Thomas Aquinas and John Paul II: Competing Views of Education? (John Hittinger)
A thought experiment: Imagine that both John Paul II and Thomas Aquinas are alive today. They have been commissioned to establish independent universities in different cities according to their respective visions of education. How would the universities differ? How would they be similar? Is it possible that they establish identical universities? In this conversation, Dr. John Hittinger takes up these questions while also offering insights that illuminate the role of culture, philosophical anthropology, freedom, and conscience in the well-ordered human life of learning. Hittinger also reflects on how he—as a life-long Thomist—has developed his own thinking as a result of his work on the thought of John Paul II.
Links of potential interest:
George Weigel’s John Paul II Trilogy:
Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II
The End and the Beginning: Pope John Paul II--The Victory of Freedom, the Last Years, the Legacy
Lessons in Hope: My Unexpected Life with St. John Paul II
Pope Saint John Paul II, Fides et Ratio (“Faith and Reason”)
Pope Saint John Paul II, Ex corde ecclesiae (On Catholic Universities/From the Heart of the Church)
Pope Saint John Paul II, “Letter to Artists”
Henryk Górecki, “Symphony of Sorrowful Songs”
Pope Saint John Paul II, Memory and Identity: Conversations at the Dawn of a Millennium
George Weigel, “Two Ideas of Freedom”