The classical Christian educator and the progressive educator have radically different ideas of education. The two camps have virtually no real common ground concerning education’s means and ends—and the difference between the two is the difference between apples and arsenic. If we reminisce about the days when PBS aired the Anthology documentary on The Beatles, [...]
Classical education to be sure offers much that is wonderful. But the most important discoveries come by effort that is often painful. A joyful tour of the “true, good, and beautiful” without pain is likely a superficial substitute for a real education. When I see T-shirts and bumper stickers that declare, “I survived Catholic schools,” [...]
In almost every way, social media seems most like some crazy, corrupt thing lurking in Plato’s Cave. But nothing in the free world forces us to be cruel, nasty, hateful, or bigoted to our fellows. We are instead called to proclaim truth, goodness, and beauty. There are days, there are days, and, then, there are [...]
In an age of moral confusion, Martin Luther King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail" offers welcome clarity. Its rhetoric still has power today, with memorable phrases like "justice too long delayed is justice denied" and "Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability." But the heart of his argument, that man-made laws are just only [...]
They say a rising tide lifts all boats. The same might be said for many things in life. When standards are raised high, everyone benefits. The contrary is also true: Lower standards pull everyone down. […]
A satirical spoof on the pretentiousness of modern art, “Batman” episodes “Pop Goes the Joker” and “Flop Goes the Joker” are side-splittingly out-loud funny while being simultaneously the best exposé of the naked nonsense beneath the Emperor’s new clothes. The secret’s out. My dual identity has been discovered. By day, I spend my time in [...]
The real problem in the modern world is not that there are too many babies, but too few. In the end, both economics and environmentalism depend upon people. Money and the earth are made for man, and not man for money and the earth. The fashionable mindset among celebrities, royals, and too many ordinary people [...]
If America is polarized and directionless today, it is partly due to the cultural revolution that emanated from Woodstock. The solution is not to recreate Woodstock fifty years later, but to reject it as the cultural and moral disaster that it was. Woodstock represented what America would eventually become—a broken and dysfunctional society. It shows [...]
Secular liberals can only celebrate Philip K. Dick’s writing by filtering and censoring it, for among other things, it includes an unambiguous, carefully argued, and strident attack upon the central liberal sacrament—abortion. Philip K. Dick From Amazon’s The Man In The High Castle to the Hollywood films like Blade Runner and Minority Report, [...]
Images certainly can be much more compelling than mere words. But like words, how images are used and when they are used are opportunities for manipulation. The photograph is unnerving. One cannot look at it without it breaking your heart. It is the sort of image that sticks in your mind forever and haunts you [...]
As a sustained artistic school, modernism cannot endure. But classical art is eternal because the ideas it expresses are eternal. A resurrection of classical form does not represent a return to the past, real or imagined, but instead a return to sanity, a reorientation of the artistic eye back to its natural, fully human purpose [...]
We live in a state of decadence, of falling away, the more so for no longer naming it as such, and Thomas Mann’s way of laying the past to rest seems to me vastly better than the hatred of it accompanied by ignorance which characterizes the brutal branch of the phenomenon of decadence. For the [...]
Love is for persons, not for qualities or ideas, except only derivatively, that is, insofar as the latter exist in the former. To insist that love is love for this person is not an appeal to settle for someone with less than stellar qualifications—for “settling” is itself the attitude of the consumer who prudently resigns himself [...]
We wonder whether smartphones have somehow fundamentally altered our human nature, but ask why we were so vulnerable to addiction when they arrived on the scene. Technology amplifies, but does not alter, who we are. We are creatures with a deep and abiding desire to avoid the real. We seek to escape awareness of ourselves [...]