Daniel Walden:

If you do not believe that it is possible for someone’s life to be changed by reading and thinking together then I wish you well, but I do not think we are in the same profession and I am not sure we’re on the same side. I can tell you that some years ago now, a young man who was still a convinced atheist read Augustine’s Confessions and found in its pages an account of evil and responsibility that overturned his entire moral picture of the world. That same young man took in Plato and Machiavelli and Hegel and Marx in great gulps the following year and felt like he had fewer and fewer solid places to stand but a much better sense of where he was. He was fortunate enough to know other young men and women who felt the same way around the same time, and their late-night conversations (including several genuine toga-clad symposia) changed how they all saw the world and one another. This story is mine; it also looks a lot like the stories of a lot of people who’ve seen that it’s possible to teach and learn in a way that does not speak to making a living but simply to living.