In 1914 classically educated men destroyed the world. 1918 was a disaster where almost everything was worse than the promise that existed in 1913 . . . The vices of Europe fed and grew fat on the corpse of Christendom while the virtues were starved. If you educate classically, you should pause, stop, think about it. Why did the classically educated bring on the guns of August 1914? One deep problem was a disdain or a false superiority over industry, one... Read more
We live in perilous times. Classical education can help, but only if we take care. The myth that education is the answer apart from the rest of culture may make professors and teachers feel powerful, but prevents us from building the rest of the support structures we need to flourish. Schools are part of a strong civilization, but they are not the only part. The myth that there is One True Curriculum that will solve our problems for all time... Read more
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
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
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
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
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?” 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. “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! 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
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