If religion loses its hold on social life, it eventually loses its hold on life altogether. And this is what's happened in the case of Europe. The secularized civilization is not content to dominate the outer world and leave man's inner life to religion; it claims the whole man.

Until good men are unfazed by being perceived as evil, nothing will change. We throw our friends under the bus because actually evil men told us that was the cost of being at their table. We don’t want to be at their table. We want to overturn it and replace it with our own.

Chinese passports are the world's worst and completely useless JUNK passports. Japan does not have "speak Japanese" as a requirement for naturalization. It is a hellish situation that one can easily obtain a Japanese passport, which is one of the best in the world. "New

The Church is Zion. “The present Jerusalem…is in slavery with her children. But the Jerusalem above is free, and she is our mother.” — Gal. 4:25-26 “I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.” — Rev 21:2

100% the same in Silicon Valley. Indians do this, too.

Helpful on the whole but the loud voices thing is wrong. In the US the upper middle class see talking quietly in public as polite, whereas the British equivalent (plus academics and chatterers!) tend to talk loudly in public in either braying or carrying or excitable voices.

The most monstrous students I’ve ever seen were high school kids introduced to the great books too early by teachers entirely lacking the serious background in the great books to even be teaching the great books (almost all charter schools) Good books for kids, not great books

Chinglican ☩ن ⚓ standard-haver, PhD in alchemy Same Spain btw that recently just refused to confirm a Papal nuncio because he didn't buy in enough to gay race communism or something.

The mistake made by parents and naive charter school administrators and teachers is that the great books are great for everyone. It sounds good in theory, but they entirely fail to realize that the deep and existential problems which define the great books are NOT for everyone

Further, the vast majority of charter school teachers who teach the great books never formally studied the great books in a great books program, and those who did only have undergraduate degrees That’s fine for STEM, but the stakes are far too high when teaching the great books

Athenian Stranger “the seminal ideas of Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, St. Thomas, only properly grow in an imaginative ground saturated with fables, fairy tales, stories, rhymes, adventures, which have developed into the thousand books of Grimm, Andersen, Stevenson, Dickens, Scott, Dumas and

Athenian Stranger Obviously, there will always be disagreement over particulars; I suspect many a well-educated 17 or 18 year old could be moved in the right way by Dostoevsky or Melville (towards the beginnings of an understanding), but certainly not if thrown into such texts without adequate

Solomon Svehla (And if you are called Solomon there is no need to tell us you are ‘him’. It’s the minimum of wisdom I’d have thought.)

Chinglican ☩ن ⚓ standard-haver, PhD in alchemy the dish's father expressed disapproval due to high rates of crime among the spoon community and statistically unfavorable medical outcomes for dish-spoon offspring

Brian Kemple Athenian Stranger 👍 Was waiting for someone to post John Senior. He talks about this in “Restoration of Christian Culture”: w/o having well-nurtured souls and imaginations (and MORAL imaginations!), “Great Books” programs produce “little Sophists”. To say nothing of the idea of compulsory

If John Locke pulled up to the curb today, what would he think of our parking rules? This question might sound odd, but it goes to the heart of a real dilemma: how do we balance private property rights with our shared public spaces?

Brian Kemple Everything depends upon the competency of the teacher guiding them The vast majority of teachers doing so are exemplary of why it does not scale up the way they do desperately want it to

Postscript: Disappointed in many “great books” guys here who think our most thoughtful predecessors are easily consumed by kids like fast food from a drive through window Such people are no different than “progressives” foolishly equating mere technology with moral progress

… everyone jumps onboard chanting a return to things like monarchy etc away from democracy, but when you point out that such things also require a correlate hierarchy in education they balk It shows you how engrained their true democratic beliefs are despite themselves (!)

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