“The Christian faith is not a condiment to be used to flavor the neutral substance of secular knowledge. Paul tells ust hat every thought is to be made captive to Christ (2 Cor. 10: 1-4). Christ says that anyone who does not gather with Him is scattering (Matt. 12:30). The Christian faith does very poorly …
More of a Mirror Than We Would Like to Admit
“Movies are fantasies, but a nation’s fantasies are also statements about itself.” [E. Christian Kopff, The Devil Knows Latin (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 1999), p. 223]
Untethered Virtue and Other Spooky Thoughts
“Respect for rationality and the rights of the individual; a commitment to the ideals of disinterested criticism and color-blind justice; advancement according to merit, not according to sex, race, or ethnic origin: these quintessentially Western ideas are bedrocks of our political as well as our educational system. And they are precisely the ideas that are …
Exclusive Education Requires Exclusive Worship
“Christian education cannot be sustained apart from the exclusive worship of the triune God. And such worship cannot be offered to Him and to demos. He will not accept it, and, incidentally, neither will demos. The establishment of a Christian school movement is in principle a threat to the current establishment, and the establishment knows …
Baggage Handles
“The fact of the matter is that we can no more choose our culture and its languages than we can our parents. A trendy academic recently urged his peers to make a careful selection among what he called our ‘cultural baggage.’ We should not deceive ourselves, however. If our culture and its traditions are baggage, …
They Feel Good All Over
“Like most modern tyrannies, the dictatorship of the politically correct has freely used and abused the rhetoric of virtue in its effort to enforce conformity and silence dissent. This is part of what makes it so seductive. How gratifying to know that one is automatically on the side of Virtue simply because one espouses the …
The Idols of Pluralism
“Properly understood, pluralism is simply another name for polytheism. When we say ‘pluralism,’ what does the plurality refer to? The answer is, to a plurality of authoritative voices, the Babel of competing divine voices, all saying what we ought to do. Because this situation creates a potential for civic trouble, the powers that be impose …
No Such Thing As Art In General
“Art is a discipline rooted in a specific culture.” [E. Christian Kopff, The Devil Knows Latin (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 1999), p. 24]
Free the Goldfish!
“Creativity is possible only as the final stage in a long, rigorous absorption of the teachings and discoveries of the past. The last thing we need for the future of our country or of our young people is one more lunatic smashing goldfish bowls in order to free the goldfish” [E. Christian Kopff, The Devil …
Trying to Fit In
“In the nineteenth century, secular education was established because many Christians were fatally persuaded of the myth of neutrality. They were told that there were many areas of life that could be studied apart from any reference to the authority of Scripture. They accepted the pluralistic nature of American public life, not as a social …