“In a media-driven culture in which status is granted according to progressive tastes, many otherwise conservative folks are only too eager to participate in local arts groups as a hedge against being called philistines. Some take a real interest in art, even apart from the social aspects, such as the wine and Brie parties at …
Trying to Get the Center to Hold
“When a culture’s sacrificial rituals ‘work,’ they transfer the existing rivalrous antagonisms onto one figure against whom all can unite, an act that miraculously dissolves existing tensions and replaces them with a social bond” (Gil Bailie, Violence Unveiled, p. 88).
True Authority Is Obedient
I have learned far more in Narnia than I can ever begin to explain, and so all I am going to try to do here is give you a small taste of some of the more important lessons I learned there. I hope that readers of these small sketches will be able to do what …
Let Him That Thinks He Stands Take Heed Lest He Paint
“For many artists, ‘it became an acknowledged pastime to ‘shock the burghers’ out of their complacency and to leave them bewildered and bemused’ . . . While this stance may seem heroic, it also contains the seeds of arrogance that helped bring art to its knees—disdain for any other viewer of the art, including patrons …
Rallying Points
“Whether it is a public hanging, a war, or a televised glorification of violence, a culture’s righteous violence will fascinate its onlookers. It will be a spectacle. Regardless of the rhetoric and details of its justification, if a society can heighten that fascination and bring it to a cathartic sacrificial conclusion, then the sacrificial violence …
Which Is Like Calling Grape Kool Aid A Fine Merlot
“. . . crudity is equated with sophistication, just as pornography made for immature minds is labeled ‘adult’ material” (Robert Knight, The Age of Consent, p. 91.).
Taught or Entertained?
“This means work on the part of the pupil. The entertainment model goes in the opposite direction. When the student is entertained rather than taught, he is in an oxymoronic way being aroused to passivity. Good teaching awakens in the student a desire to learn” (The Case for Classical Christian Education, p. 193).
Hostility As Distraction
“One is that the ‘us versus them’ motif can be manipulated to revive a group’s esprit de corps and to ‘divert attention from internal problems.’ That is to say, communal violence is an antidote for internal strife and the ‘civil’ or domestic violence to which it might otherwise lead. Campaigns against outsiders or evildoers revive …
Not to Mention the Coyote’s Explosives
“Many studies are flawed because they make little distinction between Elmer Fudd getting bopped on the head with a carrot and the Terminator graphically blowing away human beings” (Robert Knight, The Age of Consent, p. 82.).
Eschew Prolixity
“The teacher must stoop in order to teach. She has to step into the language known by the students in order to expand the power and extent of that language . . . Nothing is accomplished if big words whistle over the children’s heads” (The Case for Classical and Christian Education, p. 192).