Teach me to care and not to care.
“Our distaste for courage is born of sentimentalism, the belief that it is never right to ask or force others to endure emotional discomfort. Given that the Lord teaches ‘no discipline is pleasant,’ and Solomon teaches ‘with much knowledge comes much sorrow,’ sentimentalists and honest educators are necessarily on a collision course.”
-from my latest for CiRCE
“A classical education is a place for remedy, medicine, balm, ointment, and healing. It is a confessional booth. If a classical school is a place for therapy, then it is a place for learning to walk again after a car crash, not a place for a psychiatrist’s couch. It is a place for people who have hope and need help. It is not a place for people who are just fine, special, brilliant, advanced, and desperately in need of confirmation and praise. Those who are well do not need a physician.”
-from Only Man Can Be Healed
This summer, we will drive more than 6000 miles and see many national parks and old friends. This is the official trip playlist, which I have made collaborative for anyone who wants to listen, discern the mood, and add a few song to help out the family.
The headline says it all, but feel free to read the whole story.
It is the responsibility of every reasonable, courageous classical Christian educator to ensure that classical Christian schools do not simply become “Montessori schools for Republicans,” as a friend recently put it.
This often happens: a taste or two into a $15 bottle of red, I think, “This is so good, I should go back and buy a case.” And yet, halfway through the second glass, I think, “This is actually a bit too sweet to be all that interesting.”
It is easy to confuse sweetness, which is easy to like, for goodness.
“Of all sentient beings, humans are unique in this: once spiritually broken, they can be repaired. Like angels, man may fall. Like animals, man may die. But unlike angels and animals, between the falling and the dying, a human being may be restored to God.
A classical education is the education that naturally follows from this premise.”
-From Only Man Can Be Healed, my latest for CiRCE
I bought this one on the basis of hot recommendations from Sofia Coppola and Nick Hornby (both of whom I trust pretty far) and found it so good, I had to pace myself to make it last.
I liked it so much, in fact, that I really didn’t care how badly it ended (I am terribly picky about endings), but I found the last twenty pages immensely satisfying. The best new novel I’ve read since My Year Of Rest and Relaxation.
I’m On A Roll This Time, the latest episode of Proverbial, begins a run of shows devoted to the sayings of Boethius.
First up: “Bad fortune is of more use to men than good fortune.”
On June 9, at 8:00pm EST, I am delivering “Reconciling Beauty and Progress,” a free webinar for newsletter subscribers to GibbsClassical.com.
Beauty is rightly understood as an overflow, a surplus, and a gratuity. Beauty contributes nothing to our survival. Beauty is luxury and privilege. On the other hand, progress is now a cultural pursuit typically associated with Marxism, socialism, egalitarianism, and equality. What could beauty and progress possibly have to do with each other? Quite a bit, in fact.
In this forthcoming webinar, I will address the hidden, paradoxical connection between a traditional understanding of beauty and a common-sense approach to cultural progress.
This video will not be available as a recording.
There are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity.