The Family: Together in God’s Presence by John and Noel Piper

The Family: Together in God’s Presence by John and Noel Piper

Children should see how Mom and Dad bow their heads in earnest prayer during the prelude and other non-directed times. They should see how Mom and Dad sing praise to God with joy in their faces, and how they listen hungrily to His word. They should catch the spirit of their parents meeting the living God.

Something seems wrong when parents want to take their children in the formative years and put them with other children and other adults to form their attitude and behavior in worship. Parents should be jealous to model for their children the tremendous value they put on reverence in the presence of Almighty God.

This is a powerful and convicting piece, written decades ago. I wish I had seen it then.

‘A People Prepared’ By Kevin D. Williamson

‘A People Prepared’ By Kevin D. Williamson

Children who have not been taught any better think only of themselves. But we can be taught. As it turns out, we can learn to think, and learn to be human. As it turns out, you can get there from here, here being Bethlehem, its filth and its indifference. 

He shall go before him in the spirit and power of Elias, to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just; to make ready a people prepared for the Lord. 

Happiness, like much else, is learned. For a long time, I thought that this time of year would always be for me a time of bitterness and regret, mourning for things that were not lost because they were never in my possession to begin with. But there is not any reason for that. No good one, anyway. I have a different kind of family now and blessings beyond counting. I know that my Redeemer liveth.

This has got to be one of the most powerful articles I have ever read. What a story of redemption!

Learning for Liberty by Joseph Clair

Learning for Liberty by Joseph Clair

The true aim of a college education is the development of a citizen: a free person. A free person is not merely freed from certain things, but is freed to and for certain things. This picture of education that came down to us from Greek, Roman, and Christian sources (with important contributions from Jewish and Islamic thought and culture) tells the story of freedom for a way of life—a way of life understood as the movement from slavery to freedom to service above oneself. The story consists of four interlocking notions of freedom: intellectual, political, economic, and spiritual. 

I couldn't agree more!

The Countercultural Idea of a Christian University by Ted McAllister, Andrew Yuengert

The Countercultural Idea of a Christian University by Ted McAllister, Andrew Yuengert

This vision of truth is capable of ordering human life. It is desperately needed by us, by our students, and by our culture. By its nature it is invisible to the modern mind: it exists but cannot be encompassed by any formula or analytical frame. It is beyond the boundaries of any one discipline or ideological program. We do not create this vision to use it; instead, we enter into it and invite others. We approach its environs in earnest, respectful conversation by finding the limits of each discipline and relating each to each, by our growth in humility about what partial knowledge and power can accomplish. This vision is within the grasp of a Christian university.

I love this defense of the principles that SHOULD motivate a university, but are unfortunately rare.

Edmund Burke on Revolutionary Armies and Taxes By Bradley J. Birzer

Edmund Burke on Revolutionary Armies and Taxes By Bradley J. Birzer

As with all things, liberty is a good that can be easily perverted, especially when one takes it out of context, exaggerating its gifts at the expense of the gift giver. No free society can exist unless individual persons restrain their own passions and govern their own souls.

This something I need to keep and reflect on when I teach this book... In fact, Birzer has a whole series I will need to peruse here.

Word and Anti-Word: A Christian Humanist Meditation By Bradley J. Birzer

Word and Anti-Word: A Christian Humanist Meditation By Bradley J. Birzer

Each of these persons played his part in the Economy of the West, forcing us to confront and acknowledge his or her sacrifice for Western Civilization and for, most importantly, Christian civilization. Such acts re-center us, moving us toward wholeness. Each such act reflects the true Act, the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross.

This stunning article (from 2013!) traces the saviors of Western Civilization through its darkest times with beauty and persuasion.

Preaching a Conspiracy Theory by Allen C. Guelzo

Preaching a Conspiracy Theory by Allen C. Guelzo

It is the bitterest of ironies that the 1619 Project dispenses this malediction from the chair of ultimate cultural privilege in America, because in no human society has an enslaved people suddenly found itself vaulted into positions of such privilege, and with the consent—even the approbation—of those who were once the enslavers. The 156 years since emancipation are less than a second on human history’s long clock, so that such a transformation is more in the nature of a miracle to be celebrated than a failure to be deplored for any seeming slowness. It is a miracle Frederick Douglass celebrated; it is a miracle Sergeant William Carney celebrated on the ramparts of Fort Wagner; it is a miracle Dorie Miller and the Tuskegee Airmen celebrated; and it is a miracle Colin Powell and Ben Carson have celebrated. Why not the 1619 Project?

One of my favorite historians writing on the travesty that is the 1619 Project.

This Pilgrim Republic by Kevin Williamson

This Pilgrim Republic by Kevin Williamson

It was the Puritans’ hatred of idolatry and their disgust at idols that enabled colonial Americans to escape so heroically from the intellectual confines of their times and imagine a form of government fit for the life they desired for themselves, and this act of radical imagination spread from Puritan New England to the rest of the colonies and to American civilization at large. With the example of the Divine Covenant before them, the challenge of negotiating a temporal and administrative covenant among themselves was daunting — but possible. It was possible because they were able to think that which had been unthinkable.

Kevin Williamson has done it again with his insight into religion and history.

And the Fair Land by WSJ Editors

And the Fair Land by WSJ Editors

But we can all remind ourselves that the richness of this country was not born in the resources of the earth, though they be plentiful, but in the men that took its measure. For that reminder is everywhere—in the cities, towns, farms, roads, factories, homes, hospitals, schools that spread everywhere over that wilderness.

We can remind ourselves that for all our social discord we yet remain the longest enduring society of free men governing themselves without benefit of kings or dictators. Being so, we are the marvel and the mystery of the world, for that enduring liberty is no less a blessing than the abundance of the earth.

And we might remind ourselves also, that if those men setting out from Delftshaven had been daunted by the troubles they saw around them, then we could not this autumn be thankful for a fair land.

This partner piece to "A Desolate Wilderness" rings with beauty and hopefulness for our American experiment.

The Desolate Wilderness by Nathaniel Morton

The Desolate Wilderness by Nathaniel Morton

Besides, what could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wilde beasts and wilde men? and what multitudes of them there were, they then knew not: for which way soever they turned their eyes (save upward to Heaven) they could have but little solace or content in respect of any outward object; for summer being ended, all things stand in appearance with a weatherbeaten face, and the whole country, full of woods and thickets, represented a wild and savage hew.

Beautiful and tragic reminder of what our ancestors faced to bring us what we enjoy today as free Americans.

Making Capitalism Great Again? by William McGurn

Making Capitalism Great Again? by William McGurn

The voluntary relationship between buyer and seller at the heart of the free market isn’t the love of neighbor commanded by the Gospel. But in making market success depend on anticipating the needs of the other, it’s perhaps not as far removed as we might think.

Excellent rebuttal to the idea that the market is immoral and needs government intervention to right the ship.

“Faith and reason are mutually reinforcing” by Clarence Thomas

“Faith and reason are mutually reinforcing” by Clarence Thomas

Students, faculty, administrators, and friends of Hillsdale, let this Chapel be more than just an impressive building. Let it be a place where people enter the presence of a majestic God. Let it be a house of worship, of prayer, of meditation, and of celebration before God. Let it be a haven of rest for the weary, a place of healing for the wounded, a place of comfort for the grieving, and a source of hope for the despairing and forgotten. 

Let it point to a day when “the dwelling of God” will be “with men,” when God himself will “wipe away every tear” and mend every wound. Let it be a place where tomorrow’s leaders discern their callings and grow firm in their convictions. Let it stand as a bold declaration to a watching world that faith and learning are rightly understood as complements, and that both are essential to the preservation of the blessings of liberty. 

Let this Chapel equip and inspire us to honor God in whatever He calls us to do. For as Saint Paul wrote in his Letter to the Romans, “From Him and through Him and to Him are all things. To Him be the glory forever. Amen.”

This a beautiful dedication speech given for Hillsdale College's Christ Chapel by Justice Clarence Thomas. Just another reason to love the college.

In Defense of Latin: Per Angusta ad Augusta by Kate Deddens

In Defense of Latin: Per Angusta ad Augusta by Kate Deddens

These benefits of traveling the challenging paths of learning Latin demonstrate that through wrestling with difficulties, nobility may be obtained.

A great article with a unique argument for studying Latin

Hallowed Ground by Ray Domanico

Hallowed Ground by Ray Domanico

In pursuing their private mission, schools like All Hallows provide an invaluable service to their communities. Their success predates the most recent era of public school reform, now fading in many quarters. These religious schools continue to operate, thanks to the generosity of alumni, civic-minded individuals, and targeted scholarship programs. Donors and supporters are doing what states have failed to do: sustain schools that provide real educational opportunity to disadvantaged students.

Great article about an all-boys Catholic school accomplishing the "impossible."

Founding Deists and Other Unicorns by James Bruce

Founding Deists and Other Unicorns by James Bruce 

In today’s fights over religious establishment, liberty, and accommodation, our assumption that America did not have a Christian founding leads us to embrace the wrong conclusions—or perhaps just assumptions—about what the founders would have wanted religion in our public life to look like. 

Great reminder of what our Founders actually believed and why it matters.

1776, not 1619 by Arthur Milikh

1776, not 1619 by Arthur Milikh

Black Americans have been treated in a grossly unjust fashion throughout our history. But the Declaration and the Constitution themselves, according to the Founders’ intentions, contain the principles through which justice would come, as Fredrick Douglass and, later, Martin Luther King, Jr. believed. These countervailing facts and statements, should produce a more balanced view of America’s Founding. 

Well-written piece responding to the NYT 1619 project.

How Steam and Chips Remade the World by John Steele Gordon

How Steam and Chips Remade the World by John Steele Gordon

As the railroad was for the steam engine, the internet is the microprocessor’s most significant subsidiary invention. It revolutionized retailing, news distribution, entertainment, communication and much more.

Like cheap energy, cheap information has created enormous new fortunes, ineluctably increasing wealth inequality. But also like cheap energy, the source of those fortunes has given nearly everybody a far higher standard of living. 

To understand how profound the microprocessor revolution has been, consider this. The great science writer Arthur Clarke once noted that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. A man from half a century ago would surely regard the now-ubiquitous smartphone as magic.

A celebration of technological innovation. 

The Freedom of a Christian Nation by Brad Littlejohn

The Freedom of a Christian Nation by Brad Littlejohn

For all their insight, Reformers like Vermigli and Hooker will not provide us sufficient resources to counter such claims. Instead, we must look to Luther himself, with his crucial but neglected theology of the “three estates”—family, church, and state—and even more to the great early Protestant political theorist Johannes Althusius, who took up his pen at the same time as Hooker to propose a bottom-up theory of the state as a “community of communities” that would reject papal pretensions, head off the ambitions of absolute rulers and despotic national states, and lay a groundwork for durable individual liberty. No effort toward a “Protestant Christendom” will get airborne without the guiding lights of Hookerian nationalism and Althusian federalism.

Fascinating and complex article on the fallout from the Reformation in terms of liberty.

She BenOpped. It Didn’t Work by Rod Dreher

She BenOpped. It Didn’t Work by Rod Dreher

There are no guarantees. If you read The Benedict Option looking for the perfect solution, the 10-point plan that will keep your family Christian, you’re not going to find it. That’s because it doesn’t exist. 

Sad story from a homeschooling mom and her grown children's loss of faith.

Rembrandt Painted The Best Portrait Of Freedom Ever, And Here It Is by Andrei Illarionov

Rembrandt Painted The Best Portrait Of Freedom Ever, And Here It Is by Andrei Illarionov

Notably, The Night Watch is a group portrait. Although freedom is often perceived as an individual (personal) quality, its maintenance and protection require group efforts. Regardless of how free, talented, creative, independent, or strong an individual is, alone he or she is unable to protect his or her property and loved ones in a clash with a band of gangsters, regardless of whether those gangsters are a private enterprise or agents of a state. Collective efforts are necessary to protect personal freedom.

This would make a good Art Journal project.

“What, to a Slave, is the Fourth of July?” by Eric Wearne

“What, to a Slave, is the Fourth of July?” by Eric Wearne

The climax of the speech is incredibly uncomfortable, and one can certainly imagine a room of northern elites, self-satisfied in their invitation of this former slave, sweating profusely from the summer heat and from their discomfort, but not quite able to argue against Douglass’ points.

One of the most important speeches ever uttered.

The Flagrant Distortions and Subtle Lies of the ‘1619 Project’ by Rich Lowry

The Flagrant Distortions and Subtle Lies of the ‘1619 Project’ by Rich Lowry

This gets at the crux of the matter. The American past has had its share of both hypocrisy and nobility. Truthfulness demands that we acknowledge both. Americans were hypocrites in extolling liberty and grounding our national identity to a significant extent in it, while at the same tolerating or even embracing slavery. But, over time, the principles and rhetoric of freedom proved powerful tools against slavery.

The stakes in getting this right are large. If they succeed in making America only about the hypocrisy, the architects of the 1619 Project will deny the country’s nobility to the rising generation. They will have made America, in Huntington’s terms, a lie pure and simple, and enshrined their own hostile, mythologized account of our history.

Great historical refutation of the NYT 1619 project.

Elites Against Western Civilization by Joel Kotkin

Elites Against Western Civilization by Joel Kotkin

If one does not even know about the complex legacy underpinning democracy, including the drive for individual freedom and open discussion, one is not likely to understand when it is in peril. If we are to save our uniquely open civilization, we must counter the clerisy’s efforts to discredit our past and demolish our future.

Kotkin at his best describing our cultural catastrophe.

Finding a faith that is stronger than death — or my family’s rejection by Min Read

Finding a faith that is stronger than death — or my family’s rejection by Min Read

When I lost the Jehovah’s Witnesses, I ultimately gained everything. Those 25 people taking care of me? Two atheists, a Muslim, a Jew, gay people both churched and not, and traditional church folks like me. None of them would have been accepted by the faith I left behind — where salvation was only for a chosen few. I want an afterlife like my life has been: one like Revelation 7:9, a great multitude of diverse people existing together in love of each other and their Creator. It’s not up to me to say who qualifies.In my search, I left behind conditional, behavior-based love and traded it for the unconditional grace shown by a true family, whose bonds have nothing to do with DNA.And I’m dying grateful for that.

What a fascinating and yet very sad article. I’m very sad that the author passed away, especially at my age. But it was an interesting insight into somebody who “found faith I could do business with.“ She found a Christianity without any real need for Christ. She’s so eloquent and so clear and now she’s gone. Very sad

Trans: The Sexual Revolution Turns Totalitarian By Rod Dreher

Trans: The Sexual Revolution Turns Totalitarian by Rod Dreher

Believe what you want to believe about Ukrainian diplomacy, health care policy, immigration, and so forth. There is almost nothing more fundamental to a society than the way it regards males and females. Does it not trouble you even a little bit that we can’t have a public discussion about transgenderism beyond talking about whether it’s one of the greatest things in history, or absolutely the greatest thing in history? 

One of my favorite thinkers sounding the alarm over a subject that can only end badly.

Why Tolstoy and Dostoevsky Matter Now More Than Ever by Tim McIntosh

Why Tolstoy and Dostoevsky Matter Now More Than Ever by Tim McIntosh

Nevertheless, Christianity was “the dominating force” in the works of both novelists (William Lyon Phelps, Essays on Russian Novelists, 1911). Both knew something neglected by the best of modern novelists: The human heart inhales hope for transcendence. Both novelists portrayed their heroes and heroines as wandering hearts, unprotected by doctrinal armor, exposed to the same tribulations and rewards that God visited upon Job. Both novelists obsess over eternal questions — giving their work a fresh relevancy in our culture preoccupied with an ethics of utility.

Good thoughts for the study of Dostoevsky and Utilitarianism

What Scares Me about Classical Education by Joshua Dyson

What Scares Me about Classical Education by Joshua Dyson

This leaves us as classical educators in the role of total dependence upon God. We are putting “all our eggs in this one basket“ and trusting that God will come through with His Grace. I remember hearing a preacher ask, “What are you asking God to do that only He can do, so that when He does it He will get all the glory for it?” That is indeed what we are asking and needing God to do for our students. Because if God doesn’t come through for these students, this whole classical education project will go down as one of the most harmful endeavors to the world ever promulgated by Christians.

A sobering read.

Conservatives Should Watch More Television by Kevin D. Williamson

Conservatives Should Watch More Television by Kevin D. Williamson

The conservative movement in the United States, which identifies itself too closely with the Republican party, is at a low cultural ebb (it is certainly fashionable to be anti-Trump), but American popular culture for the past 20 years nonetheless has been suffused with deeply conservative sentiment — even though conservatives often fail to understand or appreciate it. We should watch less cable news and more drama and comedy.

I love Kevin Williamson's take on most things. He's certainly always original!

Screens Are Changing the Way We Read Scripture by Karen Swallow Prior

Screens Are Changing the Way We Read Scripture by Karen Swallow Prior

In a Word-centered faith, the ability to read well is central. As a “People of the Book,” Christians have a particular calling to preserve and promote the gift of deep reading from physical Bibles

Interesting take on the effect of digital Bibles on our comprehension and understanding.

The 1519 Project: How Early Spanish Explorers Took Down A Mass-Murdering Indigenous Cult by Adam Mill

The 1519 Project: How Early Spanish Explorers Took Down A Mass-Murdering Indigenous Cult by Adam Mill

The Aztecs brutal system depended on a steady supply of prisoners of war and human children collected from the empire’s subjects as “taxes.” The scale of the murder one could find in just a single outlying Aztec city was astounding. Abbot relays, “they witnessed the most appalling indications of the horrid atrocities of pagan idolatry. They found, piled in order, as they judged, one hundred thousand skulls of human victims who had been offered in sacrifice to their gods.”

When assigning blame for history's horrors, we would do well to look, sometimes, at who exactly was being tormented.

Jerusalem Meets Athens in New Jersey by Elliot Kaufman

Jerusalem Meets Athens in New Jersey by Elliot Kaufman

Graduates of Heichal HaTorah should be “budding Talmud scholars,” says Rabbi Aryeh Stechler, headmaster of the all-boys Orthodox Jewish yeshiva high school. That’s not all. The boys should also appreciate “how unique this country’s values are, and how much America has done for the Jews.”

This just makes me happy!

A Republic, If You Can Keep It: Or, Why Victimhood and Fear Won’t Preserve Liberty by David French

A Republic, If You Can Keep It: Or, Why Victimhood and Fear Won’t Preserve Liberty by David French

Build on the bravery of past generations, so that the next generation doesn’t have to bear the same risks. As I said before, a very few brave students shredded the campus speech-code regime, a regime that looked like a legal and cultural juggernaut a few short years ago. Now there is a need for a few more brave students — a few more brave Americans — to stand with those people who face unjustified and illiberal shame campaigns, to plant your flag beside theirs.

David French has literally fought and encourages us to do the same.

Where Lincoln Stood on Slavery By Carl M. Cannon

Where Lincoln Stood on Slavery By Carl M. Cannon

In an 1864 letter to a friend from Kentucky, a newspaperman named Albert G. Hodges, Lincoln wrote, “I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel.” A month before he died, in a speech to the 140th Indiana Regiment, Lincoln said simply, “Whenever [I] hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.”

Of course anything about Abraham Lincoln is going to get my attention and this is particularly good.

How Common Core And Screen Overdoses Are Ruining American Kids by Auguste Meyrat

How Common Core And Screen Overdoses Are Ruining American Kids by Auguste Meyrat

“Peppa Pig” and “Paw Patrol” cartoons do keep their children quiet and occupied, but it also keeps them from learning and growing. A screen addict, young or old, loses the ability to focus on anything for too long or think longer than a few moments. This then affects memory and comprehension, which finally affects all the higher-order thinking skills. The kids may be calmer, but they are also intellectually handicapped. 

When families choose to moderate or outright eliminate screen time, students can do remarkable things. They can start reading, conversing, and experimenting. They can practice remembering things and managing their day. In many cases, it doesn’t require some expensive tutorial program or intense diet of classic texts to become intellectually competent. It simply requires discipline and common sense.

Oh that parents would HEAR this message!

Judge, if You Must, but Curb the Glee: Notes from Las Vegas by Kevin D. Williamson

Judge, if You Must, but Curb the Glee: Notes from Las Vegas by Kevin D. Williamson

But what about vengeance? The desire for it is not necessarily wrong or discreditable. But I do not want to put that particular loaded gun in the hands of the people chanting “Burn, baby, burn!” at executions or entrust it to the political system that brought us both Donald Trump and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Anger makes you stupid, and self-righteous anger makes you stupid and dangerous. And if there is to be a mode of modern citizenship that has a particularly Christian character, it should begin not with arrogant crusading and joyous heretic-burning but with moral and political humility. Spend a little time here in Las Vegas and tell me whether you think we should moderate our expectations of democracy just a teensy bit. If we really believe what we say we believe — that we are made of the same stuff as R. Kelly and Jeffrey Epstein — then perhaps it is enough for us to seek to secure decent and regular administration of the law, reasonable public order, such prevention of harm as we can manage, and a measure of rehabilitation for those who can be rehabilitated. If we must judge and punish — and we must — then let us do so only because it is a mournful necessity, not for the love of the act itself and its power, or for the seductive pleasures afforded to us by detestation, reckoning, and hatred.

Another very thoughtful piece from Kevin Williamson touching on justice, vengeance, original sin, redemption, King David, and other small matters...

God Is Better Than Government at Healing the Human Heart by David French

God Is Better Than Government at Healing the Human Heart by David French

That doesn’t mean we don’t think hard about what government can do. But it does mean that we should major in the majors and minor in the minors. Government draws us in because it is so powerful. Theoretically it can do so much. But its power is in the hands of fallen men, and its actions and programs consistently reflect that sad fact. Fallen men populate the church, yes, but Christians also know that Christ said, “Where two or three gather in My name, there I am with them.” 

Given the choice of allocating my limited time between seeking religious renewal and government intervention, we should prioritize renewal. And given government’s oft-repeated pattern of hurting when it tries to help, I’ll maintain my skepticism of even its well-intentioned efforts. Facing declining life expectancy and rising despair, we urgently need to ask, “What or who is most effective at healing the human heart?” In that contest, believing conservatives should take God over government every time.

Very thoughtful piece from a great thinker.

Age of Amnesia by Joel Kotkin

Age of Amnesia by Joel Kotkin

The spread of mass education may have exemplified the promise of liberal civilization. But, without an understanding and appreciation of what allowed it to flourish, it could also accelerate its dissolution. The reduction and reshaping of the past are essential to undermining liberal democracy. The great exemplars of the past—Washington, Madison, Burke, Jefferson, Lincoln, Churchill—all warned that human beings are not necessarily good and, for that reason, power must be dispersed and restrained not concentrated. Yet we are witnessing the creation of a society, as envisioned by HG Wells, controlled by a credentialed elite. This “emergent class of capable men,” Wells wrote, should take upon itself the task of “controlling and restricting…the non-functional masses.” This new elite, he predicted, would replace democracy with “a higher organism” of what he called “the New Republic.”

Joel Kotkin is increasingly insightful and always interesting.

Everyone Quotes The Declaration, But Not Many Read It by Nathanael Blake

Everyone Quotes The Declaration, But Not Many Read It by Nathanael Blake

However, the substance of the Declaration is an extended indictment of the King of England for his crimes against the colonists. Reading the whole Declaration, we see a people aggrieved that their self-government is being usurped, their traditional rights encroached upon, and their common-law inheritance discarded.

I always love when someone takes the time to truly try to understand our foundational documents.

How To Unlock Jefferson’s Original Opening Of The Declaration Of Independence by Robert Curry

How To Unlock Jefferson’s Original Opening Of The Declaration Of Independence by Robert Curry

The American Founders had a very different conception of rights. Unalienable rights are not granted by the ruler to his subjects but are natural, essential, and inherent to everyone. The Founders’ concept of the source of our rights was revolutionary then and is still a wonderful thing to contemplate today.

I just love American History!

Burning Indignation by Theodore Dalrymple

Burning Indignation by Theodore Dalrymple

If the Coyne case illustrates anything other than merely itself, it is the superiority of the Christian to the dogmatically secular view of a situation like this (and I write as a nonbeliever). The Christian accepts, without the need for second thought, the duty of charity toward others; he can respond unself-consciously to his natural feelings of sympathy for such as Davies because he knows that we are all sinners, and that there but for the grace of God go we. He can also extend mercy to Coyne.

This is a brilliant analysis of why the secular worldview is incapable of calling something good or bad, which in turn leads to more atrocious behavior.

Oberlin's Comeuppance by Anthony Esolen,

Oberlin's Comeuppance by Anthony Esolen

As I write these words, a jury in Ohio is about to decide whether an $11 million verdict against Oberlin College, for libel and tortious practices against a local family-run bakery, should be tripled for punitive damages. If it could be tripled and tripled again, it would still be only just.

It's great to hear this common sense take on what is becoming surreal

Classical Ed: What To Think or How To Think? by Joshua Gibbs

Classical Ed: What To Think or How To Think? by Joshua Gibbs

However, Christian education demands that we teach students what to love and how to love, for love is simply the greatest kind of knowledge. A classical education aims to train the affections and show a man how to “rightly order his loves” (ordo amoris), though a man cannot order his loves until he knows what they are. Rightly ordering our loves demands both body and soul, substance and idea, what and how.

Another brilliant iconoclastic essay by my favorite teacher. It reminds me of a debate taking place in conservatism right now over pluralism vs. monism. Monism can fall victim to a dogmatic belief in one Truth and oppress all non-believers, but pluralism can fall victim to relativism and no real truth. I think there is one Truth but the way to get there is pluralism. In Joshua Gibbs article, I believe there IS the good, true, and beautiful, so we need to tell our student WHAT to think, but they will get there on their own through knowing HOW to think.

I Thought There Was a Simple Solution to an Unwanted Pregnancy, But I Was Wrong by Mariel Lindsay

I Thought There Was a Simple Solution to an Unwanted Pregnancy, But I Was Wrong by Mariel Lindsay

But now, inexplicably, I couldn’t choose abortion even though it would give me the freedom I thought I desperately wanted. I began to suspect that there was something wrong with me. After all, I had a legal option to end my pregnancy. I had a choice. But I wasn’t so sure. What seemed so simple in theory was so far from simple in real life.

Brilliant read into a young woman's unplanned pregnancy and the process of bringing her daughter into the world.

Alone: The decline of the family has unleashed an epidemic of loneliness by Kay S. Hymowitz

Alone: The decline of the family has unleashed an epidemic of loneliness by Kay S. Hymowitz

Still, the loneliness thesis taps into a widespread intuition of something true and real and grave. Foundering social trust, collapsing heartland communities, an opioid epidemic, and rising numbers of “deaths of despair” suggest a profound, collective discontent. It’s worth mapping out one major cause that is simultaneously so obvious and so uncomfortable that loneliness observers tend to mention it only in passing. I’m talking, of course, about family breakdown.

Fascinating article on a rarely mentioned effect of family breakdown. Scripture says "God places the lonely in families." We are doing our best to upend that!

I Didn’t Earn Slavery Reparations, and I Don’t Want Them by Burgess Owens

I Didn’t Earn Slavery Reparations, and I Don’t Want Them by Burgess Owens

At the core of the reparation movement is a divisive and demeaning view of both races. It grants to the white race a wicked superiority, treating them as an oppressive people too powerful for black Americans to overcome. It brands blacks as hapless victims devoid of the ability, which every other culture possesses, to assimilate and progress. Neither label is earned.

This article is so powerful and the clear answer we need to racial animosity.

I Want My Son To Become A Better Writer by Joshua Gibbs

I Want My Son To Become A Better Writer by Joshua Gibbs

Until your students quote Shakespeare and Dante as freely as they quote Drake, they won’t become better writers. More grammar means more reading, more recitations, more plays performed, more poems read aloud, more students referencing Hamlet, Claudius, Gertrude, Dante, Donne, Bronte, Austen, Whitman, Hopkins, and so forth. There is no point in teaching students the art of arrangement when all they have to arrange are trite feelings, dull sentiments, and trendy turns of phrase. Thus, the solution to poor writing is not more writing but more memorization of beautiful, canonical texts.

Another brilliant insight from my favorite teacher.

The Nature of Progressive Insensitivity By Victor Davis Hanson

The Nature of Progressive Insensitivity By Victor Davis Hanson

Finally, there is a final and mostly cynical explanation for the recent spate of progressive intolerance. Those who are by nature or habit intolerant mask their resulting guilt or fear by progressive virtue-signaling and occasional inadvertent revelations of their own moral selves.

I have to say that I agree 100% that so much of the Left's criticisms are simply projections. They ARE what they claim the Right is.

The Big Tech Threat by Josh Hawley

The Big Tech Threat by Josh Hawley

And we all know the effects. Our attention spans dull. Our tempers quicken. We reduce our friends to their public presentation in short posts. We substitute comments and likes for phone calls and direct human interaction. And those are the benign effects. 

Insightful piece into the societal effects of social media.

After Academia by Allen Farrington

After Academia by Allen Farrington

Higher education has become a transfer of wealth from the future earnings of the aspirational lower and middle classes to a metastasizing administrative parasite, which funds the permanence of the cultural elite by wielding its leverage over anybody foolish enough to dissent.

Yet another prescient article predicting the future of education based on the toxic waste it has become.

Why Christian Children Don’t Belong In Public Schools by Aaron Ames

Why Christian Children Don’t Belong In Public Schools by Aaron Ames

Let’s get right to the point: many Christians throughout history shared the idea that God is the fundamental source of all truth, whether religious, academic, or otherwise. But what are we to make of a student who has spent 15 to 20 years studying academics without ever considering God’s relationship to these fields of knowledge? Does this kind of education not actually imply that God is not the source of all knowledge and truth?

We teach kids that God is not relevant to what's important to know and wonder why they grow up to believe that God is not important.

Can We Believe? by Andrew Klavan

Can We Believe? by Andrew Klavan

It is the Enlightenment Narrative that creates this worship of reason, not reason itself. In fact, most of the scientific arguments against the existence of God are circular and self-proving. They pit advanced scientific thinkers against simple, literalist religious believers. They dismiss error and mischief committed in the name of science—the Holocaust, atom bombs, climate change—but amberize error and mischief committed in the name of faith—“the Crusades, the Inquisition, witch hunts, the European wars of religion,” as Pinker has it.

I absolutely love his argument about the worship of reason as pitted against revelation. I'm thankful that as a believer, I have access to both.

Rethinking President Grant (Part Two) By Dan McLaughlin

Rethinking President Grant (Part Two) By Dan McLaughlin

On the strength of his military record, Ulysses S. Grant was one of our greatest Americans, and his presidency should be seen as an addition to that legacy, not an embarrassment. Grant’s flaws deserve to be remembered. He probably could not have done much more to build public support for continuing Reconstruction after 1876, but he could have done more to prevent corruption, respect religious liberties, win the debate over Dominican annexation, and avoid the catastrophe at Little Bighorn. The corruption scandals of Grant’s tenure were far less important in the long run than his policy record, which they should not be allowed to overshadow, but they did interfere with his ability to do the job by handicapping his Supreme Court nominations, his Reconstruction and Native American policies, and even his efforts to annex Santo Domingo.

 In the end, though, Grant buried secession and slavery for good, kept the peace abroad, laid the building blocks for a long-term Anglo–American alliance, oversaw the nation’s turn down the path to economic-superpower status, and can claim both the Fifteenth Amendment and the modern Justice Department as important milestones in his legacy. That’s a record any president would be proud of.

This is why I love history. These are real people and their record is nuanced and interesting.

No, Today’s America Would Not Surprise The Founders In The Least by Benjamin R. Dierker

No, Today’s America Would Not Surprise The Founders In The Least by Benjamin R. Dierker

Putting aside that they understood the concept of innovation, and even had repeating firearms, this group of men understood something far more fundamental: human nature. Baked into virtually every meticulously crafted line of the Declaration, Constitution, Federalist Papers, and treatises of the day was a recognition that man has both incredible capacity for cooperation and devastating potential for destruction. Equipped with knowledge of history and of human nature, the Founders had possibly the greatest predictive power of any group of people throughout history.

I hat when people say, "The Founders could never had imagined..." It's simply not true. They had greater imaginations and the power to predict because they so well understood immutable human nature.

Rethinking President Grant (Part One) By Dan McLaughlin

Rethinking President Grant (Part One) By Dan McLaughlin

If history is just current events plus time, then biased and unfair history is bad journalism plus time. Both as a general and as president, Grant spent a lot of time on the receiving end of bad journalism and, later, bad history. Grant’s place in U.S. history would be secure if we looked only at his Civil War record. But for much of the 20th century, Grant was found near the bottom of historical rankings of presidents and maligned in schoolbooks for corruption, assessments that often said more about Grant’s critics than about Grant. As we reevaluate him today with a fairer perspective, we should see Grant as, on balance, a good president. He wrestled earnestly with intractable problems and made some lasting contributions. But he falls short of the greats: Too many of his major accomplishments failed to endure after he left office, and his blind spots were too glaring.

I love a rethinking of a historical figure as we step back and try to see him in more nuanced colors.

The Constitution Was Never Pro-Slavery By Allen C. Guelzo

The Constitution Was Never Pro-Slavery By Allen C. Guelzo

To read the Constitution as pro-slavery, in the manner of Finkelman, Waldstreicher, and even Sanders, requires a suspension of disbelief that only playwrights and morticians could admire. Yes, the Constitution reduced slaves to the hated three-fifths; but that was to keep slaveholders from claiming them for five-fifths in determining representation, which would have increased the power of the slaveholding states. Yes, the Constitution permitted the slave trade to continue; but it also permitted Congress to shut it off, which it did in 1808. Yes, the Constitution banned export taxes, required “full faith and credit,” and limited “privileges and immunities” to citizens. But the debates over those provisions betrayed no inkling that the hidden subject was slavery. And the accusation that the militia clause was meant to suppress slave insurrections was actually only a speculation tossed off at one moment of energetic accusation by Gouverneur Morris, not a deliberately conceived strategy by scheming slaveholders.

Another brilliant analysis by Guelzo, one of my favorite historians.

Are We Too Primitive to Rebuild Notre Dame? by John Zmirak

Are We Too Primitive to Rebuild Notre Dame? by John Zmirak

But I fear we don’t even want such beauty enough to recreate it. It frightens us with its demands. As God does, which explains why we flee Him. We’d rather keep our eyes firmly fixed on the husks that we feed to the pigs than think about the Father.

Watch, just watch. If some devout billionaire, or kindly non-Catholic French patriot, donated every dollar of the billions it would cost, you know what some bishop would say? He’d echo the words of one of the Church’s very first bishops: “Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?”

A sad post-Notre Dame commentary on European Christianity.

The Division of Labor Is the Meaning of Life By Kevin D. Williamson

The Division of Labor Is the Meaning of Life By Kevin D. Williamson

What we call “globalization” is a sudden radical expansion in the worldwide division of labor—a miracle of human cooperation that, as such miracles so often are, goes mostly unappreciated and unloved, and often hated. Our globalization is hated for the same reason that Renaissance globalization was hated: It disrupts existing status arrangements and introduces new elements of insecurity and anxiety into communities whose members had believed their situations to be fixed, if not ordained—and who believe that they have a natural right to the fixity of those situations, and that the duty of the state is to secure them. 

Kevin Williamson always has an original insight into the way of the world. This column is no exception. 

Homer Meets Generation Z By Howard Butcher

Homer Meets Generation Z By Howard Butcher

In today’s environment, engaging students effectively often requires appealing to their self-interest. At the beginning of The Iliad, I ask the girls in the class: How would you feel if an army of men was fighting over you? The girls’ responses differ quite a bit: Some like the idea, but most usually don’t want people to die fighting for them. Then, the next day, the boys are asked: Would you fight a war for a woman? The answers vary, but interestingly, there is often a bit more of a consensus: For the right woman, many would fight. The conversations usually initiate reasonably serious thought and students refine and amend their answers as the class discussion evolves. This approach allows them to imagine the conflict as if they were a character in the text and it becomes a little easier to draw them into the story.

I love when people recognize the benefits of a classical education and of the classic works of antiquity.

Have We Stolen A Generation's Independent Thought? by Peter Greene

Have We Stolen A Generation's Independent Thought? by Peter Greene

We are teaching students, literally, not to think, but instead to clear their own thoughts and concentrate on following the path followed by the people who wrote the test questions. We are teaching them that every question has just one right answer, that somebody out there already knows it, and that you go to school to learn to say what those people want you to say. 

Interesting thoughts on high-stakes testing and the effect on students ability to think in original terms.

What the Electoral College Saves Us From By Dan McLaughlin

What the Electoral College Saves Us From By Dan McLaughlin

If we think of the Electoral College as a way of ensuring a decisive result in the absence of a national popular majority, and election by the House as the fallback only when both of those options fail, it makes a lot more sense. Splits between the popular vote and Electoral College winners will practically always be very rare when one candidate gets a popular majority

Good defense of the Founders' wisdom in creating the Electoral College.

Teach Classical Students To Pray Classically by Joshua Gibbs

Teach Classical Students To Pray Classically by Joshua Gibbs

My plea is simple: teach your students to read classically, to write classically, to think classically, and to pray classically. Give your students books worth reading ten times and prayers worth saying ten times. Give your students prayers worth memorizing. Give your students these prayers by praying them at the beginning and end of class every day. Teach your students great prayers, prayers which deepen in meaning and slowly come into focus over the period of a lifetime. If great music is worth practicing, so are great prayers; teach your students prayers worthy of practice, worthy of concentration. Pagans repeat their prayers so the gods will finally hear, but Christians repeat their prayers so they can finally hear themselves.

I love this idea so much! I will definitely incorporate this into my class next year!

The Supreme Court Is Not The Final Say On The Constitution by Benjamin R. Dierker

The Supreme Court Is Not The Final Say On The Constitution by Benjamin R. Dierker

The only national laws are the Constitution, congressional law, and treaties. Conspicuously missing are Supreme Court decisions. While the court is known for deciding the constitutionality of laws, its decisions are not themselves laws. In the strictest sense, the opinions rendered by the Supreme Court are binding only on the parties before it.
The Supreme Court is just that, a court. It was established to adjudicate cases and controversies before it. Courts cannot make general pronouncements of law; they exist to settle disputes.

I love this take on the Supremacy of the Supreme Court's decisions. I think the people are sovereign and should retake the power of "We the people..."

I Was America’s First ‘Nonbinary’ Person. It Was All a Sham by Jamie Shupe

I Was America’s First ‘Nonbinary’ Person. It Was All a Sham by Jamie Shupe

The truth is that my sex change to nonbinary was a medical and scientific fraud.

Fascinating story of someone deceived by the LBGT ideology.

It Pays to Be A Wyoming Cowboy by The Editorial Board

It Pays to Be A Wyoming Cowboy by The Editorial Board

Despite the griping, the Board of Trustees voted unanimously in July to keep the slogan. Students, alumni and sports fans apparently weren’t offended. The university bookstore sold out of “the world needs more cowboys” T-shirts the first week they hit the shelves. Responding to demand, the University of Wyoming put the slogan on other products and sold roughly 5,000 items in the first six months.

I love that someone is standing up against the SJW! And they get the win!

How Pro-Lifers Can Overcome The Courts Stacked Against Life by Bill Kilgore

How Pro-Lifers Can Overcome The Courts Stacked Against Life by Bill Kilgore

Pro-life people and those who believe in self-government are left with poor options. Either they can continue to wait for the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade and sweep away 46 years of precedent, or they can attempt to make abortion a real political issue, not a legal question (what might once have been called a political question). This would be to challenge the dogma of judicial supremacy.
Forcing a constitutional crisis will make abortion a political issue. A constitutional crisis is not a good thing, for its outcome is always uncertain. Yet if pro-life majorities in the states are willing to force the issue and declare that the people are truly sovereign, the pro-life movement can begin to make substantive change and start outlawing abortion locally, and, in time, everywhere.

I love this take. It's time to force the issue. It is literally a matter of life and death!

Trump and the Revolt of the ‘Somewheres’ by Christopher DeMuth

Trump and the Revolt of the ‘Somewheres’ by Christopher DeMuth

The great challenge now is to make productive use of the new spirit of nationalism and its political energies. The successful nation-state not only declares but cultivates its sovereignty, and that requires sustaining the allegiance of citizens and tangibly promoting their interests and well-being. It does not aggravate, but rather respects and builds upon, the parochial loyalties of its constituent tribes of community, locality, and ethnic, racial and religious identity. Americans have done this brilliantly through the centuries, but lately we seem to have lost the knack. In the wake of the Trump rebellion, we should aim to restore relatively stable political competition and mutual accommodation, inspired by a sense of common destiny—a more capacious nationalism.

Interesting take on the "Anywheres" v. "Somewheres" dichotomy.

Why Renewables Can’t Save the Planet by Michael Shellenberger

Why Renewables Can’t Save the Planet by Michael Shellenberger

I think it’s natural that those of us who became active on climate change gravitated toward renewables. They seemed like a way to harmonize human society with the natural world. Collectively, we have been suffering from an appeal-to-nature fallacy no different from the one that leads us to buy products at the supermarket labeled “all natural.” But it’s high time that those of us who appointed ourselves Earth’s guardians should take a second look at the science, and start questioning the impacts of our actions.

Now that we know that renewables can’t save the planet, are we really going to stand by and let them destroy it?

This guy has a lot of guts, speaking truth to power.

Lightweight Lincoln By Allen C. Guelzo

Lightweight Lincoln

Freehling’s Lincoln is a man almost entirely devoid of intellectual ballast. This is not the Lincoln who described himself as having “always hated slavery.” Nor is there any sense in Becoming Lincoln of Lincoln’s long kinship to 19th-century free-market economics (from John Stuart Mill to Francis Wayland to Henry Carey). When, during the debates with Douglas, Lincoln speaks of an equality that blacks and whites should have in eating the bread they have earned by the sweat of their own brows, Freehling cannot believe that an economic equality — one concerned with earning bread — deserves to be taken seriously.

A Lincoln scholar, whom I greatly admire, Allen C. Guelzo, takes on a fellow Lincoln student with a scathing review.

Welcome to New York, Amazon—Now Go Home by Peggy Noonan

Welcome to New York, Amazon—Now Go Home

It would all be funny if it weren’t for that lost world. The 25,000 families getting a new paycheck, the mothers and fathers suddenly able to send their kids to the local Catholic school, the busy sidewalks, the lights. Instead, the books unbought in the store that didn’t open. The talent unhired and unmet.

As usual, Peggy Noonan hits it out of the park with brilliant analysis and insight. 

I doubted Jussie Smollett, and it breaks my heart that I might be right by Nana Efua Mumford

I doubted Jussie Smollett, and it breaks my heart that I might be right by Nana Efua Mumford

I wanted to believe Smollett. I really did. I know that there is a deep, dark racist history in Chicago and, if proved true, this would be just one more point on the list. I wanted to believe him with every fiber of my being, most of all because the consequences if he were lying were almost too awful to contemplate.

What kind of pathology wants a horrible crime to be true? Example #1 that the racism so widely proclaimed is indeed rare. No one hoped that horrifying stories coming out of Germany from Jews were true.

Emancipation Deniers Target Lincoln’s Reputation by Allen C. Guelzo

Emancipation Deniers Target Lincoln’s Reputation

In an age when rocking century-old statues off their pedestals has become a public sport, no historical reputation is safe. That includes Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator.

Guelzo defends Lincoln as the Great Emancipator in brilliant fashion.

New York’s New Law Is Abortion’s John C. Calhoun Moment by Kyle Sammin

New York’s New Law Is Abortion’s John C. Calhoun Moment

The parallels to the abortion debate are unmistakable. Although Cuomo lacks Calhoun’s rhetorical skill, his devotion to an unjust cause matches the South Carolinian’s. The #ShoutYourAbortion campaign began in 2015, and in 2019 it has only increased in reach. Abortion’s defenders now see that unholy act as a positive good in the world, not just a necessary evil. The lights of the World Trade Center were a burnt offering to Moloch, a pledge of allegiance to the cause of infanticide. This is abortion’s Calhoun moment.

This is the case I have long been making.

Sometimes the herd is wrong By Terry Garlock

Sometimes the herd is wrong By Terry Garlock

No matter how much this rubs the wrong way, I am quite proud to have served my country in the Vietnam War. Yes, I know, most of you were taught there is shame attached to any role in the war that America lost, an unfortunate mistake, an immoral war, an unwise intrusion into a civil war, a racist war, a war in which American troops committed widespread atrocities, where America had no strategic interest, and that our North Vietnamese enemy was innocently striving to re-unite Vietnam.

The problem is, none of those things is true.

Wonderful essay from a man who was there. Great information.

What About Dating In High School? by Joshua Gibbs

What About Dating In High School? by Joshua Gibbs

For the standard reasons. Sooner or later, one of the two people in the relationship realizes that marriage is not a possibility and then the whole thing begins to seem rather pointless. At the beginning of the relationship, both people are still too thrilled by the honor of having their existence affirmed by a member of the opposite sex to think about how profoundly tenuous the whole thing is.

Words of wisdom from my adopted mentor. I love everything this guy says.

The Separation Of Church And State Is An Impossible Fiction by Sethu A. Iyer

The Separation Of Church And State Is An Impossible Fiction

Our ideas about how we’re supposed to live are always based on our ideas about what reality is and what humans are. Our answers to political questions will most often depend on our answers to metaphysical ones—and one of the main purposes of the religion is to address the latter. So, if religion is the “church” and politics is the “state,” but politics is always driven by metaphysical and thus religious notions, then this means it would be impossible to altogether separate state from church. It is impossible even at the level of concept, let alone at the level of practice.

I love the clarity of this article.