
originally published 9/1/1999
Educator and critic Marion Montgomery (1934–2002) offers a deep critique of the relationship of the academy to its community in an effort to diagnose how higher education has lost its way. The academy should serve the community by encouraging a love of wisdom and sustaining the dignity of personhood, which necessarily involves recognizing and honoring human limits. For its part, the community should nurture this common vision of the nature and dignity of persons, bearing witness to the givenness of reality that includes the material and the spiritual, the intuitive and the rational, knowledge and love. Montgomery contrasts this with the immense destructiveness of the modern will to power. The occasion for this interview, which was originally published on Volume 39 of the Journal, was the publication of Montgomery’s book The Truth of Things: Liberal Arts and the Recovery of Reality (Spence Publishing, 1999).
13 minutes
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