John Senior Collection

Dr. John Senior was a professor at the University of Kansas who had an immense personal influence on the founding monks at the Abbey.

John Senior and the Restoration of Realism

is an intellectual biography that follows Dr. Senior’s life, especially his conversion, and draws out his philosophy of education. It especially studies the famous Integrated Humanities Program established by Senior and his colleagues, Dennis Quinn and Frank Nelick. Dr. Alice von Hildebrand wrote about this book: “We must be grateful to Father Francis Bethel for writing a life of this noble Don Quixote whose love of beauty led him to the One Who Is Truth, Beauty, and Goodness.”  And Most Reverend James Conley, bishop of Lincoln, Nebraska wrote that this book: “unlocks the mystery of the man who was John Senior … I highly recommend this book not only as an introduction to John Senior’s thought, but also as an important message, especially in our times, about education and culture.”

In The Death of Christian Culture,

John Senior, focusing on the modernist movement in literature, shows how Western intellectuals came to reject the Christian idea of an orderly, intelligible universe created by God. Today, their revolt bears its bitter fruit: moral chaos… cynicism despair. Modern man has lost his faith-and now he is losing his mind.… Tragically, the disease has spread. All areas of society are infected. Our universities are paralyzed by self-doubt. The courts have stood the law on its head. Even the Church is faltering… Does all this mean that the glory of Christian culture is gone forever? Not necessarily, answers Dr. Senior. … He believes that a new Dark Age is upon us. But there is still time to act. As individuals, where can we start? By immersing ourselves in the great books of our Christian and classical heritage. Christians must find their own roots before they can hope to bring sanity back to the world.

Is a restoration to be hoped for?

Dr. Senior answers with a genuinely realistic, but no less resounding yes in The Restoration of Christian Culture. This book continues to warn of the ongoing extinction of the cultural patrimony of ancient Greece & Rome, medieval Christian Europe, and the early-modern West, owing to the secularization, bureaucratization, and mechanization of life today. But Senior also offers challenging and provocative ideas for recapturing and living the cultural traditions of classical and Christian history. Bringing the true wisdom of giants such as Aristotle, St. Augustine, St. Benedict, and St. Thomas Aquinas in touch with the social, political & personal life of “modern man,” Senior shows how we can once again become fellow citizens of a common Western, Christian culture through work, prayer and sacrifice.