of light falling on a candlestick and the state of soul we need to cultivate in order to see it.
Continuing our series of essays introducing basic ideas in Platonism, this week we take a close look at several critical passages from the early dialogues Meno and Euthyphro that use the vocabulary of “eidos” and “idea.”
Confusion sometimes surrounds the technical terms that are used in the Platonic tradition to refer to the Forms because there is not just one word for ‘form’ but several. To make matters worse, none of the relevant words were originally conceived as technical terms and Plato himself uses them only sparingly. In this essay, I hope to clarify the situation.