Teach me to care and not to care.
“It is May, which means that classical schools across the country are finalizing plans for graduation ceremonies, setting calendars for next year, determining schedules for summer school, and trying to figure out what to do with a few senior boys whose theses were laughably bad.”
-from How To Avoid Another End-Of-The-Year Senior Thesis Fiasco, my latest for CiRCE
I’m enjoying this one immensely. I far prefer the anti-consumerism of the 80s and early 90s to the sort of shrill pap that passes as edgy these days. DeLillo is satirical, but he doesn’t believe that satirizing consumerism is brave. He doesn’t believe it is a metaphysics or a creed. It’s not a dogma. These days, people make as though anti-consumerism is genuinely interesting, daring, the sort of thing you can preach. It’s not. It’s fair, but it’s really nothing more than a cultural accoutrement.
Parent: My child has too much writing homework.
Teacher: How much time is your child spending on their writing homework?
Parent: My son went up to his room last night at 5:30 to start working on his writing homework and when I checked on him at 11:30, he was still going. Six hours—that’s unacceptable. No child should have six hours of homework.
Teacher: Was your son working on a laptop with internet access?
Parent: Yeah, so?
-from my latest for CIRCE
There is no way to bring out about real reform cheaply and with your ego intact. Real reform is always embarrassing and expensive.
Also, someone needs to write a classical Christian education manifesto.
“This will always be a temptation facing institutions which are both business and ministry; sacrificing a little on the ministry side will do much for business, sacrificing a little on the business side will do much for ministry.”
If marriage is a sacrament, it must also be a cosmology. In this lecture, Joshua Gibbs presents marriage not as theory, not as theology, but as world-building. Well suited to single people, those dating, newlyweds, romantics, and cynics.
“Don’t shoot the messenger” seems live obvious advice, but let’s all admit how pleasant it can be to deliver bad news. Check out the latest episode of Proverbial to hear more.
Student: I know how you feel about the matter, but I’m thinking about going to a secular college next year.
Gibbs: How come?
Student: I don’t want to live in a bubble. If I don’t go to a secular college, I’m worried I’ll go through my whole life without ever knowing anything about other people’s views.
Gibbs: Huh. You think college is your last chance to encounter “other people’s views”?
Student: Sort of.
Gibbs: What a strange life you must have planned for yourself after college. Be that as it may, I guess I should ask what you mean by “other people’s views”?
Student: I mean, I don’t know anything about Islam. I don’t know anything about Buddhism or Hinduism.
Gibbs: How much do you know about Islam already?
Student: Nothing. Isn’t that crazy?
Gibbs: You’ve never read a Wikipedia article on Islam?
Student: I might have, but I don’t remember it.
Gibbs: How about Buddhism? Hinduism? Atheism? How deeply have you looked into these things already?
Student: Again, I know nothing, that’s why I want to go to a secular college.
Gibbs: If you actually wanted to know about other views, you would have already begun doing a little digging.”
-from my latest for CiRCE
I had an epiphany this afternoon… I plan on organizing these thoughts into something more coherent over the next several months.
Q. What is the fundamental between the masculine and the feminine?
A. Aristotle proposes four causes: formal, final, efficient, and material. I propose that “the masculine” is the formal and final cause. “The feminine” is the material and efficient cause.
We speak of God as father because He is the formal and final cause. We speak of Church/Earth as mother because it is the efficient and material cause. The formal and final cause is indirect, the efficient and material is direct.
God feels distant to us for the same reason fathers seem distant, namely, because they are both indirect causes. They are “gone all the time.” Their support is indirectly experienced by children. Whereas mothers make our food and care for our wounds, children only vaguely grasp the role fathers play. They leave, they work, they earn money.
God “dwells in unapproachable light,” but the Church is present moment by moment. In the same way it is easier to love man (“whom we have seen”) than God (“whom we have not seen”), the love of mothers comes easier than the love of fathers.
And yet, without direct causes there are no indirect causes, and vice versa, which is why mothers tell children, “Ask your father,” and fathers tell children, “Ask your mother.” This is not shirking duty, but natural, because direct causes and indirect causes cannot exist without one another.
A materialist society cannot help but favoring the feminine. The feminine deals in causes (efficient, material) which a materialist society acknowledges, whereas indirect causes (formal, final) are thought specious. Baconian science inherently diminishes the role of fathers.
There are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity.