Today Christians of all stripes are responding in defense of the embattled family, but our eventual success will be enabled by the image of the Madonna, the Mother of God, especially as the "Stabat Mater," the Mother standing beneath the cross of her bruised and broken Son, suffering more than any other human creature has [...]
For a thousand years, liberal education shaped the moral imagination of succeeding generations, almost unaware that it was freeing them from the coercive obsessions of their political masters. Reading classics like Anne of Green Gables, Farmer Boy, or To Kill a Mockingbird, some parents meditate on the adolescents portrayed—teenagers eager to master the virtues of [...]
The ultimate purpose of virtue is to make us capable of friendship, of sacrificing our own good for the good of another, thus nurturing that mutual happiness and trust with another self. We know good families, totally devoted to their children, who’ve been blind-sided by woke “identity politics,” confusing and hijacking their kids. In three [...]
Saying that government cannot educate is not a partisan political position, but a simple statement of fact: government cannot educate, because government cannot love. Even more bluntly, government should not even try to run institutions of love, because, slowly but surely, its administrators inevitably pervert them in their desire for security or lust for power. [...]
America’s Christian culture began to erode at the turn of the 20th century, with the rise of bureaucratic public schools. The belated Christian reactions to this were homeschooling, parent-led Christian schools, co-ops and pods, and now classical charter schools. Yet, when set alongside their agnostic fellow citizens, Next-gen Christians have proven equally susceptible to loneliness, [...]
The challenge we face today is humanizing a Bureaucratic Regime, just as our ancestors humanized a German warrior regime. We’re in the position of the Apostle Paul, handcuffed to a Praetorian guard. As the Bubble grows more psychotic and inhumane, opportunities for evangelistic kindness and witness multiply exponentially. As we survey our emerging Bureaucratic Regime [...]
Scientism’s prophets began creating “fauxtastrophes,” cosmic pseudo-calamities that would satisfy our irrepressible hunger for transcendence—the natural expectation of divine retribution—and affirm our dependence on their priestly caste. Tattooed Cockney podcaster Russell Brand said it best: “If science and progress are the solution to all our problems, then it’s important that pharmaceutical companies and science more [...]
The West is split by a new cosmology or religion, pitting a faith in Divine Retribution against a founding faith in Divine Redemption, those who trust a Providential Creation versus those who evangelize a Universal Catastrophe. We’re now embroiled in a culture war, yet the insurgents’ purpose and origin remain obscure. A random collection of [...]
Our cultural confusions, especially among the educated, reveal a language desperately in need of repair, a reality in need of rediscovery. Differences in rank, in particular, were obvious until the dawn of modern scientism, the political ideology of technocratic materialism. An extremely liberal, atheist British comedian came out in support of Britain’s new free speech [...]
Shakespeare’s plays are an education in human nature, an encyclopedia of experience, to compare and contrast with all the people in our daily lives. What we see in Shakespeare’s plays are real persons, like the all flawed folks around us, coming to terms with their “backstories”—what they’ve built or destroyed—and being redeemed by love. Simply [...]
We have no way of knowing whether the twenty-first-century collapse is yet another momentary stumble or finally the Dark Age. Like good Carolingians, however, we keep looking backwards for our recovery, trying to rebuild what we once had. Christopher Dawson’s prophetic The Making of Europe (1932) ends where the Gentle Reader might expect such a book to [...]
The everyday conversation of a free society depends on trust in our commonsense experience of reality. Contemporary errors about the True, Good, and Beautiful are not simply mistaken explanations. They are lies, distorting and misrepresenting the experiences themselves, and cannot explain our real experience of Transcendence. Many parents are discovering that there is something seriously [...]
Many parents, ministers, camp councillors, and even school teachers are trying to teach virtue to the young, simply by means of lists and definitions. And surely definitions are useful... eventually. But the primary means by which kids grow in virtue are their models and heroes, seen as whole characters. In my mid-twenties, I had an [...]