Mission
We want to provide a unique environment to pursue intellectual inquiry and the examined life in community with others.
Our mission is built upon 5 Principles:
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✺ Intellectual rigor
We will support independent learners interested in serious, sustained engagement with texts of richness, depth, and lasting value.
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✺ Humanistic study
Our aim is to revitalize the study of philosophy, literature, and the other humanities as urgently relevant for contemporary life.
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✺ Self-governance and self-reliance
Proceeding from the belief that people, given great responsibility, will rise to the occasion, the Center will constitute a self-sufficient community.
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✺ Practical labor
Students will participate in the upkeep and maintenance of the farm and other collaborative tasks.
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✺ Contemplation and presence
We will provide a refuge from technologies of information and communication in order to foster the cultivation of attentional capacities in relation to art, nature, and the social world.
The Matthew Strother Center for The Examined Life will be a refuge for individuals who seek to live the life of the mind and, to adapt the words of Keats, become a soul. It will provide the space, time, and companionship to consider, as Matthew wrote, “who you are going to be in the world, not what.”
The impact and legacy of the Center will be measured by the future flourishing of its participants, by the enrichment of their sense of self during their residence, and by the ways that this, in turn, inspires them to live confidently, courageously, and hopefully.
“The straight river of my narrative has opened onto the wide deltas of the present, and looking out to sea there's nowhere to go but anywhere.”
Matthew Strother