Another Sort of Learning

From Fr. Schall's utterly charming, Another Sort of Learning: Selected Contrary Essays on How to Finally Acquire an Education While Still in College or Anywhere Else: Containing Some Belated Advice about How to Employ Your Leisure time When Ultimate Questions Remain Perplexing in Spite of Your Highest Earned Academic Degree, Together with Sundry Book Lists Nowhere Else in Captivity to be Found.

One of these excellent book lists:

Four Novels, among Millions, the Most Incomplete of Lists:

1. C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces.
2. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice.
3. Singred Undset, Kristin Lavransdatter.
4. Thornton Wilder, The Eighth Day.
(And all of P.G. Wodehouse and Dostoyevsky--and all novels that show us the infinity of particular life, even when they are not very good novels--but do not neglect the best.)

Most of Fr. Schall's lists of books, which follow every essay in the collection, have more of a theme than this one. But this one (and his title) capture the whimsy of Fr. Schall, in addition to his ability to see truth everywhere (without neglecting the best).

In his essay, "What is a Lecture?," his charm is most apparent. Fr. Schall recounts the (ultimately successful effort) of the organizers of a conference at which he presented a paper to convince him to let them photocopy and distribute the lecture before he presented it:

"[A] very nice lady wanted to now if I had the text of my lecture. Well, as that is precisely one of those things one does not leave home without if he is to deliver it, I assured her that I indeed had this gem clutched in my very hands and planned to leave it with the conference director, as per request, when I had finished presenting it to the audience." Schall sounds a little like Wodehouse here, but the charm is buried in the middle of serious essays about serious topics.

Here are some poignant quotations from Chesterton that Schall includes in his essay, "On Doctrine and Dignity: 'Heretics' to 'Orthodoxy'": "I have much more sympathy with the person who leaves the Church for a love affair than the person who leaves it for a long-winded German theory to prove that God is evil or that children are a sort of morbid monkey" (The Catholic Church and Conversion). And, "Something in his [Aquinas'] character ... led him rather to exaggerate the extent to which all men would ultimately listen to reason. In his controversies, he always assumes they will listen to reason. That is, he does emphatically believe that men can be convinced by argument. Only his common sense also told him that the argument never ends" (St. Thomas Aquinas).