Category: Article

The following essay first appeared as an article in Alvaro de Vicente’s Substack publication, Men in the Making. For more articles like this one, you can visit his page here. Subscribe to stay up-to-date on his writing. Over a century ago, the great Catholic writer and philosopher G.K. Chesterton wrote about the distinction between the supernatural virtue of hope and the disposition popularly referred to as “optimism.” On the eve of his reception into the Catholic Church, Chesterton was struck by the Penny Catechism’s teaching that the two sins against hope are presumption…

In 1989, I was a recently married lieutenant in the Army, stationed in Germany, and found myself—to this day I can’t remember how—in possession of a book entitled A Retreat for Lay People. It was a series of talks by a priest named Ronald Knox that followed the general outline of a retreat. Till then, just about any spiritual reading I had done was reminiscent of the times, with lots of exclamation points and titles like In Search of Me. This man was different. His tone was conversational yet respectful….

As a basis for mentoring, there may be no better starting point than knowledge of the virtues. Any school or organization endeavoring to begin or strengthen a mentoring program should consider this. If, from early on, we develop in our students a vocabulary of the virtues, a concrete understanding of these all-important ways of living, then our ability to mentor them is enhanced tremendously. Through discussion of the virtues we can address the roots of student weaknesses in constructive ways. Instead of starting from a place where we point out…

The world is not just a set of separately existing localized objects, externally related only by space and time…Something deeper, and more mysterious, knits together the fabric of the world.  —Tim Maudlin, professor of philosophy and physics at NYU. The poetry of Edward Thomas (1878-1917) teaches us how to look into a moment and see the world. William Blake, who saw eternity in a flower, would get Thomas’ poetry, though his own work is so vastly different it may as well have been written on another planet. The vision’s the…

Forcing the worst ideas of history on the next generation . . . for their own good  From 1961 to 1989, a wall famously encircled what was then known as West Berlin. West Germans called it the “Wall of Shame” (Mauer der Schande), a phrase coined by then-Mayor Willy Brandt. In the U.S., we called it simply “the Berlin Wall,” and though the term is neutral we all knew the wall was there to keep the residents of East Germany from escaping to the West—in other words, to keep them…

One of the great Christmas traditions is Frank Capra’s masterful film It’s a Wonderful Life. James Stewart, that most American of actors, plays the lead of George Bailey, an Everyman, a small-town ordinary guy struggling against the deceit, selfishness, and cynicism of a power-broker named Potter. Yet, for all its Americana, I find It’s a Wonderful Life a profound reflection on the teachings of my favorite saint, Francis de Sales, a seventeenth-century French bishop.  De Sales lived from 1567 to 1622 and was the titular bishop of Geneva, Switzerland, but…

When you take pen in hand and write a word, you do something approaching the divine. You are giving physical form to a thought. It is, in its way, an Incarnation. To do this with beauty and grace is to honor this Incarnation. This is penmanship.  Along with speaking, it is the most common form of Incarnation. We do it every day whether we’re signing a credit card receipt, writing a grocery list, or putting down our deepest thoughts in a journal. Like all Incarnations, it reflects who we are….

Dr. Matthew Mehan encourages us to re-examine the role metaphor plays in our lives. He notes how much hope they hold when crafted well.

Is there a tension between schools preparing students for professional excellence and for serving others? Can Elon Musk and Mother Theresa both inspire students?

Graduation speeches customarily supply profound words and lofty exhortations; yet one of the best I’ve ever heard of gave a simple and homely piece of advice. It was this: have a hobby.  Life is difficult, the speaker said. You have ups and downs, get worried and hurried, stressed out and hemmed in. You need something to get you by. Something which, for a little while, helps you forget everything that you can’t seem to forget. Something you take seriously that really isn’t serious. So, get a hobby.  What’s a hobby?…