March 14 - 2nd Meeting
We look at the transformation of America begun around the Civil War and continued until the post Second World War period (510 pp. reading).
Opening prayer and meditation: The parable of the Mustard Seed, and other excerpts from then Josef Cardinal Ratzinger’s address to catechists and religion teachers on the Jubilee of Catechists, 12 December 2000, The New Evangelization: Building the civilization of love.
- Excerpts from David Evan’s essay “The Very Peculiar Inns of Court,” published in The Inns of Court, ed. Duncan McCorquodale, London, Black Dog Publishing Limited, 1996. Evans explains the difference between Common Law and Civil Law, and the roots of the Common Law—a good introduction to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and the Common Law treated in the next reading.
- Menand, Louis; The Metaphysical Club: A story of ideas in America; New York; Farrar, Straus, and Giroux; 2001. Pulitzer Prize winner. Menand looks at pragmatism in American law, labor & capital, universities.
- Excerpt from Micklethwait, John and Adrian Wooldridge, The Company: A short history of a revolutionary idea, New York, Modern Library, 2003, chapter 4, “The rise of big business in America, 1862-1913,” pp. 57-78.
- Fabro, Rev. Cornelio; excerpt from God in Exile: Modern atheism; ch. 5 “Truth as Action and the Vanishing of God in Dewey”; trans. Arthur Gibson; Newman Press; Westminster MD; 1968; pp. 836-63.
- Excerpt from Vidal, Gore, Empire, New York, Random House, 1987, of fictional portrayal of actual but undocumented meeting between William Randolph Hearst and President Theodore Roosevelt.
- Great German intellectual historian Ernst Robert Curtius’ lecture, “The Medieval Bases of Western Thought” delivered on 3 July 1949 at the Goethe Bicentennial Convocation at Aspen CO (that inaugurated the Aspen Institute), and published as an appendix in his European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask, Princeton University Press (Bollingen series), Princeton, 1953, pp. 587-598. [+ Cautionary Note]
- Suggestion for further reading: Adams, Henry, The Education of Henry Adams, and Mont Saint Michel and Chartres. Suggested film: The Golden Bowl, dir. James Ivory, 2000, adapted from William James novel.