My Nana lived through the Great Depression, though when she told me about her experiences, life sounded neither great nor terribly depressing. Perhaps it was because in West Virginia life did not change that much. Small farms were not dependent on cash crops and so there was food. Jobs were harder to get (much!), but neighbors pulled together. Or so Nana said. One thing you learned listening to her wisdom was that people are people . . . even in... Read more
Why do we sit in rooms when Aristotle walked and talked? Socrates would walk out to the country and dialog. Plato pictured conversations that often were in motion. That was a hard question my students asked and I had no good answer, so we went outside and we walked our fields and talked. One student pointed out some acorns and we discussed Fall and death, but the life that comes from death. We kept walking and because it was Houston in... Read more
Halloween is coming. If you are convinced it is a pagan holiday, you are celebrating the wrong festival. Pagans had a fall holiday, Christians had a fall holiday. Some pagans became Christians and Christians appropriated some aspects of the pagan holiday to make a theological point. Modern pagans, who make up almost everything they do, have tried to “take back” some stuff we saved with an odd mix of Christian and Eastern theology as seen through the lens of Hollywood.... Read more
Aristotle had a problem. His students did not wish to do science, because mucking about with things like “worms” was not a worthy project for a gentleman. He wanted them to do research and science, but the delicate students thought it was beneath them. He says: If any person thinks the examination of the rest of the animal kingdom an unworthy task, he must hold in like disesteem the study of man. For no one can look at the primordia... Read more
When it comes to hard thinkers, it is all too easy to read them as judges. Does this guy line up with what I think? If so, then I can strip mine his writing for pithy quotes that make me seem smart! If not, then I can take him down and a critical essay is always easier to write. There is an entire style of Christian apologetics that takes on the job of standing in judgement of the greats. Do... Read more
The Matter of Britain, the story of King Arthur, has defied great story telling. There are good books about Arthur, Once and Future King is the best, and even a classic, L’Morte d’Arthur, but the story is better than any of the books. Of films and television we should not speak given the generally horrible quality of the product except to say that The Sword in the Stone is a pleasant little film made while Walt Disney was dying, Search for the Holy Grail is funny,... Read more
W.E.B. DuBois inspires me to do my job: educate students classically for leadership in Houston, Texas, and the United States. His work reminds me that there is a “talented tenth” that needs what we are offering and much of what puts a student in that tenth is desire. Students cannot do whatever they want academically, but they can do more than most of us think. He understood that most of us do not wish to be leaders and it is the... Read more
When I was a little boy, a go-to author was Thornton W. Burgess, because he simply was happy, kind, and gentle. There is nothing complicated about a Burgess book which creates an animal civilization that may never have existed in this actual world, but does exist in the mind of every child. This is nature as it-sort-of-is if most animals were jolly misters and misses and even the bad ones are not so bad. These are not great books, but... Read more
Do we need a new conservative party? At the time of Barry Goldwater, the Party of Lincoln doubled down on her conservative roots, but also alienated African-American voters. Some of this was accidental and some was intentional in a cynical ploy that culminated in the “Southern Strategy” of the Richard Nixon campaign. Millions of mainstream Republicans who were conservative and also supported civil rights did not notice the change, but millions of others did and left the Party of their... Read more
Papaw Earl was hard to beat. He would appear broke in Monopoly and my hopes would rise and from somewhere the money would appear. I never won. Once I played more than thirteen games of checkers with him to beat him once when he grew distracted. I would like to tell you I was ashamed, but I was not. Since he never lied, when he told me a story about a visit to a grave yard, I believed him. He... Read more
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