Matthew Strother Center for
The Examined Life
We are a non-profit center of learning providing intellectual retreats in a farm in Catskill, New York, just two hours north of New York City.
We are dedicated to the pursuit of learning and intellectual inquiry, without expectation for an end product.
The Matthew Strother Center for the Examined Life is a place where sharing and cultivating knowledge are ends in themselves.
Our origin story
Matthew’s chief passion was study—thinking, reading, and writing, by himself and in community. His ambition was to live in sustained engagement with great books and big questions; to answer the call of wisdom and live the life of the mind.
It was Matthew’s vision to create a place of cooperative learning and living, a retreat from the busy world, to enact his commitments with others. His illness prevented him from moving forward with the project, but before his passing in 2023, Matthew and his partner Berta talked about creating a foundation that would carry out his plans and, as he said, “stand in for my spirit”.
The Matthew Strother Center for the Examined Life is dedicated to realizing that vision.
“I wanted to recalibrate my ambition to burn on purer sources: questions, awareness, curiosity, wonder; somewhere deeper down, the slow-burning coals of mortality.”
Matthew Strother