The Great Conversation

"The liberal arts are not merely indispensable; they are unavoidable. Nobody can decide for himself whether he is going to be a human being. The only question open to him is whether he will be an ignorant, undeveloped one or one who has sought to reach the highest point he is capable of obtaining"

When I was preparing for graduation from Hillsdale College, I realized, like so many others, that I would miss the place. I don't think it was because of Saga's fantastic fish Fridays or the all night paper writing sessions (which were sometimes fun but mostly left me hungover). The greatest reason that I do miss Hillsdale is the intimate relationships that I developed with a number of people there and the conversations that I had with those people. And here I don't really mean the late night drama llama walk, but the real conversations about God, truth, and the nature of things, or what C.S. Lewis calls "the verities which mortals lack or indirectly learn."

I have missed this part of Hillsdale more and more the longer I am away. The people that I work with have exacerbated this. Most of them would look at me like I was crazy if I asked them why Troy's neighbors helped them in the Trojan war (which I recently posed to a Hillsdale friend). By that I mean, most of them have read few, if any, good books and most of them don't have the faculties to even grasp what a philosophical habit of mind might be.

All this is to say that I miss all of you and want to continue the conversations we have had. Most of the best of these conversations have revolved around what Mortimer Adler and Robert Maynard Hutchins called The Great Conversation, which is to say, the questions about man, his soul, the universe and man's place in it, and, most importantly, God as they have been discussed by the greatest minds in the Western World.

All these thoughts have come together recently when I started working my way through the Britannica Great Books. In the introduction, Hutchins explains the liberal arts, how they have been pushed aside in modern discourse, and how we still need them. It is a wonderful defense of the liberal arts and you should all read it (I tried to find it online but unfortunately could not).

I am starting this blog to try to continue at least part of those conversations through my reading of the great books. I will be posting quotations from the great authors and some of my thoughts about them. I hope that they will inspire you to read these books yourself and, through them, to become more fully human and closer to God.

NB: Hutchins explains that the editors of this set did not include the Bible because most people already have it and they felt the space in the set would be better occupied by books that were less likely to be redundant. These books are truly great and have much truth in them, but the Bible is the only book that is true. If you haven't read it all the way through or have not read it in a while, I suggest you do that before you read any of the books I will be commenting on.