“The potency of ideas lies in their ability to influence thinking, motivate action, shape cultures, and alter the course of history.” Why do we care so much about our ideas? What is an idea? What is power? Three questions that are familiar to human history, but, perhaps, too-little examined today. That ideas are important seems, no doubt, widely accepted […]

Perhaps this is an odd title—Living through the Barbarism—but it seems that ours is an age of unthinking strife. As a Lyceum Member asks: What is work and what is its purpose? This is something I have been thinking about a lot recently but also as a follow up to our conversation on Private Property […]

A Lyceum Member proposes, as a topic for our 29 November 2023 Happy Hour: “How much does the artist’s intention factor into the meaning of his art? How can semiotic Thomism help us to answer this question? Can there be a more fitting interpretation of the art he makes than the one he intended? Is […]

Understanding the World(view) What do we mean by the common term “worldview”?  Our English word originates from the German Weltanschauung (from Welt, meaning “world”, and Anschauung, “view”, “perception”, or even “perspective”).  Often, the term is used as though it needs no explanation: “That’s your worldview”, “My worldview is…”, “The Roman worldview” or “The Catholic worldview”, […]

The provincial attitude is limited in time but not in space. When the regional man, in his ignorance, often an intensive and creative ignorance, extends his own immediate necessities into the world, and assumes that the present moment is unique, he becomes the provincial man. He cuts himself off from the past, and without benefit […]

What is property? What is wealth? Who has a right to ownership? What moral quandaries are to be found in the concentration of wealth? Over the past several decades, wealth has become, in many ways, largely dissociated from real things, from tangible beings. This dissociation stems not only from the movement to a fiat currency, […]

The contemporary controversy concerning education centers around the institutions tasked with providing it.  We ask ourselves what curricula should be implemented, what teaching methods are most effective, and how governmental agencies can assist in the growth of educational institutions—we debate the morality of teachers and their influence, the rights to speech and questioning, the difficulty […]

The term kulturkampf, literally “culture struggle”, has long-since been translated into English as “culture war”.  I have no desire to participate in a “culture war”.  Indeed, as I will argue here, the very notion of the “culture war” is not only misguided but harmful.  But as someone living within a culture, however, I do believe […]

Among the diverse ways in which people today live unreflectively, prominent is the attachment to kindness. Frequent are the admonitions to be kind—and, indeed, often it is used as a defense for one’s moral righteousness when caught out in immoral actions: “I’m not a bad person, I am kind…” (as though being kind covered up […]

On 13 April 2023 at 7pm ET, Dr. Thomas Hibbs (see event times around the world) will present the Annual John Deely / Jacques Maritain Lecture for the Deely Project at Saint Vincent College, in Latrobe, PA: “Trauma, Sorrow, and Beauty: Maritain and Rouault on Art” (Zoom link). In his work on the crisis of […]