Like many books that already I should have read, Don Quixote had been neglected for far too long—Tsundoku and everything. I am now reading Cervante’s hilarious novel for the first time and am immediately tickled by the Jared and Jerusha Hess comedic style (Nacho Libre and Napoleon Dynamite definitely come to mind). Lines such as […]
Books & Literature
Reader Looke, not on his Picture, but his Booke
In Jeanett DeCelles-Zwerneman’s instructive treatise, A Lively Kind of Learning: Mastering the Seminar Method, she makes an important claim about learning to read a work on its own merits, rather than with the prejudices that frequently arise out of one’s intimate knowledge of the author. She writes, Ray Carver was an alcoholic and Rousseau abandoned […]
We Are Humans; We Are Not Gods
I have been reading through Jorge Louis Borges’ Selected Poems. One of the poems to which I keep returning is one of life’s refrains. The poem is called Límites. It reminds me there is something human about boundaries because boundaries—be they natural or artificial (that is, political)—remind us of our own limits, especially the fact […]
Don’t Read My Blog Every Day!
…if you don’t want to. As a matter of fact, you may have only signed up for my Saturday Substack Newsletter, Rumbling Toward Heaven, and are now wondering why you’re getting something from me in your inbox on a Monday. Well, this is a courtesy email to let you know that I will be publishing […]
C. S. Lewis’s Confession to T. S. Eliot
In the open stanza of Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, the narrator says, Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherized upon a table; Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, The muttering retreats Of restless nights in one-night cheap […]
Two Books About Books
There have been two book discoveries that remain marked in my memory as being most serendipitous. The first—and I cannot recall how or from whom I discovered it—is the Education of a Wandering Man by Louis L’Amour. Ironically, it played a part in shaping my view of education. I say ironically because Louis Dearborn LaMoore […]
On Education: A Review
I recently reviewed On Education, for Ad Fontes, A Journal of Protestant Letters. On Education documents Abraham Kuyper’s involvement with the Netherlands’ seventy-year political battle over parents’ rights to choose schools representative of their religious convictions. On Education is more than just a helpful resource; it is a uniquely prescient guide for everyone concerned with […]
The Arms Best Adapted to Old Age
For the philosopher himself could not find old age easy to bear in the depths of poverty, nor the fool feel it anything but a burden though he were a millionaire. You may be sure…that the arms best adapted to old age are culture and the active exercise of the virtues. For if they have […]
We’re Late
W. H. Auden is considered by most to be one of the 20th Century’s finest English and American poets. Younger than T.S. Eliot, and greatly influenced by him, Auden fits squarely in the camp of the modernists poets exemplified by Eliot and Ezra Pound. In his poem, We’re Late, he highlights the hurry, scurry, fret, […]
Washing Giants’ Feet
One good way to learn is to sit at the feet of a good teacher. But a better way to learn is to wash the feet of those teachers with the greatest minds, the intellectual giants of the Western Tradition. When it comes to education, Plato’s Socrates considered dialogue to be the best vehicle for […]