A New Semester

A new semester begins at St. John’s in two days, meaning that I will be spending much of my time reading, discussing and writing about various classic texts in what some call the “Western canon”. This semester I will be reading works concerned with Government and Society, beginning with Plutarch’s life of Lycurgus and Aristotles' Nichomachean Ethics , and ending with Pessy v. Ferguson and Roe v. Wade. We’ll be deep into Plato, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Marx, de Toqueville and the Federalist Papers. What a blast! To make it even more fun, my son David will also be a “Johnny”, and will be not only in the same segment but actually in one of the same classes with me! I’m not sure how they’ll distinguish between the two “Mr. Kearns’s”.

I have been wondering how I will have time to continue this blog, and decided that I shall just have to write about the readings. I’m hoping that the subject matter—government and society—will be of interest to my readers. In so far as there is a preponderance of Kuyperians among them, I think this is likely.

So next up…. Lycurgus, Regent of Sparta