On Teaching
June 17, 2018
by Wilfred M. McClayThere are many things that the world doesn’t understand about teaching. One of them is this: teachers themselves rarely have the occasion to step back and reflect on the meaning of what it is they’re doing. What is teaching, after all? Why should anyone do it? What is the point of education in general? How should we go about it? Here Prof. McClay considers just these questions, drawing on the classical tradition and on years of his own teaching experience to reflect on the nature, aims, and means of educating.
May 24, 2018 Augustin IoanHumans never interact with their environment without metaphysical consequence. That is, the world becomes, or is discovered to be, a repository of meaning. Sometimes the meaning points beyond what at first seems to be there, as when we encounter the sacred. But what is the sacred, and how does the numinous dwell in the physical world? Moreover, how does man dwell with it? In this first of two essays exploring such questions, Romanian architect Augustin Ioan draws on Heidegger, Deleuze, and others to help us find our place in space.
September 27, 2017 Damien François
Speaking for the reconstruction of Parliament's bombed-out Commons Chamber, Winston Churchill famously quipped, “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.” But how? And should we care? Is it not all rather a matter of taste? Philosopher Damien François interviews architectural theorist Nikos Salingaros, who believes that the art of building is anything but arbitrary: our built environment matters deeply for our attitudes, our aims, our very bodies. Neither a ‘modernist’ nor a ‘traditionalist’, Salingaros is as much a champion of the field’s historical vernaculars as he is of new possibilities afforded by contemporary empirical discoveries in biomathematics. His intellectual eclecticism, his passion for humane urbanism, and his compelling alternatives to stale orthodoxies make him one of the most exciting theorists active today.
August 12, 2017 Jason Morgan
Mortal man may yet be saved, some say, but there is a doom upon the brutes: when it's over for Rover, it's over forever, and anything else is sentimentalism. That account may score points in certain quarters, but is it really so sound? If the goodness, peace, and joy that we experience in time are epiphanic of Eternity, then surely we ought to take such phenomena seriously, even when we find them in animals. Looking back on the life of a beloved family dog, Jason Morgan asks us to reconsider whether there isn't something beyond the sentiments, after all, and if so, whether man's best friend might not finally be spared the grave.
July 17, 2017 What can I get at college that I can't find on Wikipedia? How does it all fit together? What is the purpose of education? Students today enjoy unprecedented freedom of choice when it comes to their academic formations. But their universities are often ill-equipped to help them answer the questions that inevitably shape this freedom, in part due to a general uncertainty about what sort of unity, if any, exists across the various forms of knowledge. Jonathan Rowland considers how today's academic institutions might address this doubt and its consequences by drawing on the more lasting of John Henry Newman's insights into the nature of the university.
January 11, 2017 “Have mercy on me, a poet!” To many, the vocations of the poet and the monk seem incompatible. The young Thomas Merton, having had a taste of each, considered the former immanent, worldly, and vain, whereas the latter was “transcendent”, sacred, concerned with the “reality of God”. But there are many poets, even of a secular cast, whose ethos bears striking similarities to the ancient mystical practice of hesychia, or stillness. If these similarities are more than coincidental, why are there so few hesychast-poets? Could there be such a thing as a deliberate hesychastic poetics? If so, what would its praxis look like? If not, is that all the worse for poetry, or for monasticism?
May 18, 2016 April 10, 2016 On the northwest coast of the Black Sea, beyond even where the Emperor Augustus banished Ovid, lies the Romanian town of Tulcea. Like many Romanian cities, it was a focal point for the confluence of a dizzying array of cultures: Slavic, Latin, Greek, Turkish, Jewish, Tatar, Armenian, and more. And, like cities everywhere, its social fabric was reflected and transmitted in its built environment. It was a remembered past and a lived present in stone and wood. Thirty years after the fall of the regime that “systematized” its urban core, one of the country's leading architects reflects on the cityscape that shaped his childhood in Tulcea and offers quiet hope for its future.
March 27, 2016 The Christian religion has at its center the Resurrection of the Christ, without which, St. Paul says, the faith is in vain, and through which we, too, are to rise. To what sort of life? It is not that of an abstracted, disembodied spirit, but that of an entire person, body and soul, whole again, and transfigured. In this sermon from his days as Vicar of St. Mary's, Oxford, preaching to a society drawn to materialism on the one hand and 'angelism' on the other, John Henry Newman meditates on Christ's invocation of the burning bush as a sign that we – our bodies included – "die but to appearance", a sign of the incarnate eternity that awaits us on the far side of the grave.
March 6, 2016 Last summer, the United States Supreme Court ruled that marriage is a constitutional right for all citizens, and that laws banning same-sex marriage are unconstitutional. What does this mean for the Church? Orthodox theologian Vigen Guroian argues for a rediscovery of the centrality of the Eucharist in Christian matrimony – and for the Church's immediate disengagement from the civil marriage business.
Sacred Space as Public Place (Part 1)
Building with Biophilia: An Interview with Nikos Salingaros
Eulogy for Skip
Unity and Diversity in the University Curriculum
‘Stillness in Rhythm’: Hesychastic Poiesis
The Prince and the Polis
Clarion Review Founding Editor Jonathan Price and philosopher Nathaniel Helms sat down with His Serene Highness Hans-Adam II, Prince of Liechtenstein at the Oxford Union to discuss localism, centralisation, and his hopes for democracy in the third millennium.
A Space of Forbearance
Augustin Ioan
The Resurrection of the Body
If Love Has Won, Has Marriage Lost?
An Orthodox Response to Obergefell v. Hodges
