Everyone knows that technology troubles our lives in the twenty-first century.  It distracts us, surveils us, accelerates us, isolates us, weakens our habits of attention, alters the demands and means of education, and increasingly mediates in our relations to both one another and to reality itself.  The natural response is to ask: how do we […]

A retrospective reflection on the recent Philosophical Happy Hour concerning fate, providence, and the limits of human free choice. A few brief reflections derived from our recent Philosophical Happy Hour on Fate: 1. Many people use the term to avoid responsibility for not only their own actions, but even for having to think about the […]

A retrospective reflection on our Philosophical Happy Hour on Consciousness. Many of these themes will be discussed in depth at our upcoming conference in September. Learn more here. Our Philosophical Happy Hour conversation concerning “consciousness” (held 10 June 2026) and spanning more than two hours covered a great many particular topics: the distinction between “being […]

On 3 June 2026, we engaged in a nearly 2-hour conversation concerning beauty. A few highlights, conclusions, and elaborations: 1. Beauty is necessarily encountered first through the senses. It is also, in our experience as human, always connected somehow to a sensory experience, even if the object greatly exceeds what sense alone can provide. Mathematics, […]

A Preface to a Long Conversation—on the relationship between faith and reason—begun by addressing the presuppositions which have made the conversation unnecessarily difficult. “There are not one hundred people in the United States”, once said Fulton Sheen, “who hate the Catholic Church; but there are millions who hate what they wrongly perceive the Catholic Church […]

In this conversation, Geoffrey Meadows (Head of Upper School, Tulsa Classical Academy) discusses being a “hunter of causes” and the need to translate enthusiasm into hard work in classical education. Together with Dr. Kemple, he discusses the importance of philosophy, the impact of technology on education, and the necessity of moral formation in students. Geoffrey […]

In this conversation, Dr. Matthew K. Minerd reflects on his intellectual journey, highlighting the influence of language and philosophy—the dance of νοῦς before our eyes—in shaping his understanding of the world and his habits of inquiry. Listen as he and Dr. Kemple discuss the discovery of meaningful study, the development of a global intellectual perspective, […]

Executive Director Brian Kemple joined Dcn. Harrison Garlick of Ascend: The Great Books Podcast to discuss a short story of Flannery O’Connor, “The Lame Shall Enter First”. You can find (and follow) Ascend on X.com here, and listen to their podcasts on all these many platforms—or watch on YouTube below.

John Boyer joins Brian Kemple to discuss the decline of traditional liberal education and its impact on university curricula, emphasizing the superficial engagement with important questions in contemporary society, particularly through social media. In place of these superficial approaches, we ought to recover the Aristotelian understanding of causality, developing habits of real inquiry, and discovery […]

A polemic on why the lukewarm “center” cannot hold. There is an episode of the sitcom Parks and Recreation featuring a cult that named themselves “the Reasonabilists”.[1]  The cult worships “Zorp, the giant lizard god who will destroy the earth with his cleansing fire of judgment.”  When asked why the cultists call themselves “the Reasonabilists”, […]