Another Sort of Learning
Another Sort of Learning: Selected Contrary Essays on How Finally to Acquire
an Education While Still in College or Anywhere Else: Containing Some Belated
Advice About How to Employ Your Leisure Time When Ultimate Questions Remain
Perplexing in Spite of Your Highest Earned Academic Degree, Together with Sundry
Book Lists Nowhere Else in Captivity to Be Found
by James V. Schall
San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988
300 pp., $12.95
reviewed by John Thompson
Long subtitles are apparently “in,” and so is the reconsideration of the declining role of the humanities in our society, à la Bennett, Bloom, Alder, Hirsch, et al. Fr. Schall is a bona fide enthusiast for the humanitites, but he’s no mere antiquarian. He is listening not only to the great minds of the past., but also to the questions raised by contemporary students in his political philosophy classes at Georgetown University. The result is a readable, challenging, and (necessarily) idiosyncratic book. Fr. Schall’s book stands out all the more for his willingness to flaunt contemporary taboos like belief in a deity who is more than merely a philosophical necessity.
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John Thompson is a librarian and professor at Waynesburg University, Waynesburg, Pennsylvania
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