“Among conservative believers we at least have a concept of resistance to relativism in the areas of truth and ethics. We reject the idea that something can be true on Tuesday but false on Friday. We also reject the notion that sins in the first part of the week gradually lose their sinfulness by the …
Not Good Symptoms At All
“Artists also talk of Good Work; but decreasingly. They begin to prefer words like ‘significant,’ important,’ contemporary,’ or ‘daring.’ These are not, to my mind, good symptoms” (C.S. Lewis, The World’s Last Night, p. 72).
Poetry is the Point
“We do not have them master the grammar and the dialectic so that they can chop logic for the rest of their dreary lives. They should grow up into wisdom, rhetoric, glory, and again, poetry” (The Case for Classical Christian Education, p. 160).
Poetasters As Self Important
“He there faces the fact that modern poets are read almost exclusively by one another. He looks about for a remedy. Naturally he does not suggest that the poets should do anything about it. For it is taken as basic by all the culture of our age that whenever artists and audience lose touch, the …
Can”t Imitate Abstractions
“Abstractions can be true and can be affirmed, but they cannot be imitated. This is why many schools are filled with children who learn various biblical abstractions and can repeat them back, but there is nothing there to imitate. Children from other denominational traditions repeat back a different set of abstractions. The lives of the …
Why Being Smart Just Changes the Speed At Which We Can Get Into Sin
“I gladly admit that we [the cultured] number among us men and women whose modesty, courtesy, fair-mindedness, patience in disputation and readiness to see an antagonist’s point of view, are wholly admirable. I am fortunate to have known them. But we must also admit that we show as high a percentage as any group whatever …
Distance Learning
“Incidentally, this is one reason why all forms of cyber-education will necessarily be second best. Certain learning can be acquaried at a distance, and in one sense every book ever written is a form of ‘distance learning.’ Consequently, what can be place on a page and withdrawn from that page many years later can also …
The Man Ain”t Got No Culture
“Culture, like religion, is a name given from outside to activities which are not themselves interested in culture at all, and would be ruined the moment they were. I do not mean that we are never to talk of things from the outside. But when the things are of high value and very easily destroyed, …
Foundational Gratitude
“A biblical aesthetic requires that true creativity be built upon an inheritance. Perpetual revolution is as destructive to the arts as it is to civil order” (The Case for Classical Christian Education, p. 158).
So Call Now
“Like biblical parables, commercial messages invade our consciousness, seep into our souls. Even if you are half-awake when commercials run, thirty thousand of them will begin to penetrate your indifference. In the end, it is hard not to believe.” (Neil Postman, How To Watch TV News, p. 124).