What Are You Reading This Summer?
The return of summertime every year often recalls the years that will never return: the golden days of youth. The energy,…
Coincidentally: Before Incunabula
Some essays write themselves and this is one of them. In 1996 the philanthropist George W. Mallinckrodt gave a substantial…
Coincidentally: Hearing Secret Harmonies
The Civil War was raging, and a Confederate sentry heard the sound of a voice coming from marshland behind enemy…
The Birds: When the Wind Changes Overnight
For all their disagreements, scientific fact and science fiction are in agreement concerning the viral quality of fear. Men tend to…
Oedipus the Detective
The murder mystery is as old as murder. When the blood of Abel cried out for justice, the all-seeing Judge took…
Coincidentally: All Gas and Gaiters
Irony was strained the United Nations’ “Earth Summit” in 1997 when President Clinton and President Chirac and Prime Minister Blair…
Coincidentally: Arma Virumque
By an instinct common to all youth who have not had pacifism violently hammered into them, the inventive child will…
Who Owns Your Children?
Home Education in
an Authoritarian Age
by Phil Lawler /Andrew Beckwith
— About — Is home education “dangerous”? A Harvard Law School professor—calling parents “authoritarian” and organizing a private “Summit” of…
The Writing Is on the Web
With the unfolding of spring comes a renewed awareness and appreciation for life. It is peculiar, though, how the observation of…
The Divine Tragedy of Achilles
As the heroes of The Iliad are slain in blood, Homer gives each of them an epitaph in poetry, that they may die…
Coincidentally: Names Proper and Improper
Of all the blithe habits that befog our culture as it careens toward wreckage, one of the most annoying is…
Learning by Light and Darkness: A Review of A Lantern in Her Hand
by Paul Prezzia
If philosophy is a preparation for death, as Socrates says, then the same can be said of education, at least…
These Parables: Laborers in the Vineyard
Lord Palmerston, or certainly some such confident Victorian, said: “If you do well here, you’ll do well there.” Many Christians…
The Redemption of Lydia Longley
Within about five minutes half of her family had been slain. Lydia Longley, aged 20, entered into the strange journey…
The Vampyre Bicentennial: Should Catholics Be Wary?
Full disclosure: I have been scarred by vampiric literature. It happened when I was a boy. My mother learned of an…
The Vulgar Morality of Tam o’ Shanter: A Tale by Robbie Burns
January 25 marks the birthday of Robert Burns (1759-1796), the national poet of Scotland, and is observed worldwide with the Robbie Burns…
These Parables: The Unmerciful Servant
St. Peter was an impetuous man, unlike his most recent successors, and so his reserve through our Lord’s discourse in…
These Parables: The Net
Without a “sense” of the Church, Jesus’ parables can be reduced to exercises in moralism. Fundamentalist readers, or even those…
Who Owns Your Children?: Home Education in an Authoritarian Age
— About — Is home education “dangerous”? A Harvard Law School professor—calling parents “authoritarian” and organizing a private “Summit” of…
Jungle Fever: Reading for the Heart of the Summer
There is something distantly primal and tribal about summer, when sunny days and sultry nights seem to unconsciously conjure up the…
