History matters. There is a central importance to what happened, because what is now is (in part) produced by what happened. That sounds so obvious, that students often ask: “Isn’t everything caused by what was? Aren’t we just a product of history?” Yes. Sort of. What is before is what made what is, but part of what is before are the stories we believed. These stories-great literature, inspired us, moved us, and made us what we are. They are not history, but... Read more
Tolkien began writing by being overwhelmed by the great sea wave that swept away Atlantis and so Lord of the Rings was born. So a scholar told me once, perhaps it is true. Certainly Numinor was much like Atlantis . . . Atlantis ends with a great wave sweeping the might of man under the ocean. People have approached me offering me maps to Atlantis when they heard my dissertation was on Timaeus. I looked, because maybe it was the start... Read more
Education is not getting a credential, but making the soul more like it should be or so Plato suggested at the very start of the Western discussion of the nature of learning. The soul, Plato tells us, as it is, is not so good. Plato argued for the immortality of the soul, accepted what reason demonstrated, but knew being deathless was not good enough. A zombie is undead, but lacks life and so lives in ugliness. Plato, as a forerunner of... Read more
We are distracting ourselves, not to death, that would be more interesting, but to shallowness. We consume ideas like a humming bird, flitting from idea to idea, but we face situations that require more than we can get in a fly-by. Eventually, hard problems come and those cannot be solved by slogans, memes, or mic drop answers. At the moment when depth is required, the shallow are insufficient: sans thought, sans experience, sans passion, sans everything. If we take some of... Read more
Culture is harder to create than destroy, just as books are easier to review than to write. The collection of our garbage, the flushing of our toilet, the groceries in our store are miracles with so many interlocking parts, so many engineering, pioneering geniuses that I pause over anyone suggestion that we disrupt culture. My Nana taught me to appreciate the street light: all that free energy making the dangerous darkness bright. Yet a culture can carry on only if... Read more
I go to a Church that tweaks the liturgy every few centuries, whether it needs it or not. We are not old-fashioned, just persistent to the point of puckishness. We have not yet capitulated to the Visigoths, let alone “secular conceptions of faith as a personal lifestyle preference.” We have resisted Lenin and radical forms of Islam all in the last fifty years. One can meet the survivors every Sunday! We persist and merely persisting seems disruptive to me. Most... Read more
We are too busy to have deep views about anything for which we are not paid. We are distracted and so shallow, a condition that Professor Alan Noble describes as “secularism.” We are distracting ourselves to death. In his new book, Disruptive Witness, Noble recommends some community ideas. The Saint Constantine School has adopted some, such as: Primary schools could move away from screens as much as possible and extend reading and silent-reading times. Noble rightly sees that such voluntary... Read more
The times, we are told, keep flowing like a river, perhaps the stream we cannot step into twice. Reading those changes aright can make a man wealthy, scrying them correctly half the time grants a man the reputation of wisdom, and being mostly wrong, but eloquent, allows ze to write for the Atlantic. The words of such prophets have been written on subway walls, even tenement halls, but there the failed prophet should treasure the sound of silence. This is... Read more
I have been told by an excellent poet never to write poetry for the public that has enough pain in these difficult times. Fair enough. Those who cannot, teach, and so my job has been to introduce college students to poetry (Blake! Tennyson! Hughes!) and hope they love what artists can do with words as much as I. Yet not everyone, God help them, followed the advice of my wise mentor. Instead, through an error of judgment, they wrote, they... Read more
Times are tough for everyone, but what if: Our faith has the resources to overcome the challenges of our times, but the church has often left those resources untapped. Professor Alan Noble has written Disruptive Witness, a must-read book. What he calls “secularism” and “distraction” threatens to prevent us from becoming whole and from talking to each other, comprehensibly witnessing in Christian terms. I am still unpersuaded that Noble’s use of “secularism” is useful, when “badly educated” or “mentally lazy”... Read more
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