Winter 2016

The City

Political Life and the Horizon of the Human: Polis, Church and State, and Totalitarianism

Mark Shiffman

“We might say, in Aristotelian terms, that the political animal is prior in potency, but the city is prior in act.”

The Creation of the City of Man

Giorgio Buccellati

“The biblical God is the city’s conditor because he created the conditions that made it possible, conditions which must continue to govern this human efflorescence that is the city, precisely if we want it to remain human.”

Flannery O’Connor and the City

Rodney Howsare

“It seems that the cities in O’Connor’s stories are there precisely in order to alert us to something that concerns us all. The modern megalopolis, after all, is our invention and, as with all inventions, it tells us something about its inventors.”

The Conversation of Ascent: A Reading of St. Augustine’s Confessions, Book IX, Chapter 10

Scott Jude Roniger

“For Augustine, language is social from start to finish, from its acquisition to its perfection.”

The City and Apostolic Solitude

Gilles François

“[S]olitude becomes the principal catalyst of mission.”

Religion and the Life of Civilisation

Christopher Dawson

“A society which has lost its religion becomes sooner or later a society which has lost its culture.”