"The human things come first."  Anthony Esolen discusses his reading and teaching of Václav Havel's "Power of the Powerless" (with asides on Hannah Arendt and C.S. Lewis) and the dangers of "political knitting clubs."  He also considers the parallels between excellent brewing and excellent teaching while also noting how the Catholic faith and liberal education be taken up for ideological reasons.  Finally, he introduces and reads his dramatic-epistolary monologue "Saint Paul to Gamaliel" from his poem The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord.

Links of potential interest:

The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord

Esolen's essay "Resisting the Totalitarian Power of Politicization"

Video of Anthony Esolen's "The Boethius Option"

C.S. Lewis, "Learning in War Time"

Pope Saint John Paul II, Centesimus Annus

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts