The Once and Future College

I’m glad you noticed my “Once and Future College” and am pleased you found some of your questions about Socratic teaching answered. I posted the talk on my website—under “Articles and Papers”—a few weeks ago now, but you’re right that I hadn’t yet mentioned it here in Anamn?sis.

As you can see from the header, the talk was delivered in early June in Chicago at the annual meeting of the Orthodox Theological Society of America. One of the Society’s themes this year had to do with Orthodoxy and higher education, and they invited me to come and talk about Rose Hill, the little Orthodox great books college I helped to establish back in the mid-nineties.

People continue to contact me about the experience, most recently a priest in Washington who is involved in a similar venture and who wrote to ask my permission to use the Rose Hill College Catalogue as their template. I was therefore glad for the opportunity to tell a bit of the history and, more importantly, to write at greater length than I had before on both the perils and promise involved in combining dialectic with traditional religious commitment.

If only everyone were an apophaticist! I’m reminded of Schuon: “Metaphysics cannot be taught to everyone, but if it could be there would be no atheists.”