Life passes and makes what once was good, a shame. My love, still difficult to overcome, for the song Total Eclipse of the Heart is one of those shames. Once it was acceptable to love this song, then it was a guilty pleasure, and now people just look at you with pity. A song is in trouble when the parody is better than the music video. In honor of tomorrow’s eclipse, I have decided to face my fears and exegete the... Read more
“Beauty had charms to tame the savage beast,” so Disney and fairy tales tell us. If this is so, then why do we spend so much time in ugly places. We work in cubicles and we send our children to rooms built for utility and not for beauty? We love beauty so much that billions are made promising beauty. Nobody would choose to sit in an ugly room if they had a choice. We may be sending beautiful students and... Read more
The proper role of the Federal Government is to stand between white nationalists and the African Americans they wish to enslave or oppress. Read more
Satan is real, he is active, and he must be opposed. Christianity suggests this is true and human experience fits that suggestion. Men like Rasputin have a diabolical charm, able to deceive even decent people. I have known men like he was. The vessels change, but the devils do not. (more…) Read more
This birthday Mom and Dad bought me a box of candy I loved as a child including hard to find candy cigarettes and bubblegum cigars. Wonderful as nostalgia, I have almost finished off the box (wax mustaches! coke bottle candy!), but it is worth asking: did tobacco shaped candy products make us more likely to smoke? Looks like it. Though it did not make me a frequent smoker, I did play detective using the candy cigarettes.* I do not mourn... Read more
I started a new children series and stopped, not because I was offended, but because I have read the book already, generally several times. Here are some themes that could use a timeout (along with Captain Underpants): Schools hate imagination and teachers are bad. Back when CS Lewis dared take on stultifying schools in The Silver Chair the idea was fresh. No more slavish worship of school and teachers as found in the nearly unreadable Tom Brown at School. Yet somehow, the... Read more
Basic moral rule: if you see evil, call it evil. Read more
Some advice is so good it works for everyone. At the kindergarten through college program, where I work, there is a common element to being a student. Sure the college students do not have to worry about eating crayons and the fifth grade does not need the complete Plato (yet!), but if you move from a seventh grade discussion of Phaedo to one in college, you see the commonality. Here are ten things everyone should do: I. Don’t take a smart phone to... Read more
Nationalism is not patriotism. "Blood and soil" nationalism has a particularly evil history and in the lifetime of my father, destroyed millions of human beings. Read more
There is a reason the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. We should not love anything disproportionately or inappropriately, but it is worse when out of control loves are detached from reality. If we love a friend poorly, at least we are loving a person and there is hope that he or she will be able to correct you! If we love an imaginary friend disproportionately, even as a child, then this can be devastating. There is less... Read more
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