Overlapping Aesthetics

Very few period pieces set in the 1980s are all that convincing because the average home in 1985 was largely stocked with goods and styles from the 1970s and late 1960s, although contemporary filmmakers typically stuff a “1985 home” with goods and styles that were fashionable in the year 1985.

Gibbs In Mojave

Tomorrow, we are waking at five to get on the road early. Driving from the Lemoore Naval Air Station through the Mojave Desert, Las Vegas, and hopefully making it to the Grand Canyon by early evening.

I made a playlist for the occasion. As usual, this one is marked collaborative, so feel free to add to it.

Every Time

Tom: We’ve made remarkable cultural progress over the last fifty years.

Harry: Really? What about rising suicide rates? And do you know how many Americans are on antidepressants?

Tom: We’ve probably always been this depressed. It just wasn’t reported or diagnosed before.

Every time.

CiRCE 2021 National Conference Preview

“Monasteries were both more popular and more productive when they were harder to get into. The gatekeepers of classical schools should remind themselves of this fact every day before beginning their work.”

-from “The Downside of Classical Christian Education’s Rising Popularity,” one of two forthcoming talks at the CiRCE 2021 National Conference

Sign up for virtual admittance to the conference and attend my lectures online

4th Of July Meditation

“Love your neighbor as yourself” is an ethic which assumes love is a teacher. A man’s intuitive care for himself must always be pushed outward, stretched farther. Our neighbors are not on the other side of the world, but physically close to us. Our neighbors are just beyond our own bodies. Love is a dilation of being, the reception of the Infinite Himself. When God’s love fills a man it “runs over” and those near that man are blessed by the gratuitous bounty which overflows. The man who loves God cannot help loving his neighbors.”

-from Love Of Neighbor And Enemy On The 4th Of July

Journalism Of The Soul: How To Read Proverbs

“A proverb does not support itself. Our lives justify great proverbs, and so the more a man examines his life, the more a collection of proverbs will seem to him like newspaper headlines that offer up-to-the-minute reports on the state of his own soul. These are the news sources worth following. Who cares that CNN’s journalists can tell you what’s going on with Iran when journalists of the human condition like Solomon and Goethe can tell you what’s going on with your relationship with your father?”

-from my latest for CiRCE