Jonathan Wanner

Background

About Jonathan Wanner

To illuminate our nuptial vows, my wife and I inscribed the first and last words of T.S. Eliot’s “East Coker” inside our rings: “In my beginning is my end,” mine reads, and hers answers, “In my end is my beginning.” Though brief, this reversal contracts a universe of meaning within the span of a single breath: wherever our origins and ultimate ends intersect, there is the meeting point of wonder, wisdom, and that “final and self-sufficient” happiness toward which all desires tend. As much as man defines his life’s aims, much more do his aims define him, for only in “seeing” his ultimate end may he read himself in God’s Image. In like manner, we seek where we come from to learn who we are: rational yet concupiscent, substantial yet privative, mortal yet immortal-bound. In continuous pursuit of such origins and ends, our family draws faith in our core convictions: that the purpose of life is the purpose of education, that we must rest in the world’s goodness even while we condemn its evils, and that the liberty of the “liberal” arts is obedience to laws natural and divine—a transcendent life of virtue and contemplation. My long-term conviction is to serve a college that adheres to the Magisterium, prizes virtue, and couples faith with reason for the renewal of culture at large. In a world of pixels and servers where students are plugging themselves out of their bodies, there is a pressing need to train the senses to intuit the real, whether through the calluses of manual labor, nature’s pathways, art’s sublimity, philosophy’s riddles, or the convivialities of community. The surprise such moments elicit serves not merely to entertain—it awakens one to the awful and sublime mystery of wonder. As the beginning of wisdom, wonder yokes art to philosophy; as the cattle prod of the intuition, it awakens the heart to the joyful disturbance of “I do not know.” Upon these humble and ignorant grounds the quest for liberty begins: liberty from the flux of time and modern groupthink; liberty to exercise every operation of the soul; liberty to act upon unchanging truths. In constant transformation, I pilgrimage toward this end and challenge students to do the same.