A word from Stephen Fields, SJ

Last month I briefly paid tribute to my and my youngest daughter’s Latin teacher, Dartmouth’s Professor Edward Bradley, in “Speaking of Metamorphoses.” Every once in a while we get a message like this one, just in today:

Dear Mr Johnson,

I just had the pleasure of reading your moving tribute to Professor Bradley of Dartmouth. I’d like to thank you. I am a Jesuit priest and professor of philosophy and theology at Georgetown University. This morning I was counting my blessings over the respect and affection that my students, much to my surprise, seem to give me. I wanted to understand more what it is that we teachers give that seems to evince this response. And so I came across your tribute. It helped me.

Thank you, too, for your supportive comments on the American bishops’ stand on the HHS mandate.

I admire the Claremont Institute.

Yours appreciatively,

Stephen Fields, SJ

I asked Father Fields if I could post his message and added something I had omitted from my remarks about Professor Bradley. In our conversation last month, Professor Bradley commended to me three books above all others: The Odyssey, The Aeneid and Saint Augustine’s Confessions (which he described in part as an inversion of the Aeneid). Father Fields responded: “I teach the Confessions at least once every year, and have done them again this term. A book to live by and continually grow more deeply into…”

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