Classical Education: Good Versions Can Save, Bad Versions Didn’t Stop World War I (1/5)

Last updated on: November 19, 2018 at 1:34 pm By John Mark N. Reynolds

As I write on the eleventh day in the eleventh month, set to publish at the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour, educators should pause, especially Christian educators, and realize that bad classical education did nothing to prevent the disasterous War. Bad classical education exterminated itself for several generations in Flander’s fields as men who learned Latin well, but were educated badly killed each other in World War I. The results were a barbaric Middle East, the monsters of Bolshevism... Read more

Heroic Losers: On Why Winning Is Not Always Winning

Last updated on: November 10, 2018 at 4:09 pm By John Mark N. Reynolds

We need more heroic losers. While getting more heroic losers, we might aspire to shed short-term winners and miserable losers. This begins when we realize that winning is not always virtuous for humans because in a broken cosmos, winning always come with a cost. God who knows the future can judge when the game is worth the price, but we can only guess and our guesses are often wrong. Failure is not always bad for us, because failure in the short... Read more

A Leadership Lesson from The Song of Roland or Why Charlemagne May Not Be Your Next College President, But You Might Consider Someone Like Him

Last updated on: November 9, 2018 at 8:34 pm By John Mark N. Reynolds

Leaders: We Need Them Choosing a leader is hard and our present few decades of electoral mess is not an encouraging example. What about leaders in churches? The Bible gives us some requirements, generally ignored, yet still there. A great many organizations in higher education are looking for new leaders as Boards discover things are not going as well as advertised. What are the characteristics of a leader who can actually lead and people follow who are not just being paid. The... Read more

Look to the Long Term

Last updated on: November 9, 2018 at 12:27 am By John Mark N. Reynolds

Far Better Irrelevant for Now than Unserious Forever Events can make us feel powerless, because we are, in fact, fairly powerless. Even in a Republic, my vote, my opinion is just one of many. That is as it should be, but means that I must not worry or stress when I cannot control outcomes I do not like. This is as hard as not being stressed when heading to the dentist. I know what I should feel, yet mental assent to the... Read more

Will Ye No Come Back Again: The Longing for Absent Leaders

Last updated on: November 8, 2018 at 10:24 pm By John Mark N. Reynolds

God help us, but we miss our leaders, mostly the leaders we have never had. We long for the return of the good King, but candidates are few in fact. We have a jolly tradition at any great feast we host: we toast absent friends, heroes, random folks from history we admire, and then sing loudly and defiantly: Bonnie Charlie’s noo awa Safely o’er the friendly main; He’rts will a’most break in twa Should he no’ come back again. Chorus... Read more

Don’t you want to be free? Black Thunder and the Question for Our Time (Arna Bontemps)

Last updated on: November 6, 2018 at 7:23 pm By John Mark N. Reynolds

“Don’t you want to be free?” That’s the question the enslaved people of the United States ask in Black Thunder, a novel that should be read by anyone who cares about the answer to the question. Arna Bontemps, a product of Christian education and the Harlam Renaissance, was bold enough to write a novel where powerful African-Americans said: “Yes.” He wrote in 1936 Los Angeles, Watts, when the Civil Rights movement was still thirty years away. Bontemps wanted to be... Read more

“Times were so horrible,” the young Evangelical Whig explained to his Nana

Last updated on: November 6, 2018 at 9:13 am By John Mark N. Reynolds

“Times were so horrible,” the young Evangelical Whig explained to his Nana. “We cannot go back to the pain.” The Nana had lived through the horrible times when the times were not black and white photographs, but her life in living color and yet she stubbornly, even resolutely, refused to vote in her own interest. The young Evangelical could only hope he could mobilize his demographic to vote in the elections lest his Nana return to a time for which... Read more

“We Cannot Go Back” says the Person Reviving Whiggery: The Self-Referential Incoherence of the Young Evangelical Whigs

Last updated on: November 4, 2018 at 3:14 pm By John Mark N. Reynolds

“We cannot go back! Do not be so nostalgic!” So says a certain kind of Evangelical, often young, though sometimes merely playing young in the morning mirror. We know they are wrong, because they are reviving (at best) eighteenth century Whiggery where if one merely listened to what our betters were saying and looked at what they were producing, we would see that history was inexorably, with some downs to our ups, getting better. Whiggery is the idea that keeps... Read more

Trust in the God Who Knows

Last updated on: November 3, 2018 at 5:26 pm By John Mark N. Reynolds

God knows. The cosmos is vast, but God knows our names and loves us. This is good news. We can trust a God who loves us as an individual and not just abstractly. God is, but God also loves us: not just corporate us, but you and me as people. The good God knows our deepest pain and our greatest delights and longs for an eternity full of joy with us. That God exists is true, but might have been... Read more

Thinking about the Old South (Arna Bontemps)

Last updated on: November 2, 2018 at 7:48 am By John Mark N. Reynolds

Antebellum. Americans need the truth and for many the truth begins with killing a lie: the antebellum South is a lost paradise. Instead, like Plato’s Atlantis, the antebellum South is a tyranny “sunk . . . until every drop of blood drawn with the lash (was) paid by another drawn with the sword.” Multiples of Lincoln’s four score and seven years have passed since that South existed and still we ponder the antebellum South. Grant racked Lee, but the rebel... Read more