The legendary Georgetown professor Fr James Schall SJ died peacefully last week, at the age of 91, surrounded by his family. He had retired in 2012, after teaching for more than 30 years in Georgetown’s government department. Despite serious health problems, the books and articles had continued to pour forth. I was privileged to know him as an undergraduate, a writer and editor, and a correspondent.
His output was extraordinary: dozens of books and thousands of essays on the great works and writers of the Western intellectual tradition. His book, Another Sort of Learning, is a classic. Composed of short chapters on topics such as “Why Read?”, “Oddness and Sanity” and “On the Seriousness of Sports”, each ends with a reading list. Taken together, Schall’s lists of “books nowhere else in captivity to be found”, as the subtitle has it, comprise a liberal education and helped form a thousand libraries.
