Tag: From the President

Bulletin

From the President (June 2025)

Last month, our first cohort of Junior Fellows completed the two year sequence of informal courses in the traditional liberal arts that constituted. This issue of our bulletin features the work of those who participated in the fellowship. Michelle Ferguson describes her development of Legenda Classical Resources to foster education renewal in the Quad Cities of eastern Iowa and western Illinois. Lucas Dos Santos writes of his work in Brazil. Joseph Tabenkin announces an exciting series of videos he has developed to help teachers learn and teach the history of astronomy. The conversation between Augustine and his mother, Monica, gives a taste of the conversations we began to have as the fellowship progressed.

When Jeff and I first conceived the program, I was edified by the response. “We are going to introduce fellows to the seven traditional liberal arts as they are ordered to the life of wisdom.  No degrees, no grades, but we will give you a shiny certificate at the end.”  “Please can I be a part of that?” many responded. I have continued to be edified throughout my work with them. Katie Gillett told me that it has transformed her intellectual life. “I had never studied anything that wasn’t connected to a grade. So liberating!”

I was especially edified by our final conversation, which focused on the question of whether a life of wisdom was achievable for them or would it always remain an unachievable dream. Michelle raised this question, which was close to her heart; her thirst for learning, for wisdom, has been a source of both great delight and great pain. 

I would have liked to have offered a comforting white lie. I wish I could have said that wisdom is equally available to all, but I couldn’t. However, I encouraged them by saying that the grounding they had received in the liberal arts had put them in a position to participate more fully in wisdom by imbibing more deeply from what they read and heard. They have also learned how to converse about the best works in an ordered, serious, and fruitful way. They took some encouragement from this, but also expressed how impossible it seemed without continuing the fellowship they had built up over two years of challenging and illuminating conversations. So we began brainstorming about the best ways to keep moving forward. 

Michelle sent me a lovely email this week, detailing ways in which she benefited from the program. “Finally, and most importantly, I feel that I have been set on a path towards that lofty goal of wisdom – a long-held desire of my heart, but elusive without tools and guidance. I so appreciated your advice at our last meeting to be willing to live with questions and struggles. I think it was Katie who asked me in our final session if I felt ‘wise’ now, and I laughingly told her no – but I DO feel that I am on the path that leads there. That path will, I assume, last for eternity – I will always be learning more about the unity of all things. I have spent much of my life a victim of standard schooling, in which discrete facts and disconnected ideas need to be retained for the test. While my adult years of study and teaching my own children certainly moved away from that model, I have struggled to step back from the details to see the bigger picture – my mental camera is always in close-up and infrequently pulls back for the wider shot. After going through the Fellows Formation program, I am more consistently pulling back to orient all the knowledge we sampled in a wider framework. I look forward to continuing that journey in connection with the other fellows!”

If you know someone devoted to the classical liberal arts revival who longs to have what they themselves missed, encourage them to consider applying for our next cohort, which begins this August with a symposium on Plato’s Republic at the Augustine Institute in St Louis.

Bulletin

From the President (April 2025)

Blessed is everyone who fears the Lord,
    who walks in his ways!
You shall eat the fruit of the labor of your hands;
    you shall be blessed, and it shall be well with you.

Your wife will be like a fruitful vine
    within your house;
your children will be like olive shoots
    around your table.
Behold, thus shall the man be blessed
    who fears the Lord.

The Lord bless you from Zion!
    May you see the prosperity of Jerusalem
    all the days of your life!
May you see your children’s children!
    Peace be upon Israel!

Psalm 128

I felt the truth of this Psalm during a delightful 10 days spent in Southern California and Arizona during the middle of February. I traded -17° for lovely spring weather in the 60s and 70s. It was a time to celebrate old friendships and new life. I got to hold Angela Carmel, the newly baptized first child of my youngest son. And I got to laud my longtime fellow laborer in the field of education renewal, Michael Van Hecke, who along with his wife, Jessie, received a lifetime honor award for their service of leadership at Saint Augustine Academy in Ventura. These events made me grateful for the many wonderful friends I have made in this work, and very hopeful that Angela and hundreds of thousands of others of the class of 2043 will look back fondly on joyful and fruitful experiences of learning. 

At the Boethius Institute, we are doing all we can to bring this hope to reality. This includes encouraging a spirit of leisure in learning, which Josef Pieper famously considered The Basis of Culture. In that spirit, we are honored to feature articles from Sadie Hoyt of Classical Encounters, who encourages us to “make time for contemplative encounters with beautiful art”, and Colleen Hutt, Director of Literary Evangelization (I love this title!) for Well-Read Mom, who writes about “The Transformative Power of Leisure and Literature”.

As I’ve mentioned before, in a particular way we are working to tap into the tremendous power that mathematics and science have to foster that same spirit. I was delighted when I was invited to give a talk on the role of science in a liberal education for the national classical educators symposium in Tempe, Arizona.  I was able to put a lot of my thoughts together and receive encouragement from the overwhelmingly positive response of the science teachers present. (The recording of the talk will be available at this site in the near future.) 

In the same spirit, I am happy to announce that registration is open for our conference on mathematics which will be held August 6th to the 7th at the Augustine Institute in St. Louis. Our speakers – philosophers, scientists, educational theorists – have thought deeply about the relationship of ancient and modern mathematics and their roles in a life order to wisdom, and have devoted themselves to sharing this with students from middle school through college. 

As I mentioned in our last bulletin, we are grateful to the St. John Henry Newman Institute for their financial support to our work on mathematics and science. Sean Maltbie, Director of Mission and Outreach, said, “The Quadrivium Project of the Boethius Institute is a big vision project that we believe will have a long-term disproportionate effect on the renewal of education. Right now, all we have is bandaid fixes. The Boethius Institute can gather a cadre of people capable of taking a global view and directing concrete applications.” We are looking forward to getting started.

Bulletin

From the President (January 2024)

“And they’re off!” This is how I am feeling about the new year and the work of the Boethius Institute. 2024 had its trials, but we ended well, and have had a strong beginning to 2025.  It began on January 3rd and 4th in Pasadena at the Adeodatus Winter forum, which was entitled Canonizing Tolkien. This was not declaring him a Catholic saint, but about making the case that Tolkien has reached the status of a “canonical author” – one respectable enough to be read and studied in a serious way, even one that all educated people should have read thoughtfully. (Boethius Senior Fellow Dr. Erik Ellis explains more about what this means in one of this bulletin’s feature articles.)

I thoroughly enjoyed my time with other serious students of Tolkien’s works, such as Brad Birzer, author of Sanctifying Myth, and Holly Ordway, author of Tolkien’s Modern Reading and Tolkien’s Faith. Boethius Fellows contributed to event: Dr. Ellis explained how Tolkien as scholar “canonized” Beowulf (through his influential article “The Monsters and the Critics”) and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. (Both essays, along with his famous “On Faerie Stories” can be found in this volume.) My talk was entitled Educating for Greatness: The Lord of the Rings as a Cultural Epic, a portion of which is our second feature article. We also include Gimli’s praise of the Glittering Caves of Aglarond from The Lord of the Rings, a moving example of Tolkien’s power, who, like the Elves of Lorien, put the thought of all he loved into all he made.

The new year has also brought the good news of our first major grant. The St. John Henry Newman Institute has committed $100,000 to help us launch our quadrivium project, the goal of which is to help educators understand the importance of the quadrivium formation in liberal education, and to provide the training and resources to make it effective in the classroom. You’ll have more news about this in future bulletins. 

We’re also about to begin the final semester with our first cohort of fellows. This semester we will study the principles of music and astronomy as liberal arts, as well as consider the importance of all the liberal arts for a life ordered to wisdom. As a taste of the success of this program, I am delighted to share this account by fellow Lucas dos Santos, who is already sharing the fruits of his study with educators in Brazil.

More is already underway. So stay tuned for more great news about our work this year.

Bulletin

From the President (November 2024)

 Ah! Weather! For 30 years, I raised my family in Southern California. People would say to me in envious admiration, “What beautiful weather you have!” “Actually,” I would reply, “we have no weather, and I think I miss it.” 

I’ve got it now. Living in northwest Iowa on the border of Minnesota, we’ve had quite the ride this year. A gorgeous surprise spring in February was followed by a return to winter, then 10 inches of rain leading to record flooding, which all dried up during the long drought of summer. An unseasonably warm October clothed the bean fields with flaming yellow, often surrounding hollows still colored inky green with late planting, while the reaping machines turned the dry cornfields from ochre to harvest gold. October ended with a Halloween snowfall, which I enjoyed watching through our warm bedrooms bay windows – beautiful white flakes blustered about by a fitful wind against a mixed background of still green and bright yellow and bare naked trees, the last reaching their fine bronchial branches up to the luminous gray-white clouds. What will November bring? One thing I know – no matter how harsh the winter, spring will come again. 

October 28th witnessed the passing of Eva Brown, for over 60 years a Tutor, and inspiration, and leader of St John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland. I only met her once, at a Circe Institute gala honoring her with The Russell Kirk Paideia Prize, but I owe her a great personal debt. Her institution inspired the founding of Thomas Aquinas College, the dear mother that inflamed and informed my love of learning, and kept me in weatherless SoCal for so long. More personally, she had a profound impact on my mentor, colleague, and friend, Richard Ferrier, in whose spirit of infectious wonder, joy in life, and passionate love of learning I was blessed to bask for countless hours. Whatever I have done in the service of the classical liberal arts renewal we are enjoying has been the fruit of Eva and Richard and the many other exemplary teachers I have had, who labored to keep the flame of learning alive as it fell into winter elsewhere.

We are now into the third or fourth generation of this recovery, and it is beautiful to see many new shoots arising in the United States and around the world. This issue of the Bulletin features more fruit from the Eva tree. David Arias, a student of mine some years ago, is now leading the unique efforts of the Albertus Magnus Institute, while Jean Carlos Guerreiro, another Thomas Aquinas College graduate, has returned to his native country of Brazil to contribute to the recent upsurge of parents and educators planting new classical liberal arts schools there. I look forward to meeting many of those involved in Brazil in May, when I will speak at a conference organized by the Instituto Newman de Educaçao Classica.  

Speaking of Brazil, I am excited to announce that Lucas Fonseca Dos Santos, one of our Boethius Fellows and a master of classical languages, is translating many of our Arts of Liberty materials into Portuguese. We are blessed to be able to offer the abundance of these resources to a population eager to receive them. We have already seen the number of website visitors from Brazil jump from dozens to hundreds!

I also had the joy of visiting two schools that have been at the classical renewal long enough to count as established. Immaculata Classical Academy in Louisville and Sacred Heart Academy in Grand Rapids impressed me with the unity of their faculty and their desire for excellence. I was inspired to write a blog account of my visit to the former and to share the fruits of discussing leading Discussion Classes at the latter. I hope that you are blessed to be associated with schools like these, as parents, teachers, alumni, or supporters, and pray that beautiful educating communities like these will continue to spread throughout the world.

Bulletin

From the President

Dear Reader,

This issue of our bulletin includes articles that show two sides of the imagination. Senior Fellow Erik Ellis expresses why as a humanist scholar he values how the Quadrivium provides an objective basis for understanding and instantiating beauty, while Emily Kwilinski writes of the joys she has found as an adult in returning to the imaginative literature of her youth (we include a few selections from Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables series to give you a taste).

The Quadrivium has been much on my mind of late. I am writing this introductory note from the Pascal Instituut in Leiden in the Netherlands. As with our Boethius Fellows, Jeff Lehman and I are beginning a second year of teaching the Quadrivium to a small group of very bright students working towards PhDs in a Great Books program. We have begun each year with a week of in-person classes, grounding our teacher/student relations in personal interaction that is impossible with Zoom meetings alone. We have broken bread together, while having conversations that range from Leiden’s dramatic fight for independence in the 1570s to the character of Cassius in Julius Caesar, to whether equality of opportunity is a good to be desired or perhaps a justice to be insisted upon.

In a walking conversation (almost everyone bikes or walks in the cities here), Dean Gerard Versluis noted that, inspired by programs like that of St. John’s College in Annapolis, their curriculum includes mathematics and literature. This has caused them difficulties in recruiting students, who are often eager to study philosophy and theology but wonder why they should be required to take courses in subject areas they consider irrelevant. There are many things we can say to explain this, but often the proof is in the pudding. I loved hearing from Femke Heijmans, one of our students, who expressed her amazement at how much she learned from last year’s study of Euclid, but even more at her realization of how much, much more there is to know than she will ever be able to.

The same question came up in one of the several academic retreats I led for teachers this summer. The three-day program of integrated learning includes a session in which participants prepare to publicly present Euclid’s demonstration of how to bisect an angle without using a protractor. In the midst of some energetic discussion to understand the arguments and entertain other ways, one participant raised the question, “But what use is all this?” Some participants excitedly pointed out that they had been enjoying a palpable experience of learning to use reason. I invited them to imagine how vastly different their life would be if they had been trained so that they could habitually reproduce even difficult geometrical demonstrations clearly, orderly, and intelligently.

These are among the profound effects that the Quadrivium has traditionally had on students and continues to have today on liberal arts students fortunate enough to be required to develop their powers of mathematical thinking. The Boethius Institute is in a privileged position to promote the inclusion of the Quadrivium in today’s classical liberal arts renewal, and it will be a primary focus of our efforts in the next few years.

In other news, the Augustine Institute graduate school, home base for Jeff Lehman and myself, moved over the summer to a beautiful new campus in St. Louis. This threw a wrench into our plans to host several events this summer, but will provide outstanding opportunities in the near future. We hope to welcome you there in the future.

Bulletin

From the Director

Dear Reader,

Over 25 years into the classical liberal arts revival, we are launching into a period of accelerated growth. My sense of this has been confirmed by recent participation in the Transforming Culture Symposium at Benedictine College in Kansas, and an Alcuin Retreat for classical education leaders at the University of Virginia on the theme of “The Academic Return of  the Great Tradition.” Mainstream education today is looking worse and worse, while veterans in the movement have founded institutions that are now very good at offering parents, educators, administrators, pastors, and social leaders the aid they need to build or re-build school communities with a high rate of success.

Recently I was asked, “If classical education were to increase tenfold, what would the future look like in two generations?” “Who knows?” is the truest answer. The present is so uncertain; we stand in real danger of losing the freedom and social stability necessary for education. Still, it’s interesting to muse. “Classical education” means different things to different people; those who have been involved in the renewal for some years are now trying to sort through these different ideas. If we take it to refer generally to a serious education grounded in the best of Western cultural traditions and ordered to the true, good, and beautiful, today’s growth gives hope of great fruit in fifty years. The demand is certainly there, and growing; if we can meet it while providing all the necessary teacher formation, which is the most important part of the work, and avoiding the teacher and student burnout that can afflict networks that grow too quickly, then we would be graduating several hundred thousand each year, between 5% and 10% of the total high school graduates. In 30 years or 40 years perhaps 10 million adults will have been nurtured in serious, often joyful, learning communities, with a high rate of alumni devotion. They will be grounded talented well-formed people, a good chunk of whom will have significant life experience under their belt. And that’s only in the United States. Many around the world are seeing what is happening in the US, and doing all they can to begin movements in their countries.

Is that a critical mass large enough to topple the hollowed out husks of the educational and cultural institutions already showing signs of eventual collapse by providing real, workable, worthwhile alternatives? At least it should be enough to pass on in a beautiful way the best of Christian Western civilization in the midst of general cultural collapse. Maybe, it will even bring about in some form a new birth of wisdom, which we so desperately need. We need our knowledge of the truth to blossom into wisdom, we need our preservation of the beautiful to create profundity, we need our love of the good to produce statesmen.

Our society is plagued by a lack of wisdom; the modern era was grounded on a complete rejection of the possibility and desirability of wisdom. We need wise educators, creators, and leaders to inspire us, persuade us, instruct us, and show us the way. The larger the number of those well-educated, the more likely we are to produce these great people, especially as we foster those special souls who give themselves over to the pursuit of wisdom with a passionate life intensity, and as we develop a greater diversity of thoughts and practices among those who love those things and are able to argue about them, for in a real way wisdom is born of deep and serious questions.

In this edition of our bulletin, we can see the fruits of Abraham Lincoln’s education in serious grammar study and reading Shakespeare, the King James Bible, Euclid, and Blackstone, as we mine the deep spiritual wisdom expressed beautifully and powerfully in his Second Inaugural Address. Boethius Fellow Joseph Tabenkin shows how his openness to art allowed a powerful sculpture to fulfill his experience of Normandy Beach.

 

Bulletin

From the Director

Dear Reader,

This issue of the Arts of Liberty Bulletin features different pieces related to literature, and arises from a number of providential connections. I encountered Arnold Bennett’s 1907 Literary Taste and How to Form It through my collaboration with Lisa Vandamme’s Read With Me project. We led a series of conversations on the short, practical, challenging, inspiring guide which I found very fruitful. Here is a teaser: The makers of literature are those who have seen and felt the miraculous interestingness of the universe. A “chance-meeting” at last year’s National Symposium for Classical Education introduced me to Megan Lindsay, a Great Hearts’ drama and literature teacher who shared with me some of her secrets for opening the minds and hearts of her students to the power of Shakespeare (which I adapted for a very successful workshop at an elementary school in Kentucky). I celebrated Providence in the works of JRR Tolkien and the classical liberal arts revival in my talk at last year’s Circe Institute conference.

The new year has seen our work at the Boethius Institute continue to develop. Our Fellows in formation just completed a short course on logic by considering the ways in which it helps perfect our reasoning even in matters where we can’t attain the mathematical certainty, and encountering Aristotle’s description of the magical moment of intellectual insight that elevates us above the limited but powerful realm of sensory experience. We will now turn to look at classical rhetoric in theory and practice. Senior Fellow Erik Ellis discussed criteria for a canon of great books with colleagues in South America. Matthew Walz gave a talk on Benedict XVI’s concern for healing reason at the Circe Institute’s Forma Symposium. Jeffrey Lehman and I offered talks on the liberal arts and the history of Catholic education at the St. John Bosco Conference in Denver, and soon we will begin our modern mathematics sequence with our students at the Pascal Institute in the Netherlands.

Many more seeds are germinating to bear fruit in the summer and beyond. I look forward to reporting on them for our next Bulletin.

Bulletin

From the President

Dear Reader,

As the new year approaches, those of us involved in the Arts of Liberty Project have much to be grateful for. January 6 will mark the first birthday of its new parent organization, the Boethius Institute for the Advancement of Liberal Education. We have had a solid first year and are ready to expand our efforts in 2024, including publishing our Introductory Geometry and Arithmetic text by Michael Augros, author of Who Designed the Designer? Dr. Augros does an excellent job re-presenting key content from all of Euclid’s Elements in a clear, accessible way for high school students and life-long learners. This volume has been downloaded for years by many around the world from the Arts of Liberty website; its new existence in a durable, easy-to-read printed volume will introduce the wonders of classic geometry to thousands more learners.

Returning the Quadrivium to its rightful place in liberal arts studies is high on the Boethius Institute priority list. Properly presented, mathematics introduces the young mind to the life of knowledge by arousing wonder through careful reasoning. As Dr. Augros writes,

Geometry is full of wonders. At every level of this science, from the most elementary to the most advanced, we are confronted with the unexpected. Often the seemingly possible turns out to be impossible, and conversely what at first seemed impossible turns out to be possible.

Our Quadrivium students at the Pascal Instituut experienced this in a recent discussion of Euclid’s treatment of incommensurable magnitudes. Said one, “It is not possible that two lines can be incommensurable! You can divide them into parts as small as you want. You must be able to find a common measure!” And yet, Euclid shows it is not so.

Classical mathematics is so formative because it occupies the sweet spot for human knowing by relying on both imagination and argumentation. For this reason among others, encouraging the development of the imagination in the young is crucial for learning ordered to knowledge, as elementary teacher Forest Barnette points out in her article “On Early Education in the Liberal Arts:”

Imagination is not an alternative to reality – it’s the key to reality. Imagination helps us to understand the most fundamental truths around us: it helps us to explore what is beyond the physical limitations of the moment; it helps us to explore what isn’t by showing us what is preventing it from being so; and it helps us to explore what could be by going beyond the is and isn’ts and into the unknown.

Nurturing the mathematical imagination is not only delightful in itself, but also immensely helpful in making science both practical and liberating, as aeronautics engineer Liam Collins witnesses in his article, “Dr. William McLean and Imaginative Creativity.” Albert Einstein shows us his creative imagination at work in using a magical space elevator to provide the fundamental insight for his theory of general relativity.

As Socrates and Plato experienced, classical mathematics can set ablaze the love of wisdom in a budding philosopher. We taste truth and yet cannot help but question existence. Working through the Elements was my first experience of learning indubitable truth. At the same time, doubts about the reality of points without parts and breadthless lengths were also present from the very beginning. And, as far as we can tell, regular 15-sided polygons inscribed in a circle exist nowhere in the natural world, much less inscribed dodecahedrons; probably we can't really make tangents to circles. But the delight in geometry and arithmetic does not depend upon being able to find their objects in physical reality; in some way it is enhanced because we are easily convinced that we cannot. We find them in our imagination. And yet they are true and objective -- the imagination is fed by and determined by our experience of sensible reality, as it is empowered by the intellect.

I am very grateful to announce that last month we received IRS approval of our tax-exempt status. We hope the publication of Dr. Augros’s volume will just be the beginning of our Library of Liberal Arts series. Several more volumes are ready to be edited, and we need to commission our volumes on grammar, rhetoric, and music. If you are able to make a financial contribution, we will be deeply grateful. Small gifts go a long way in a new organization like ours, and also help us to show potential major benefactors that we are serving a widely felt need.

We hope your hearts rejoice in the peace of this season. 

Bulletin

From the Director

Dear Reader,

Over the past year, I have studied, written about, and found inspiration in The Consolation of Philosophy. One of the great dialogues of ancient times, it was written by Boethius, a Roman consul, senator, philosopher, and theologian, during his imprisonment on charges of treason.

The beginning of the work finds a fictional version of Boethius wallowing in sorrow because, forgetting the lessons he had learned from his youthful devotion to the study of philosophy, he feels overwhelmed at the thought of how God had let unjust and wicked men succeed in their plots against him. In the midst of his self-pity, Philosophy appears to him as a Lady, who tries to console him by recalling how she had strengthened her devotees to not only endure unjust suffering, but to laugh at their enemies while doing so.

I have been fortunate in that I have not suffered injustice because of my service to Philosophy. Like many of you, however, I suffer discouragement from time to time as I join in the struggle to bring wisdom back to the world of education. The forces of folly can seem so powerful. Being reminded of philosophical heroes like Socrates and Seneca is encouraging, as is the hope that Philosophy brings by proclaiming the rewards of a life devoted to wisdom.

We are already beginning to taste those rewards through the growing Fellowship of the Boethius Institute for the Advancement of Liberal Education, as I detail here. One of our Fellows, Paul Boyer, is a contemporary Boethian - a former State Senator currently running for mayor of Glendale, Arizona, who is struck by irony that the mastermind of realpolitik, Macchiavelli, was a real life political failure.

If you want to find out more about our very busy summer and early fall, take a look at our Events calendar. I hope that we will be able to report more encouraging news in the coming months.

Bulletin

From the Director

Dear Reader,

Easter weekend has definitively proclaimed the arrival of Spring, at least in northern Iowa on the border of Minnesota. Two weeks ago, though Canadian geese filling the sky and fat robins returning to their territories spoke of spring as imminent, the deep snow cover made it hard to believe in new life. Trees produced buds in vain. But Nature is wise. This weekend brought our first days of 50, 60, and 70 degree weather, and the snow quickly melted away, revealing grass eager to make the earth green again. Soon green shoots will completely cover last year’s corn stalks in the fields.

In this mood of the joy of new life, I am delighted to announce a great step forward in the work of the Arts of Liberty Project. Taking inspiration from the great work in the preservation, development, and promotion of the liberal arts done by Boethius, the last great Roman statesman, Jeff Lehman and I have decided to found the Boethius Institute for the Advancement of Liberal Education. For over a decade, ArtsofLiberty.org has provided a wealth of materials that foster the understanding and practice of the traditional trivium and quadrivium as the proper foundation for a life devoted to wisdom. The Boethius Institute will follow in the footsteps of its patron by publicly defending the crucial role the liberal arts play in liberal education, adapting them to current circumstances and opportunities, and providing leaders of the growing liberal arts renewal with deeper formation in them.

Questions abound about the place and nature of the liberal arts today in what is often referred to as classical education. How should we understand and practice grammar, logic, and rhetoric? Do geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and music have any role? How do the physical sciences, which are so important in modern education, fit into an education of which they have historically been a rival? In an excerpt from a fascinating essay on the rise to consciousness of an imaginary boy, George MacDonald imagined the effect of this rivalry on a serious young man. Scholarly discussion about these questions is revealing significant disagreements among practitioners. I express one of these disagreements in response to a recent article tackling the difficult question of defining what the expression “liberal art” means.

Opportunities also abound. Students who have received a strong liberal arts foundation are ready to achieve great heights in areas such as Latin, Greek, rhetoric, history, mathematics, philosophy, and theology. Teachers who have been successful in their particular classrooms and schools are ready to share how they have fed the natural hunger of the young for learning. When I met Lisa Vandamme at her school in Orange County, California, she was proud to introduce me to her eighth grade class, who impressed me with the passion and penetration of their answers to her question, “What has been your favorite work of literature during your time here?” She shares her fundamental secret in this issue of our bulletin.

To learn more about the Boethius Institute, visit our new website. We will keep you up-to-date on our various activities, such as our visit to the University of John Paul II in San Jose, Costa Rica.