How can the study of history, understood as a branch of liberal learning, become a liberating education? Prof. Francesca Guerri offers an initial answer by giving us an account of her own intellectual and spiritual pilgrimage and the role of the study of history in that pilgrimage.

Then, opening the discussion to more universal connections, Dr. Guerri takes up the themes of friendship, the nature of the human person, and the role that community and companionship play in teaching and the intellectual life of the university.  She also considers how history relates to the sister disciplines of liberal learning and how historical study can be a point of entry for students into a larger vision of reality that is coherent, intelligent, and ultimately teleological.  History, approached as a discipline within the Catholic intellectual tradition offers meaning and vision that can liberate us and for which we are ultimately responsible as caretakers.

Links of Potential Interest:

Dr. Guerri’s website

Polybius, The Rise of the Roman Empire

Chris Blum, “The Historian’s Tools,” Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 13, no. 4 (2010): 15-34.

Christopher Dawson

Crossroads Cultural Center