The other night I testified (via telephone) before the Alaska state legislature, on the standards their public schools are adopting for classes in English. I’d read the standards but didn’t have them in front of me, so I was taken aback when one of the representatives plucked a directive out of all the verbiage and … Read more
In several recent articles at Crisis and elsewhere, I’ve been arguing that Catholic schools should reject the Common Corpse, the newest form of an old and largely successful campaign to banish good and great poems and stories from our classrooms. I’ve been charged with exaggeration. Surely things cannot be that bad. The sky still stretches … Read more
Every week it seems I receive three or four letters from people who are establishing new schools or reforming old ones. These letters are most encouraging, and all of the writers, without exception, are dedicated to restoring what is called a “classical” education. Sometimes that implies the study of the true classics, the literature of … Read more
Sometimes the best thing you can do to a school is to raze it. The pipes leak, there’s mold in the ceiling panels, rats are nesting behind the wainscot, and a strange black stain has appeared under the basement floor near the oil line. It isn’t worth repairing. It might have been worth repairing, if … Read more
Many years ago, a prominent man wrote to one of his favorite authors about his latest book. This man had been a soldier, a hunter, an athlete, an historian, and a social reformer, and was now employed in a post of some significant responsibility. He had many children, and was by all accounts a bluff … Read more
A young man and woman arrive at the office of the town clerk to procure a marriage license. They’re all smiles, until the secretary hands them a document to sign, wherein they read this remarkable sentence: “The State, conceding to the parents the making of their children’s bodies, asserts its primacy in the making of … Read more
When referring to the nationalizing of medicine known as the Affordable Care Act, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said, “We have to pass the law to see what’s in it.” “[Law] is nothing else than an ordinance of reason for the common good, made by him who has care of the community, and promulgated,” … Read more
Shall we allow sharp dealing, or not? That’s one of the questions that Cicero takes up in his wise and noble work, De officiis (On Moral Duties). One side, represented by the philosopher Antipater, holds that you are in the clear so long as you don’t actually tell a lie about what you are selling. … Read more
I’ve donned my boots and leggings, and done what I had no desire to do. I am examining, with tedious scrutiny, the so-called Common Core Curriculum for literature and English, a new’n’improved set of standards for reading and writing in our schools from kindergarten to twelfth grade. I have read the essays, written by students, … Read more
Or I might say, “Sauron forgot about a hobbit.” There is one thing everyone ought to know about blacktop. It cracks. Ice then gets into the cracks and before you know it, there’s a regular furrow, and some windswept dirt, and something with stubborn roots sets up in it, like dandelions with their brave yellow … Read more
In October, 1919, a heavily “progressive” Congress passed the Volstead Act enforcing the Eighteenth Amendment, prohibiting, for almost all purposes, the production, sale, and distribution of alcoholic beverages. There are two things everybody has learned from Prohibition. First, it is wrong to try to legislate morality. Second, you cannot do it, for Prohibition failed. But … Read more
One of the many forms of self-promotion, at my old mater ferox, was a regular bulletin called “Princeton in the Nation’s Service,” detailing the many ways in which Princetonians past and present were making the world a better, that is a more Princetonian, place to live. I suspect that, after the ordinary fashion of human … Read more
Recently, as readers of Crisis may have heard, our administration at Providence College retracted an invitation to a Professor John Corvino, who afterwards said in disgruntlement that he’d been looking forward to speaking at a Catholic college like ours, to persuade young people that the homosexual life was good for the individual and for the … Read more
After the Roman Empire in the west had fallen—that is, after it had been quite perforated by the incursions of Germanic warlords, it was often hard for ordinary peasant farmers to secure sufficient peace to till their lands. As late as the eleventh century, if they lived on an estuary in Kent near a place … Read more
The mayor of San Antonio glares down at the electrician, who is bidding for a contract to wire some new public offices. “Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Roman Catholic Church?” The electrician looks puzzled, but his assistant Carlos, a man with more experience in political affairs, speaks up. … Read more
Two recent court cases illustrate the incoherence and remarkable intolerance of “liberal” views regarding conscience. One involves the bottomless pockets of the atheist Michael Newdow, who most recently joined several plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the U.S. Treasury Department demanding the words “In God We Trust” be scrubbed from U.S. currency. Newdow advocates what Richard … Read more
The scene is from C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength. The callow young sociology professor, Mark Studdock, an atheist and a social climber, has been detained in a cubicle deliberately fashioned with odd annoying angles and not-quite-right pictures on the wall. His detainers aim to break down in him any last sense of the inner … Read more
Last year, L’Eglise de Notre Dame de l’Assumption, in the old fishing port of Arichat, Nova Scotia, celebrated its 175th anniversary. Its twin spires overlook the bay where John Paul Jones, to Americans a hero but to loyal Canadians a pirate and a traitor, once trained his guns, and sure enough, near the corner of … Read more
On June 19, the US District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan ruled in favor of a high school student named Daniel Glowacki, who had charged that his high school teacher, Jay McDowell, had violated his constitutional right to freedom of speech. He was granted one dollar in compensation. The court’s verdict, in vulgar … Read more
Why must the children of light always be ten revolutions and a hundred years behind the children of darkness? If we cannot always defeat our enemies on the battlefield, can’t we at least learn to recognize their tactics so that we won’t be fooled the next time? Never mind that. Can’t we learn to recognize, … Read more