You propose to become a professional scholar.  Unless you are independently wealthy, your ability to do so will depend on the expenditure of other people’s wealth (in the form of tuition, taxes, or patronage) to pay your salary.  What reason can you sincerely give for what you want to do, sufficient to justify such expenditure?  Consider possible objections.  Discuss thoroughly.

Clean, Obvious, Cold, Superficial, and Wrong

"Everything in that old [pagan] world would appear to have been clean and obvious.  A good man was a good man; a bad man was a bad man.  For this reason they had no charity; for charity is a reverent agnosticism towards the complexity of the soul.”  -- G.K. Chesterton, Heretics, Chapter 12

The Aim of the World

“The world has done its best to secure repose without relinquishing evil.”  --  Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Egotism”

Student Surveys, Revisited

A Wonder

It Was a Beautiful Fight

My father loved St. Paul, so all my life people have been quoting to me the apostle’s remark, “I have fought the good fight,” and his advice to the young Timothy, who stands for each one of us, to follow his example.

Children Are Not Costs and Benefits