The most dangerous thing my wife ever placed in our house was a headboard with a shelf. Every night my near sighted self is tempted to place objects on this shelf and if you have never been hit in the head by an early iPad, then you do not know how Steve Jobs lied about the weight of the first devices. Now imagine a giant mug of The Saint Constantine School perched perilously above your head and the image of... Read more
We need to see the man, say what incantation is necessary to be the man. Homer’s Odyssey begins: ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, Of the man to me speak, Muse, “many ways” Notice that the Muse comes between the man and his chief characteristic in the order of the words of the line. The man is a man of many ways (“tricky” like Brer Rabbit). Even the trickster runs out of tricks when facing the gods or fate. Our hero is like... Read more
My Mom would send me outside, despite protests, and tell me to come back when the street light (yes, singular) came on. I might dam the “creek,” a rivulet so small that it was often dry, but seemed to me a major body of water or build a “fort,” but come inside? No. As for dirty, when Dad cut the grass, we would roll down the hill until we turned green. Grass stains are forever . . .sorry Mom. Imagine... Read more
The alt-right is dystopian fantasy for adolescent boys of any chronological age. Sadly, unlike Hunger Games or other young adult literature, the message of the alt-Right seems eager to bring on rather than avoid the dystopian future. I love the West, because it is my home, but the West has no monopoly on good ideas or interesting history. Say “China” and that is enough to prove the point, but even the tiniest ethnic group has something to teach us. Pity the... Read more
If the alt-Right (the Ku Klux Klan with Twitter and irony) is to be believed, my race is dying out. I am, by American standards, perhaps the whitest person alive. My family came to the Jamestown area sometime in the seventeenth century . . . so genetics says and unlike the alt-Right genetics, does not lie. Because we kept moving west, the family ended up almost in heaven in what was then western Virginia. We saw Yorktown and then when... Read more
Bad discussions happen when one person in the discussion gives a strong view and the minute he is pressed on his ideas retreats smirking: “I am being ironic to expose the political correctness of our time.” You have wasted time talking to a person in bad faith with the added irritant that the fellow claims you’re a fool not to have recognized his game. College sophomores in dialectical programs like The Saint Constantine School can fall into this trap if... Read more
If you are a Christian, black lives matter. “But wait,” we start to say, “Don’t. . . ” Stop. Think about it. Don’t say it. This last weekend marked the anniversary of Emmett Till’s murder for the “crime” of daring to flirt with a white woman. This was a mere sixty years ago. Look at this horrific image. This picture was taken in my grandfather’s generation. This is not ancient history and the evil that caused lynching has not ended. We... Read more
Of all the things I expected when I got a bust of James Garfield (circa 1880), one of those things was not that it would become: The Voice of James Garfield. Yet this is what happens when one must go from college students to kindergarteners in the space of one hour. I work at an Orthodox, classical school that extends from kindergarten through college and James Garfield is an example to us at every level. . . and maybe he can serve... Read more
Many of us are mentally lost, because we never found an academic home. We root for the school team, especially if we are in a state like Texas, but our academic life was autonomous or at best centered in the department of the major we chose. This cuts us off from close fellowship with people who are academically different . . . there is value in the engineering student hanging with the theater major! That is a loss and we... Read more
I know one student with too much self-esteem for every ten I know with too little. This isn’t science, just an anecdote from a teacher. We are a strange and glorious experiment . . . kindergarten through college education. Imagine a college student being in the same “house” as a five year old and both of them gardening, listening to stories, learning to think, playing music (even if at different times and rooms)! One thing this experiment helps me to... Read more
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