Brian Kaller is a Missouri-born journalist who has lived in Ireland for many years, researching traditional ways of life. He has written for the American Conservative, First Things, Mother Earth News and Irish newspapers, as well as on his web site oldschoolschool.org.
Brian Kaller
Articles by Brian Kaller
Silage and the Silence of the Corncrake
I’ve been talking to elderly friends here in the Irish countryside about what they used to do when the sun shone. The answer, of course, was that they made hay.
The End of Childhood Play
Too many children grow up learning no lessons, organising no peers, and exploring no territory, unless it be shifting electrons around a screen, and the screen becomes their world.
Growing Up Stoic
For our home-schooling lessons my daughter and I have been reading Greek and Roman philosophers, and she has taken a shine to the Stoics – not only reading them with…
An Athenian Coup, or Slapstick Bedtime Story?
For tonight’s lesson, I said to my ten-year-old, tell me how the first democracy was created. “Sure,” she said, remembering our lessons past. “It was in Athens, about 2,500 years…
Comedians in Togas
The Greeks were funny. We don’t usually think of them that way; we think of them as marbled patriarchs in togas, Really Important Men We Revere for Some Reason. Admittedly,…
Conversations with Bronze Age Warlords
Pop quiz: What ancient Greek legend begins with the kidnapping of Helen of Troy, and ends with Greeks sneaking into Troy inside a hollow wooden horse? If you said “The…
The Real Social Network
The other night I saw the end of a life well-lived. I didn’t know him; I just saw his funeral. My bus rolled through the dark night I was riding…
Horse Burgers and the Lives of Others
If you could boil our global problems down to seven words, they might be these: we don’t see where stuff comes from. Most of us grew up staring at glowing…
Classic Cinema and Our Future
I want to see films for all ages, devoid of hip countercultural irony. I want to see low-budget teleplays in which today’s equivalent of Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland put…
Homewreckers
County Kildare, Ireland. A couple I know – we’ll call them Bob and Nancy -- lived in a century-old house in the middle of their town, a few miles from…