Meindert De Jong’s "The Wheel on the House" is not merely about what we like. It is about what we need. Too often, announcements in our world that “We’re all in this together” are merely announcements from powerful people that they are in charge. De Jong’s beautiful tale is something different. Meindert De Jong [...]
Near the end of his essay "The Inner Ring," C.S. Lewis says, “To a young person, just entering on adult life, the world seems full of ‘insides,’ full of delightful intimacies and confidentialities, and the desire to enter them. But if he follows that desire, he will reach no ‘inside’ that is worth reaching.” In [...]
Just what is Christian education? Is it Protestant education, is it evangelical Christian education, or does it also encompass Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox viewpoints? More than sixty years ago, A.W. Tozer wrote: There is, unfortunately, a feeling in some quarters today that there is something innately wrong about learning, and that to be spiritual [...]
If we truly want to overcome the curse of racism, we need to begin with restoring the humanities, the voice of the human race, to their rightful place at the heart of any good, true and beautiful education. This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the premiere of Destiny, a politically-charged play by the Marxist [...]
American culture is surely decadent. Its decay is palpable to any sensitive observer who reads the feuilleton section of the local newspaper or attends a university. But is our decadence terminal? Is our civilization on a collision course with extinction? The Culture We Deserve by Jacques Barzun (200 pages, Wesleyan University Press, 1989) Politically America [...]
Thomas Aquinas’ cosmology and doctrine of the soul are vitalistic. Everything has a particular soul to it, and these souls have particular life-forces destined for particular ends. As a whole, the cosmos is meant to reflect and embody the graces of God: his beauty, love, and goodness. Such is to what all things are ultimately [...]
Many academics have forgotten the true and the good and have largely cut themselves loose from all philosophical moorings. Students under the tutelage of such professors are certain to confuse right with wrong, virtue with vice, good with evil, and authority with force, and to have no fixed axioms by which to orient themselves in [...]
Here I share a project that my daughter undertook and fulfilled weekly, over 20 weeks, when she was 12 years old. To: Rebecca Stern From: Daniel Klein RE: VIRTUES PROJECT Each Wednesday, by 20:00, email me your written thoughts on the virtue of the week. Your written thoughts should include answers to the following questions. [...]
Now we’ve always been a happiness oriented culture. “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” and so forth. Right? But it’s taken a particularly interesting turn: the topic of “meaning” and “meaning in life” is coming to the fore. People, more and more, are talking about not just sheer contentedness, but what it is for [...]
Pope Leo’s educational vision aligns directly with the Catholic understanding of God’s creative goodness: He sees education as proceeding from our foundation as made in God’s image, which sees us as more than mere passive recipients of being, but cooperative causes in its creation. “The authentic teacher arouses the desire for truth” is found early [...]
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 job of the teacher is to help orient students to and deepen their intimacy with reality itself. And the indispensable condition for a teacher being able to do this is not expertise, experience, knowledge, or pedagogical technique, however important these are, but literally being in love with the good. How do we enable [...]
I had not seen my former student, Adam, for a decade or so after his graduation from Hillsdale College when I ran into him and his young family at the supermarket. "You once asked me" he said, "for what purpose was the soul of man made. I had little in the way of an answer [...]
Christian higher education is in just as much of a crisis as the rest of the field. The smaller Christian schools are going to have to figure out what differentiates them from the rest of the competition. In most cases, their survival will require a return to the sources of the faith in which the [...]