Archive for September 2025
A Letter to Every Student: What If Education Moved Beyond the Love of Spectacle?
The following is the inaugural convocation address Dr. Matthew Barrett delivered at New Aberdeen College near Charlotte, NC. You can read the full address at Dr. Barrett’s substack.
Read MoreA Letter to Every Student
We are living in a day when universities are terminating their liberal arts education. The reasoning of these universities is quite modern: these degrees are not practical. No obvious job is waiting after graduation. Nor do these jobs produce a tangible product, let alone one that is profitable. In our modern day when success (and…
Read MoreHow to Think Like a Thomist: Act and Potency
How can the water in a river always be flowing by and yet it remains the same river? By wrestling with this and various puzzles regarding change, Aristotle discovered the distinction between act and potency or actuality and potentiality. Aristotle realized that all the things in nature are a blend of act and potency, like…
Read MoreJohn 17 and the Covenant of Redemption
How can detailed discussions about Trinitarian processions and missions move you to greater love of God and understanding of scripture? In this episode of Credo podcast, Dr. Harrison Perkins, author of Reformed Covenant Theology: A Systematic Introduction, joins Matthew Barrett for an in-depth discussion of classical theology in John 17. Perkins outlines this passage as a…
Read MoreHow to Think Like a Thomist: Being and Metaphysics
What is reality? What is real? When we start asking these questions, we start our inquiry into being. Everything that has being is in some way one and unified, true or intelligible, good and thus desirable, beautiful and therefore pleasing. When we proceed further along these lines, we have arrived at the science of metaphysics.…
Read MoreMarketers and Mystics: How Worship is Reshaping Evangelicalism
I have not read a book that helped me understand the twentieth century Protestant theological landscape as much as this one in a long time. A good book of history describes something important; a great book of history opens up a whole host of important implications of the story it tells. This book is great…
Read MoreHow to Think Like a Thomist: Argument and Dialectic
Everyday, we wrestle with differing opinions and truth claims. Are we left to despair that we cannot find a way through these conflicting claims? The calling of St. Thomas Aquinas was to pose all the most relevant questions, face all the most relevant difficulties involved in each question, and draw all the relevant distinctions. In…
Read MoreHow to Think Like a Thomist: The Principle of Non-Contradiction
Down through the ages, mankind has been on the search for truth. Is there such a thing as absolute truth? How can we know what is true? The principle of non-contradiction stands as a kind of witness that human beings can know something solid and true about reality as a whole. In this video, you’ll…
Read MoreLiterature in a Digital Apocalypse
Most of us recognize that modern culture overvalues utilitarian content that can be grasped quickly, but what can atone for this deficit of beauty? In this episode of Credo podcast, Matthew Barrett interviews Jason Baxter of Benedictine College on his new book, Why Literature Still Matters: Beauty After the Apocalypse. They discuss the role of…
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