National Review Interview with Fr. James V. Schall

I first learned about Fr. James V. Schall when I read his foreword to a modern edition of A.G. Sertillanges's The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods.  (This is a book I highly recommend for all Christian intellectuals, academics, graduates students, and thinking people of faith).  I next read Schall's The Life of the Mind: On the Joys and Travails of Thinking.  I have a few more of Schall's books on my shelf that I hope to get to soon.  One of those books is A Student's Guide to Liberal Learning.

I was thus pleased to run across an interview with Schall, now retired from Georgetown, at National Review Online.  Schall discusses the legacy of Benedict XVI, friendship, reading, the Bible, and teaching.

Here is a taste: 

LOPEZ: Why is friendship so important? 

FR. SCHALL: In practice, for most of us, its presence in our lives comes close to defining our happiness or lack of it. This is the great theme we find already in Plato and Aristotle. Indeed it is doubtful if anyone has explained to us what friendship is better than these two have. All else is a commentary on them or an explanation of the same experience they explained. In one sense, friendship is what college life is about — understanding what it is, what it means to betray it, what it means ultimately. It is the greatest of our external goods.