Our inheritance seen through the eyes of faith

What we need for the moment is not so much a body of belief as a body of people familiarized with certain ideas.

~ C.S. Lewis Out of the Silent Planet

Life: have you examined it?

     Socrates has said that the life that is unexamined is not worth living.  Each generation eventually finds that it needs to ask itself what it believes - at first about God, but then further about how God would have us see everything else.  We are surprised a little to find that each generation through history has addressed this question, and that we can consult this accumulated wisdom of our ancestors. Some of it is misguided, of course, but all of it offers something we cannot get any other way:  perspective.  CS Lewis, in the quote above, suggests that we need a group of people familiarized with certain ideas - a community of people in command of a body of accumulated wisdom.  It is this sort of community that we at the Center for Western Studies wish to propagate.  We believe that the Western approach to knowledge and wisdom is the best approach the world has ever seen for the study of ideas about the world itself, mankind as a whole and as individuals, and most importantly, the revelation of God. 

The Center for Western Studies is a place for the student who seeks to sharpen that “eye.”  To learn more deeply about our Western cultural inheritance of literature, art, music, architecture and philosophy in order to better live an examined, integrated life: one that then connects that inherited wisdom to our present experience.