James Schall
by Alex
It occurred to me the other day that I might as well google “Life of the Mind” to see what the Internet thought that it was about. The result, after some clicking around, was learning a bit about “James Schall”:https://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/schallj/, a Jesuit and professor at Georgetown. Schall does political philosophy (of the old school) and has also spent a lot of time thinking and writing about liberal education (of the old school). His site includes open access copies of long essays like “A Student’s Guide To Liberal Learning”:https://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/schallj/WS17BJVS.htm. Having come out of a liberal arts background I think it is always interesting to watch someone else think about it out loud, especially — forgive the indelicacy — someone so old: his bibliography includes works that look very interesting to me but are just outside the horizon of my own experience.
That said, Schall definitely writes like he was ordained before Vatican II — there are just not a lot of people around today who insist that _all_ young people absolutely _must_ read _Phaedrus_. But so what if he is To The Right? One must be open to all sorts of things. As a person to encounter intellectually and whose work might be useful to teach to students in certain circumstances.
I checked out his site, but all the links are broken!
Yes — the links are broken: they have an extra ‘j’ in the URL. However if you remove it, or use my links, then you can see the actual contents. So for instance instead of
https://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/schalljj/WS17BJVS.htm
use
https://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/schallj/WS17BJVS.htm
Note the second one includes the string “schalljj” while the working one is just “schallj”.
Someone should really get on that.