On a crisp autumn Sunday morning, in a town nestled beneath towering bluffs on the Minnesotan banks of the Mississippi River, a nineteen-year-old boy stood near the steps of a church in which he knew not a soul, wondering if the answers to his doubts about his faith might lie within.

We can safely assume that when Fortune magazine sent James Agee from the Chrysler Building to the cotton fields of Alabama, at the height of the Great Depression, they did not expect him to return with a piece of writing they would never publish, and which would become, for nearly 80 years, a lacuna in the realm of American letters.

In the confused and frightening days following the attacks on America in September of 2001, an armed Texas man with a swollen sense of nationalistic vengeance sets out in violent jihad, shooting three men he perceives to be Arab Muslims, and killing two of them.

In Plato, there is but one historical figure. But the man’s philosophy, so elegant and elemental, marked a major leap in the Western history of human thought. Plato gave first shape to the same questions of value and meaning that baffle us today, more than 2,000 years later.