Art

Poets and artists who are satisfied only by the delights experienced through art, are like people who arrive at the doors of the Royal Palace, but do not go into the bridal feast, although they are invited to do so. -St. Barsanuphius of Optina

Reforming Education

HT: Perry Robinson

Who is the Aggressor, Georgia or Russia?

Read Patrick Buchanan thoughts on this war here.

I.O.U.S.A

In over 400 theaters on August 21. Check out iousathemovie.com.Locate a theater near you.

The Dumbest Generation

“In the four minutes it probably takes to read this review, you will have logged exactly half the time the average 15- to 24-year-old now spends reading each day. That is, if you even bother to finish. If you are perusing this on the Internet, the big block of text below probably seems daunting, maybe even boring. Who has the time? Besides, one of your Facebook friends might have just posted a status update!

Such is the kind of recklessly distracted impatience that makes Mark Bauerlein fear for his country. “As of 2008,” the 49-year-old professor of English at Emory University writes in “The Dumbest Generation,” “the intellectual future of the United States looks dim.”

The way Bauerlein sees it, something new and disastrous has happened to America’s youth with the arrival of the instant gratification go-go-go digital age. The result is, essentially, a collective loss of context and history, a neglect of “enduring ideas and conflicts.” Survey after painstakingly recounted survey reveals what most of us already suspect: that America’s youth know virtually nothing about history and politics. And no wonder. They have developed a “brazen disregard of books and reading.”

Things were not supposed to be this way. After all, “never have the opportunities for education, learning, political action, and cultural activity been greater,” writes Bauerlein, a former director of Research and Analysis at the National Endowment for the Arts. But somehow, he contends, the much-ballyhooed advances of this brave new world have not only failed to materialize — they’ve actually made us dumber.” Read the full review at the L.A. Times.

Coach Joe Paterno Knows Latin

As football season approaches, I thought I would post something by one of the greatest college football coaches of all time, Joe Paterno. Coach Paterno is probably the only coach, still coaching, who played college football before the invention of the face mask. He played college football for Brown University. “Joe Pa” is probably the only coach, in modern day college football,who knows and appreciates Latin. The “Classical Teacher” recently published an article by Coach Paterno on his classical education and how it applies to his philosophy of life and football. This may be Coach Paterno’s last season and I hope it is a great one. The following is a few quotations from this excellent article. You can read the whole article here.
“In my senior year, we were the best Catholic-school team in New York. We lost only one game, to St. Cecilia’s High from Englewood, New Jersey, which had a sharp, intense young coach named Vince Lombardi. I had hurt my arm the previous week, and all through the St. Cecilia’s game I had to conceal my pain—not from the other team, but from my own coach. I was afraid he’d pull me out.

Don’t get the wrong idea. Football was not the most important thing for me at Brooklyn Prep. Student politics and government fascinated me too. Every year my classmates elected me a class officer, finally class president, and then they picked me for vice president of the student council. But that wasn’t the main part either. What school was really about—and I never had a moment’s confusion about this—was getting an education.

Every one of us at Brooklyn Prep had to take four solid years of mathematics, four years of Latin, and two years of a modern language. Our teachers, those who weren’t Jesuit priests, were scholastics, young men on their way to becoming Jesuit priests. All of them burned with idealism, and that made them marvelous teachers……..

At the beginning of my senior year, this austere big brother of a priest-to-be led me to Virgil. Father Bermingham told me that Virgil was the greatest of the Roman poets, that he lived just three or four decades before Christ, and that he is known mostly for his epic poem, the Aeneid. Father Bermingham asked if I’d like to read it with him. I did.

“What I had in mind,” he said, “was reading it together in the original Latin.”
“In Latin? A poem as long as a book?”
“Yes.” The book was on his desk, more than four hundred pages thick. As a schoolkid, I always had the attitude about any challenge, hey, if it’s difficult, let’s do it. That made it more fun.
“But if it’s in Latin,” I asked uncertainly, “will we be able to cover all that?”
“What’s important,” he said, “is not how much we cover. It’s not how much we do but the excellence of what we do.”
Excellence. The way he pronounced that word made it shine with a golden light. I’ll never forget the majestic ring of the opening lines and of how we approximated them in modern English:

Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris …
Of arms and the man I sing……….

Aeneas is not a grandstanding superstar. He is, above all, a Trojan and a Roman. His first commitment is not to himself, for he is bugged constantly by the reminder, the fatum, “You must be a man for others.” He lives his life not for “me” and “I,” but for “us” and “we.” Aeneas is the ultimate team man. A hero of Aeneas’ kind does not wear his name on the back of his uniform. He doesn’t wear “Nittany Lions” on his helmet to claim star credit for touchdowns and tackles that were enabled by everybody doing his job. For Virgil’s kind of hero, the score belongs to the team.

Father Bermingham didn’t have to lecture me on most of that. We were just reading, sentence by sentence, in Latin, and there it was, like a living experience.

For entertainment today, we flip the channel to Rambo or Miami Vice and get caught up by the fight scenes and the chase. But it’s not the same kind of experience. Once a person has experienced a genuine masterpiece, the size and scope of it last as a memory forever.”

The Evangelizing New Atheists

“The apologetics of the 1970s and ’80s are useful if you are teaching in a church camp, but it’s not that relevant to the claims the New Atheists are making, which are very different,” D’Souza says. “The New Atheists are really surfing the waves of 9/11, equating Islamic radicalism with Christianity. These are not questions addressed by C. S. Lewis or Josh McDowell.” Source

Let me say that I am little disappointed that D’Souza would put Lewis and McDowell in the same sentence. D’Souza says that the “New Atheists” are bringing up new questions for believers that apologists of the last century did not have to deal with, which is a bunch of hooey. I have listened to Christian/Atheist debates all of my life and the only thing new about this contemporary atheism is that they tend to be a little more rude and evangelistic than those of the past. As far back as I can remember the atheists have tried to blame most of the violence of history on religion and especially Christianity. Listen or read the Greg Bahnson/Gordon Stein debate of the late 80’s to see what I am talking about.

I think Philosopher William Lane Craig’s recent article in Christianity Today better describes the “New Atheists”;

You might think from the recent spate of atheist best-sellers that belief in God has become intellectually indefensible for thinking people today. But a look at these books by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens, among others, quickly reveals that the so-called New Atheism lacks intellectual muscle. It is blissfully ignorant of the revolution that has taken place in Anglo-American philosophy. It reflects the scientism of a bygone generation rather than the contemporary intellectual scene.

That generation’s cultural high point came on April 8, 1966, when Time magazine carried a lead story for which the cover was completely black except for three words emblazoned in bright red letters: “Is God Dead?” The story described the “death of God” movement, then current in American theology.

But to paraphrase Mark Twain, the news of God’s demise was premature. For at the same time theologians were writing God’s obituary, a new generation of young philosophers was rediscovering his vitality.

Back in the 1940s and ’50s, many philosophers believed that talk about God, since it is not verifiable by the five senses, is meaningless—actual nonsense. This verificationism finally collapsed, in part because philosophers realized that verificationism itself could not be verified! The collapse of verificationism was the most important philosophical event of the 20th century. Its downfall meant that philosophers were free once again to tackle traditional problems of philosophy that verificationism had suppressed. Accompanying this resurgence of interest in traditional philosophical questions came something altogether unanticipated: a renaissance of Christian philosophy.

The turning point probably came in 1967, with the publication of Alvin Plantinga’s God and Other Minds: A Study of the Rational Justification of Belief in God. In Plantinga’s train has followed a host of Christian philosophers, writing in scholarly journals and participating in professional conferences and publishing with the finest academic presses. The face of Anglo-American philosophy has been transformed as a result. Atheism, though perhaps still the dominant viewpoint at the American university, is a philosophy in retreat.”- From the CT article “God is not Dead Yet” by William Lane Craig

Public School Myth

“Over at Campaign K-12 they’re wondering, based on conflicting messages from McCain advisors, whether the Senator will “fully fund” the No Child Left Behind Act if elected president. It’s a question I’d like to see answered, but these sorts of mixed messages are a dime a dozen in political campaigns. What really captured my attention in the Meet the Press conversation containing the curious “fully-fund” nugget was this comment from Obama supporter Sen. Claire McCaskill, (D-MO), explaining why the presumptive Democratic nominee opposes school choice:

It’s, it’s about making sure we don’t undermine public education. We are who we are as a nation because we figured out how to educate our kids with public money, public education. The rest of the world has admired us from the days that we became a country, and we cannot turn our back on public education. And sometimes the word choice is code for making sure that we can skim the cream off the top into private schools and leave public schools flailing and, and in desperate need of help. And so we’ve got to make sure that our commitment is to our public education system.

Nothing aggravates me more than the constant repetition of the myth that the United States was built on public schooling, and if parents could choose private schools without having to give up their tax dollars the country would disintegrate.

We aren’t “who we are as a nation” because we figured out how to educate kids using “public money.” (Though if public-schooling advocates want to say that public dollars are what is key they should have no problem with vouchers). American kids were being educated long before either public schools or funding was the norm, and while in the colonial and early national eras there was some public funding for education, there was nothing even approaching the centralized, bureaucratically moribund system we have today. Almost all education was voluntary and people chose from options including homeschooling, tutoring, “old field schools,” for-profit writing schools, church-run schools, and more. And it worked: Adult white literacy stood at roughly 90 percent in 1840, a very high level by world standards.” From Cato Blog

Economic Collapse

Rick Saenz at the blog “Dry Creek Chronicles” has posted a very interesting book review on the possible coming economic collapse. You can visit his blog here.

The Only Degree That Counted

“It is not that secular education was unacceptable to the desert elders. Indeed many of them were lettered:Arsenius, Basil, Evagrius, and Cassian. It is simply that secular education always remains insufficient without ascetic depth; it is unfulfilled without the spiritual content. The only degree that counted in the desert was the degree to which one was humbled, even effaced, in order to reveal the presence and grace of God.”-In the Heart of the Desert by Fr. John Chryssavgis