My grandson started attending Regents School of Charlottesville [Virginia], a classical Christian school, for his seventh grade. The other day I saw one of the books he was reading: Antigone by the Greek playwright Sophocles. I am a proud grandpa. Seeing this brought back fine memories. When I was in the same grade, at a parish school outside Chicago, I participated in “Junior Great Books” which had been started a few years before, in 1960, following the arrival of Mortimer Adler’s Great Books program for adults in 1949. I cannot express how excited I was to read these materials and discuss them, led by two volunteer mothers. The readings of “Set Four,” which I still have, were: Sophocles (Antigone), Plato, Polybius, Cicero, Epictetus, Icelandic Sagas, Pascal, Scott, Huxley, Poincaré, Chekhov, Carroll (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland), Shaw (Pygmalion).

A half-decade later I majored in both government and theology at the University of Notre Dame, and this meant that I read, discussed, and wrote about many of the great books of Western civilization. In two year-long courses, for example, we read one book weekly for a total of 60 books. Each member of the seminars wrote a short paper on them, and we discussed the papers and the books. Another excellent course was Professor Walter Nicgorski’s “American Founding” which included The Federalist Papers, Madison’s Notes on the Constitutional Convention, and Paul Eidelberg’s The Philosophy of the American Constitution (1968).

A decade later, in the mid-1980’s, my wife obtained training in the “shared inquiry” of Great Books and she led discussions with grade school students for over a year. In her second year, she complained to the Great Books Foundation that the readings were too dark. When she received a reply that they had no interest in discussing changing the readings, she quit. On top of being too dark, the readings were not great literature; they were simply reading club selections.

In the early 1980’s I led a parish reading group that met monthly to discuss Catholic great books. A few of the participants eventually left the secular reading clubs to which they belonged because our books were far more enriching.

Some of you might remember that Dinesh D’Souza published an anthology, with an introduction to each selection, called Catholic Classics (1986). He followed it up with a second volume in 1989, and combined the two in 1993. The first volume had ten chapters: St. Augustine’s Confessions, Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Pascal’s Pensées, Thomas à Kempis’ Imitation of Christ, Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua, Chesterton’s Orthodoxy, and Merton’s Seven Storey Mountain. I read these two anthologies and they were quite good.

I think it was in the late 80s, when I was working as a lawyer in Chicago, that a local newspaper published a story on Elmer Johnson, a prominent lawyer. Mr. Johnson felt intellectually deprived, although I don’t recall if the piece identified his undergraduate major. So he started reading the Great Books. His tutor was University of Chicago Professor James Gustafson. Reading these books while working full-time as a partner in a major law firm would be a big challenge. A bigger challenge, to me, is when he chose to do the reading. He would set his alarm for 2 am, read until 4, and then go back to sleep. I was impressed.

I have a daughter, class of 2009, who majored in the three-year great books program at the University of Notre Dame. It’s called the “Program of Liberal Studies” (“PLS”). She chose this major because, before she began classes in business for her sophomore year, she was talking with a senior and my daughter was so taken with the fact that this young woman was an educated woman, intelligent, articulate, and serious-minded. The senior was a PLS major. My daughter immediately changed from business to PLS. Like the senior, my daughter is now educated, intelligent, articulate, and serious-minded. (She did end up in business.) Moreover, as it happens, several other young women and men from our northern Virginia parish matriculated to Notre Dame and majored in PLS.

In 2013, I started a parish group to meet monthly to discuss St. Augustine. Twelve years later, we are still meeting. We have read, among other things, his Confessions, The City of God, his writings on grace and free will, and a collection of his sermons. And we have read St. John Paul II’s letter on Augustine, Pope Benedict’s weekly audiences on him, and Peter Brown’s masterful biography.

In early 2018 and again in early 2020, I gave tutorials to a dozen students in my parish in grades 6-9 on what I called “Catholic Great Books”: St. Augustine, St. John Henry Newman, Catholic poetry, St. John Paul II’s “Letter to Artists,” Plato’s Republic, St. Thomas Aquinas’s Treatise on Law, the Declaration of Independence, a paper from our Founders’ Federalist Papers, Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech, his Gettysburg Address, and his Second Inaugural.

I followed this up (during the COVID crisis) with sessions on 50 “Great Speeches” including: Pericles’ funeral oration, Cicero, St. Paul, Aquinas (I found one of his sermons), Shakespeare, Patrick Henry, Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Churchill, de Gaulle, Bishop Sheen, Martin Luther King, John F. Kennedy, General MacArthur, Barbara Jordan, Ronald Reagan, and Jeanne Kirkpatrick.

My favorite speech might be the very short speech of an unnamed counselor to King Edwin, delivered in A.D. 627. Allow me to share it with you. (I won’t provide the 1,500-word introduction I gave my students, nor the short sonnet, No. XVI, by William Wadsworth which it inspired. Also, Father John Dunne, C.S.C., discusses the speech in his A Search for God in Time and Memory of 1977.)

The speech is from Book II, chapter XIII, of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People written circa 731. A hundred years before Bede wrote, St. Paulinus had addressed King Edwin, desiring that he convert to Christianity. (If a king converts, the people regularly do so as well.) King Edwin said he was open to the idea but asked each member of his council to say what he thought. An unidentified member responded:

The present life of man, O King, seems to me, in comparison of that time which is unknown to us, like to the swift flight of a sparrow through the room wherein you sit at supper in winter, with your commanders and ministers, and a good fire in the midst, whilst the storms of rain and snow prevail abroad; the sparrow, I say, flying in at one door, and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry storm; but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, into the dark winter from which he had emerged.

So this life of man appears for a short space, but of what went before, or what is to follow, we are utterly ignorant. If, therefore, this new doctrine contains something more certain, it seems justly to deserve to be followed.

Edwin and all his chief men were baptized. In front of the crowd gathered for the baptism, the pagan high priest, Coifi, mounted Edwin’s own horse and, with sword and spear, destroyed the nearby pagan idols. It was quite the effective speech!

My grandson is in good hands as a student in a school that is introducing him to the Western canon of great books, secular and Christian. I wish the same for your children and grandchildren.