Teach me to care and not to care.
“Traditionally, sex has been a very private, secretive activity. Herein perhaps lies it powerful force for uniting people in a strong bond. As we make sex less secretive, we may rob it of its power to hold men and women together.”
-Thomas Szasz (1974)
I am only about half way finished with it, but with every chapter I finish, I can sense that Beware of Pity is creeping higher and higher on my list of favorite novels. It is presently up in the realm of Stoner and Strangers on a Train and might finish beside The Road and Till We Have Faces.
“Camilla: My new diary arrived in the mail today.
Gibbs: Before you start this diary, I’m going to lay down a few rules for how it can be kept.
Camilla: What are the rules?
Gibbs: First, your diary will not be a secret diary. I might pick it up and read it whenever I choose. Secret diaries encourage the worst and darkest sorts of thoughts a person has. Secret diaries are often filled with complaints, insults, and grievances with others. Why? A secret diary needs a reason to be secret, which means you will fill it with the sorts of thoughts you don’t want other people hearing, which either means confessing your own sins or the sins of others. A diary is no place to confess your sins, though, because a diary can’t forgive you. And it’s no place to catalogue the sins of others.”
-from my latest for CiRCE
At this point, “I attend church virtually” means “I don’t attend church.”
It is the responsibility of reasonable Christians everywhere to make sure that “virtual” church attendance does not become a socially acceptable substitute for regular, actual church attendance.
The problem with virtual church attendance is not that virtual things don’t count, for if it is possible to sin online, it is possible to be virtuous online, as well. The issue, rather, is making things virtual which could be actual with just a little effort, just a little suffering.
To do something online which cannot be done in person is one thing, to do something online which can just as easily be accomplished with a brief car ride is another. If a husband could kiss his wife on the lips, but preferred to kiss her image on a Zoom screen instead, he wouldn’t be much of a husband. Nonetheless, virtual attendance at a church which is no less than fifteen minutes away is fast becoming an acceptable substitute for appearing physically to sing and pray. That foolishness has to be quashed, no matter how feelings get hurt in the process.
“Question One: Is this the sort of school where the children of board members get away with murder?”
–my latest for CiRCE
This one is collaborative, so after you get a feel for it, add whatever seems most fitting.
The latest episode of Proverbial is “The Real World” and aims to explain why young people roll their eyes at the expression “the real world,” why youth is glorious, and why they shouldn’t roll their eyes at the expression.
If you’re a long time listener of the show, this one might be fun to listen to with your teenage children.
Every movement acknowledges that there are people not yet in the movement who ought to be.
But it must also acknowledge there are people within the movement that ought not to be.
If classical Christian education is a movement, we must confess that too much time has been spent on the former and too little time spent on the latter, and the need for the latter grows exponentially every year.
Unless we are nominalists, we must admit that not every school which claims to be classical is actually classical. Claiming to be classical does not make one classical.
This is a troublesome thing to say, for it means making painful divisions, tough calls, borrowing from the Against The So-and-So’s spirit of late antique Christianity. It means contracting, not expanding.
The temptation is to believe: “There are people inside who don’t belong, but we will bring them to the point they do. And we will fiscally benefit from those who don’t belong in the meantime.”
But this makes the movement unattractive to the people who do belong. Bad money drives out good money.
In my mind, the race is on to be the first school that claims openly, unapologetically, in no uncertain terms: “So far as classical Christian schools go, being Republican does not make you missionally aligned.”
As the number of applications to classical Christian schools rise on account of this Fox News documentary, this will become a harder and harder message to present.
“People are all more or less materialists today, for they are the heirs of the nineteenth century. They need only be shown some crude mimicry of ‘mental’ events in nature or in instinct, and they will fancy that the ‘mental’ has been explained. It is whatever is lower that we take to be more real.”
-Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World
Denis de Rougemont is better at explaining modernity than Rene Girard.
A feigned care for the poor has brought as much suffering on the world as poverty itself. It is not a sin to be poor, but it is a sin to pretend to pity the poor, and the wages of sin is death.
There are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity.