My dear mom liked to collect very old books that were splendidly, terribly bad. She has a wonderful reading voice with great books, but she came into glory when she read bad literature. Mom once read a Christian novel from the Edwardian era that had gangsters saying gangster-things like “Fork over your cabbage.” People had eyes that were “twin pools.” We laughed . . . Hard. Perhaps the most endless entertainment came from books of “science” from by-gone days. Mothers... Read more
Socrates without the hope of orthodoxy leaves us at a loss. This is both frightening and challenging. I love teaching Socratically. At a minimum this means starting each class open to anything. Thirty years of experience reading great texts tells me you cannot know a great book until you can know why great people have loved that book. I try (God helping me) to read every book as if it were true, good, and beautiful. Until I can get Nietzsche as someone... Read more
Some books stay with you and influence all you do. When I was a boy, after eight, but before twelve, I read Nicholas and Alexandra. This book, and the many others I consumed on the Russian Revolution, left me with three distinct truths that have stayed with me: Personal piety cannot replace professional competence. Things may be bad, but sweeping away everything in a revolution will (almost) always be worse. If your revolution needs the murder of children, your revolution... Read more
We are in hard times and the famous, our elite, have failed us utterly. That is cause for sorrow, but not hopelessness. God cannot die, the image of God cannot be utterly effaced from the souls of living men, and so there is hope. The quiet person at the back might say one simple word and so change the course of history. Simon of Cyrene was in Jerusalem and forced to carry the cross of Jesus and so will never be... Read more
We should be kind and the kind man does not shout at the people he loves. Generally. The other night we turned into the wrong lane and one family member, very kindly, shouted to the driver to get into the other lane quickly. Something generally wrong, shouting at the beloved, turned out to be very right in a particular circumstance. Shouting was the greater kindness in this odd circumstance and to refuse to shout out of a desire to be “kind”... Read more
Civility in civil society is good as party manners are good, they keep a decent situation tolerable, but are dangerous in a bad one. Calls for civility usually come when the folks get uppity, either urban or rural poor, and express their anger through crudity. The polite put-downs of decades of educated opinion seem civil compared to the crudity of the obvious tyrants, but the underclass gets it. They are “heard,” but fundamentally ignored. Nobody considers that their deepest ideas might... Read more
In fifth grade I learned that big kids could be dangerous. The nerdy kids in fifth grade, and dear reader I was born a nerd, decided that we would play at Greco-Roman mythology using a jungle gym as our cosmos: the top was Olympus and the bottom Hades. The big kids, for reasons I still did not understand, were offended with our happy play. They stopped our fun, because they were the Big Kids. By sixth grade, I got tired... Read more
“Winning is it’s own justification,” say many about to commit a monstrous act. For a Christian the justice of a society is measure by the treatment of the weakest. Do the poor get equal justice or are the rich favored? Are the physically weak in greater danger than the strong? No society, not one made up of Christians certainly, ever will pass the test of justice perfectly. The world to come will bring perfect justice, but until that day (Maranatha!)... Read more
Picking Up My Shattered Pieces is the book you should take with you on vacation this summer. Why? This honest account of a happy marriage and death contains the truth: no story in this life ends “happily ever after.” Every story ends with someone bereaved and Gina Pastore shares her account of what this means. Don’t be afraid, because Pastore has written a hopeful book. Hers is one of the best accounts of grief since A Severe Mercy. Frank Pastore was in... Read more
My idea for a summer blockbuster: Could Philosophy Woman defeat the villains Money and Acclaim to save genuine education from the-for profit-prophets? She could have a secret identity as a teacher at an urban school: paging Ms. Diotima. Her lovable sidekick, Mr. Socrates, could provide comic relief and witty catchphrases. This is why Disney has yet to call me for film ideas, I suppose. Yet Christians must always oppose the love of money and the worship of power. This is not... Read more
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