“The rampant literary sleaziness-and make no mistake about it, we are talking about some pretty tacky humans-was almost accidental, a byproduct of institutionalized vacuity and timidity. Writers with nothing to write about invariably start covering themselves up with sex and gore, if only because they realize, almost instinctively, that those two subjects can be described …
Education and Christian Civilization
“I want to argue here that it is not possible to fully provide ‘the paideia of the Lord’ outside the context of a Christian civilization. If this is the case, then Paul’s command to the Ephesians, when they did not live in a Christian culture, just as we do not, means that he saw, at …
Better Living Through Chemistry
“And this situation illustrates the nature of our dilemma. Suppose for a moment that some prophet had come out of the wilderness in 1958 and predicted that within a generation one-fifth of the children enrolled in our schools would be doped into docility. The prophet would, of course, have been laughed back to his cave. …
The Apologetic for Bad Art
“The first thing we must do is get the smoke out of our eyes. Which is to say that we must start afresh, and concede publicly what most earnest men and women have always conceded privately, that the ancient apology for bad art-“the work is shoddy and disjointed because The Times are shoddy and disjointed”-is …
Garden Hoses and Education
“If we bring this down into the present in order to illustrate what it would mean to us, paideia would include the books on the bestseller lists, the major newspapers, the most popular sitcoms and networks, the songs on the top forty lists, the motion pictures seen by everyone, the architectural layout of most suburban …
School Reform
“When Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning was published in 1991, the government school system was in crisis. Some thought that it could not get any worse, but in the time since then, the unthinkable (even for then) has become commonplace. Still many Christians have not yet come to grips with the foundational nature of …
The Root of Affectation
“Sir Henry Savile (one of the scholars who prepared the King James Version of the Bible) read the indictment, almost four centuries ago” ‘Vanity,’ he said, ‘is the sin, and affectation is the punishment: the first may be called the root of self-love, the other the fruit. Vanity is never at its full growth till …
Paideia Central
[Speaking of ancient Greek civilization] “Further, the point of paideia was to bring that culture about. To find a word of comparable importance to them, we would have to hunt around for a word like ‘philosophy.’ To find a word of comparable importance in our culture, we would have to point to something like ‘democracy.’ …
So Much Genius, So Little Talent
“Reputations born of hyperbole must gather ever more hyperbolic hyperbole unto themselves, else they die (and take their fabricators with them). The problem, of course, is that there is a point above which a reputation cannot rise: once a writer has become the most important writer of the day, he or she has nowhere to …
All You Need Is Love
“Love that refuses to defend that which is loved is not biblical love at all. Such a sentiment is actually self-absorbtion. Love that shuns a fight is an oxymoron, and so I turn the charge around. The modern evangelical world says peace, peace, but there is no peace. Neither is there love. I love the …