Teaching Truth-and Goodness and Beauty by Lindsey Brigham

Teaching Truth-and Goodness and Beauty by Lindsey Brigham

But to teach truth alone is to usher students into a world of firm foundations, pure proportion, and stately symmetry with no color or sound or scent—the world of the fable above. This world lacks all that makes the truth homey and habitable, lovely and lovable; little wonder that students tire of it, poke fun at it, seek to move out of it. It cannot be home for their souls, for it lacks goodness and beauty.

We cannot leave beauty out of our teaching. It is essential to fully forming human beings.

The Threat to Free Speech by Christina Hoff Sommers

The Threat to Free Speech by Christina Hoff Sommers

It is hard to know how our institutions of higher learning will find their way back to academic freedom, open inquiry, and mutual understanding. But as long as intersectional theory goes unchallenged, campus fanaticism will intensify.

She gets the danger we face as we try to shut down free speech.

Addicted to the Apocalypse by Ben Shapiro

Addicted to the Apocalypse by Ben Shapiro

When people who have never seen war begin championing wartime tactics with such alacrity, they bring actual violence closer. But this isn’t The Walking Dead. It’s not a Batman movie. It’s a constitutional republic with a social fabric that frays every time we jettison traditional morality for wartime tactics. I have to agree with Ben about toning down the rhetoric if we are going to actually be more effective.

From Americans to Americans by Kevin D. Williamson

From Americans to Americans by Kevin D. Williamson

If we follow the course we are on, we will see more unhappiness, more violence, more repressive national-security policies, less prosperity, less freedom, and less of anything that looks like the quite-good-enough America we already have.

If the right matches the left's rhetoric, we may get a real, and violent, civil war on our hands. Then our values will not be furthered but there is a real risk we will work against our own values.

The Funeral of a Great Myth ('Popular Evolution) by C.S. Lewis

The Funeral of a Great Myth ('Popular Evolution) by C.S. Lewis

In the science, Evolution is a theory about changes: in the Myth it is a fact about improvements. Thus a real scientist like Professor J.B.S. Haldane is at pains to point out that popular ideas of Evolution lay a wholly unjustified emphasis on those changes which have rendered creatures (by human standards) ‘better’ or more interesting. He adds, ‘We are therefore inclined to regard progress as the rule in evolution. Actually it is the exception, and for every case of it there are ten of degeneration.’ But the Myth simply expurgates the ten cases of degeneration. In the popular mind the word ‘Evolution’ conjures up a picture of things moving ‘onward and upwards’, and of nothing else whatsoever. And it might have been predicted that it would do so. Already, before science had spoken, the mythical imagination knew the kind of ‘Evolution’ it wanted. It wanted the Keatsian and Wagnerian kind: the gods superseding the Titans, and the young, joyous, careless, amorous Siegfried superseding the care-worn, anxious, treaty-entangled Wotan.

Lewis, at his clear-eyed best, slaying the dragon's of a false religion.

Why History Will Repay Your Love by Peggy Noonan

Why History Will Repay Your Love by Peggy Noonan

Knowing history will make you a better person. Mr. McCullough endorses Samuel Eliot Morison’s observation that reading history improves behavior by giving examples to emulate. He quotes John Adams: “We can’t guarantee success [in the Revolutionary War], but we can do something better. We can deserve it.” 

What a wonderful case for the study of real history!

Carpe Diem: U.S. Students Revive Latin and Greek by Nina Sovich

Carpe Diem: U.S. Students Revive Latin and Greek by Nina Sovich

Latin and Ancient Greek, once the purview of elite private and Catholic schools, are showing up in public school classrooms across the country. From 2000 to 2016, the number of students taking the National Latin Exam, has increased roughly 30% to 142,271 from 110,015, according to Clement Testing Services. Nevada and New Mexico showed the biggest recent growth.

So cool!

Sunday Schooling Our Kids out of Church by Tim Wright

Sunday Schooling Our Kids out of Church by Tim Wright

...by segregating our kids out of worship, we never assimilated them into the life of the congregation.  They had no touch points.  They had no experience. They had no connection with the main worship service—its liturgy, its music, its space, its environment, and its adults.  It was a foreign place to them.  And so…once they finished with the kids/or youth program, they left the church.

Definitely something worth thinking about. 

Be Careful The Trend You Set When Removing Confederate Monuments by Brad Schaeffer

Be Careful The Trend You Set When Removing Confederate Monuments by Brad Schaeffer

Think hard before moving forward. You may find yourself more in a more Orwellian place than you ever imagined. Whoever controls the present controls the past. It is a responsibility not to be taken lightly.

As a lover of history, I hate to see it desecrated. No one is perfect, but we lose sight of that when we condemn those of the past for failing to live up to our modern standards. History teaches us to learn from them, not to relegate them to a dustbin.

How College Summer-Reading Programs Are Failing Our Students — and Our Culture by Mark Tapson

How College Summer-Reading Programs Are Failing Our Students — and Our Culture by Mark Tapson

Disturbingly, however, students for decades now have been too often brainwashed into shunning the wisdom of Dead White Males, disconnecting themselves from our common culture, and instead, embracing a historical narrative of oppression and victimhood that molds a false identity for them based on tribal classifications of skin color, class, and gender. That way lies the death of the individual, of culture, and of civilization itself.

Sigh. More of the same insanity. 

Promoting ‘Captain Underpants’ To Reluctant Readers Doesn’t Help Them by Jessica Burke

Promoting ‘Captain Underpants’ To Reluctant Readers Doesn’t Help Them by Jessica Burke

A person’s imagination is a door of sorts to his soul. Michael D. O’Brien says in his book “A Landscape with Dragons” that the imagination is “a faculty of man’s soul that would help him to comprehend the invisible realities.” Children use their imaginations to help them begin to understand good and evil, right and wrong. We need to build our children’s imaginations up with stories of hope, nobility, and courage so that they will have a fountain of goodness to draw from for the trials of life.

Word.

American Retail’s Fast, Furious Decline by Kevin D. Williamson

American Retail’s Fast, Furious Decline  by Kevin D. Williamson

It often has been observed that the real value of a first job is not the money earned in that job: The real value of the first job is that it leads to the second job, and the third...But the decline of retail will mean fewer stores and fewer starting jobs at those stores, constricting the path from unskilled hourly worker to richly remunerated manager. Fewer people will have the opportunity to learn and to demonstrate those basic elements of personal accountability — keeping a schedule, making peace with difficult customers...

Kevin Williams is always original in this thinking and his take on the decline of retail is a case in point.

Your kids bored at school? Tell them to get over it by Laura Hanby Hudgens

Your kids bored at school? Tell them to get over it by Laura Hanby Hudgens

Unfortunately in a consumer-oriented educational system, words such as habit and discipline have all but gone by the wayside. We emphasize concepts like differentiation, higher-order thinking, cooperative learning and data-driven instruction over student responsibilities like organization, perseverance and hard work.

This woman is speaking my language!

Thinking Christianly about the Liberal Arts by Robert Woods

Thinking Christianly about the Liberal Arts by Robert Woods

A human who has reaped the full benefits of a liberal arts education knows how to recognize the true even when swimming in a sea of propaganda. He knows the good even in an age that humorously declares there is no good. The privileged human who has received that rarest of education will know and treasure the beautiful in an age of crass consumption.

Christianity and the liberal arts go perfectly together and is a great antidote for what ails our culture.

The Factor Behind Rising Child Suicide Rates That No One Wants to Talk About By Susan L.M. Goldberg

The Factor Behind Rising Child Suicide Rates That No One Wants to Talk About  By Susan L.M. Goldberg

Research by Jay Belsky in the 1980s showed that children who spent more than 20 hours per week in child care away from their primary caregiver before they were a year old were more aggressive and prone to behavioral problems in preschool.

Could suicide, depression, and ADHD be linked to the increase in child care? Wow