Years ago, an acquaintance of mine, one Thomas Sheehan, wrote a book entitled The First Coming in which he argued that the life and death of Jesus constituted the first, only, and real coming of the Christ to earth. He argued that there was and will be no second coming because Christ accomplished his task…

This part of Plato’s philosophy is perhaps the most well-known of his many contributions to ancient Greek thought. Not only did it become the foundation for his political theory, but it even became a kind of paradigm for the Western view of reality as a whole. Here, in Book Seven of his Republic, Plato offers…