“We may appreciate the efforts, and even admire the greatness, of men who have tried to find the universal, the general ‘behind’ appearances; yet at the same time their quest was doomed to fail, for all universals break down as soon as the Creator, He who made man in His image, is denied or left …
The Difference Attempts At Application Make
“Karl Marx was an intellectual who suffered misfortune because people tried to put his ideas into practice. Had Plao suffered the same misfortune, the world would still be talking about that totalitarian hellhole” (The Case for Classical Christian Education, p. 215).
Sacralized Sentimentalism
“It may seem strange that Christians fell victim to the optimistic, humanistic, ‘romantic’ vision of love—so much so that its last strongholds are probably within Christian circles” (H.R. Rookmaaker, Modern Art and the Death of a Culture, p. 78).
Can’t Fight Gas With Gas
“Pop evangelical sentiments, diffused in their normal gaseous way, are utterly inadequate for resisting the spirit of our age, which wants to seep into the unsuspecting school through every available crack” (The Case for Classical Christian Education, p. 208).
Art As Death Throes
“For the Enlightenment was to change the world. It is a period in which we today are still living, though at its end. Its aims have been fulfilled” (H.R. Rookmaaker, Modern Art and the Death of a Culture, p. 41).
No Frictionless World
“‘What would you do if everyone let you?’ is actually the same question as ‘what are you actually trying to accomplish?’ But such thought experiments are dangerouis because they require that we postulate a frictionless world, which is not the world we live in. Thus it is all too easy to drift off into utopian …
Not Just a Mirror
“Believing as I do that the arts in general are not merely a mirror reflecting social and cultural values, but are, on the contrary, powerful forces which shape and mould the way in which people live and behave (a view, incidentally, held by every major literary critic from Plato to T.S. Eliot), I have examined …
Why the Bait Hides the Hook
“One proverb expresses the principle well. He who takes the king’s coin becomes the king’s man. If we receive money from the government, we must know that the money comes with conditions. Today the conditions might be tolerable. In fact, they will certainly be tolerable because otherwise the bait would not hide the hook. But …
Just Because a Group is in Formation Doesn’t Mean They Know Where They are Going
“Contemporary authors, playwrights and poets thus find themselves in a disconcerting dilemma. If they attempt to delineate an ideal, they are accused snobbery, of being anti-proletarian, illiberal, undemocratic and, in certain instances, racist. Accordingly, all but a dwindling minority have chosen to join the ‘Raskolnikovian’ ranks of iconoclasts, consoling themselves with the thought that they …
When Education is too Narrow
“But the danger is that their education can become little more than reading. When they come to take their SATs, they discover that their verbal scores are stratospheric, and their math scores give the impression that the test was taken by a rock that was having trouble holding the pencil” (The Case for Classical Christian …