“Low-cast Hindus, in short, suffered humiliations in their native India compared to which the carrying of identity cards in South Africa was almost trivial. In fact, Gandhi, to his credit, was to campaign strenuously in his later life for the reduction of caste barriers in India—a campaign almost invisible in the movie, of course, conveyed …
Western Culture and the Kingdom of God
“At the same time, Western culture receives the emphasis it does because this is the culture in which the Christian faith has made the greatest advances. Western culture is not synonymous with the kingdom of God, but the histories of the two entities are so intertwined that one cannot be understood apart from the other. …
Well, Not Exactly
“A result of all this is that New York’s purveyors of high cinema art have chosen to import from France, Germany, Italy, or wherever, a hand-picked selection of those countries’ intimate, unconventional, or intellectually ambitious movies. There is certainly nothing wrong with a nothing-but-the-best policy for that American elite within the elite which enjoys foreign …
Defining Classical
“The resurgence of classical education over the last decade has been heartening in many respects, but some aspects of it are a bit confusing. No one holds the copyright on the word classical, and given the nature of the word, there has been something of a scramble in the various manifestations of classical education. This …
And It Appears To Have Worked
“A deviant from a Leninist (and even Marxist) point of view, Gramsci formulated in his Prison Notebooks the doctrine that those who want to change society must change man’s consciousness, and that in order to accomplish this they must first control the institutions by which that consciousness is formed: schools, universities, churches, and, perhaps above …
What’s Wrong With Civil Rights
“There is a vast difference between the way Christians and humanists define ‘civil rights.’ For a Christian rights tend to be negatively defined. For a humanist they are positively stated. For example, a Christian approach can be seen in such common law rights as the right to trial by jury or habeas corpus. A humanist …
The Crowbar of Events
“One might expect that a minimal level of rationality would require artists seeking a ‘meaningful’ alternative society to judge it by the same standards by which they judge their own. But this, alas, is one of their most consistent failings. They judge our society by the flaws and inadequacies they see all about them. But …
Schools for Show Poodles
“Far from teaching children to learn the nature of the world and how to occupy an appropriate station in it, they are what my daughter Rachel helpfully called classical schools for ‘show poodles.’ These schools make it easy for critics who oppose a truly superior Christian education (which necessarily includes the inculcation of humility) to …
When Artists Abandoned the People
“The simple fact is that, until the French Enlightenment, Romantic movement, and the American and French Revolutions of the eighteenth century, the artist saw himself as a celebrant of this society and all its values, which to him—if not to aesthetes of today—were noble and heroic.” [Richard Grenier, Capturing The Culture (Washington, DC: Ethics and …
Isaiah 5:20
“For example, we have gotten to the point where a preacher can spend the entire sermon talking about himself, and his own struggles, and everyone says that he is being open, honest, transparent, and humble. Another man, who proclaims the truth in a way that indicates something would have been true had he never been …