Towards the conclusion of class this past semester, I posed to my students a question that attempts to relate desire with happiness. I began by asking them to list desires or inclinations that they thought all humans possessed. To assist their reflections, I told them to start with more basic desires, ones that humans share with the rest of the cre...

Catholic intellectual giant G.K. Chesterton famously wrote in Orthodoxy that “[t]he madman is not the man who has lost his reason.  The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.”  Most serious Catholics who have heard these words would say they agree.  Yet, many of us (myself included) make an idol of reason—clinging tig...