New Humanists

Send us a text Why study history? To understand ourselves? To pass on the tradition of our ancestors to our progeny? To build something new? Jonathan and Ryan compare Richard M. Gamble"s and Henri-Irénée Marrou"s attempts to answer these questions. They look at Gamble"s introduction to his anthology The Great Tradition

Send us a text The wise man, like Abraham, does not spurn Hagar. For she is merely preparatory to Sarah. This is the analogy that the great Jewish Platonist, Philo of Alexandria, makes when discussing an education in the liberal arts versus the life of philosophy. While the liberal arts have the dignity only of the con

Send us a text Clement of Alexandria was one of the many luminaries of the Catechectical School of Alexandria, one of the early church"s most distinguished centers of learning and theology. His argument that all truth, whether found in the Bible or in Greek philosophy, issues from a single source, namely Christ, potent

Send us a text Niccolo Machiavelli is often held up as the paradigmatic political philosopher of the Italian Renaissance. But as James Hankins argued in an earlier book, Virtue Politics, Machiavelli in fact repudiates the framework common to many of the humanists of the Renaissance. Machiavelli is an outlier. Who then

Send us a text In his lifetime, John Chrysostom witnessed the true beginning of Christendom: the Emperor Theodosius confirmed the public standing of Christianity over that of paganism and delivered a final knockout blow to Arian heresy in favor of Nicene orthodoxy. But a religion on the upswing can attract opportunisti

Send us a text Can Christians read and appreciate pagan literature? The vexed relationship between the Church and a world that hates it has generated many different responses. The most popular recent proposal is Rod Dreher"s "Benedict option" - Dreher counsels Christian retrenchment and quasi-monastic self-sufficiency.