I’ve been meaning to post something to the site for several days but I’ve been preoccupied with speaking and editing commitments. Over the past two weekends I’ve been speaking at home school conferences in Chicago and Buffalo NY. At last weekend’s conference in Buffalo I had the great pleasure and privilege to meet the inestimable Alice von Hildebrand. What a joy to spend some time discussing life and philosophy with such a scholar and such a mind! We had known each other for some time, and had spoken on the phone and corresponded via e-mail and letter, but we had never met. It’s wonderful to have finally done so. I was particularly impressed by Dr. von Hildebrand’s sharpness and intellectual agility, a mental athleticism that belies her almost ninety years.

I’ve been speaking at the conferences on “The Battle for a True Education: A Matter of Life and Death”. Apart from extolling the virtues of a fully integrated liberal arts education, rooted in the tradition of western civilization, I’ve also been promoting the Ignatius Critical Editions and their accompanying Study Guides as ideal for home schoolers, high schoolers, and college undergraduates. If you don’t know this series, check it out now: www.ignatiuscriticaleditions.com.

This week I’ve been embroiled with the editing of the July/August issue of the Saint Austin Review which will be on the theme of “Literary Converts”. We are so blessed with contributions on this topic that I have the onerous task of whittling down the many good articles into the final selection. Each issue of StAR contains 32,000 words of articles (excluding my editorial) and this time I had articles of sufficient merit to warrant publication totalling more than 70,000 words in length. Choosing which to include and which to exclude is not an enviable task! Amongst the articles being considered are several on Graham Greene, and others on Hopkins, Newman, Chesterton, Roy Campbell, Walker Percy, Evelyn Waugh, Malcolm Muggeridge and others. The final selection will be posted on this site, on the contents page to the July/August issue, a week or two before the magazine is published. If, however, you would like to read these excellent articles on some of the giants of the Catholic literary revival you will have to subscribe to StAR itself, which you can do conveniently on-line from this very site!