Childhood without a Harness
Just a few days back, I arrived home to find a mound of muddy clothes at my front entrance and the sounds of children...
Everywhere at Once, Nowhere at All
“Right now, the main thing I’m taking from this conference is that PowerPoint is destroying the educational process.”
The conference, organized around the theme of...
Call an Assembly: The First Duty
In The Supper of the Lamb, a delightfully odd book, Robert Farrar Capon suggests as an exercise in reality an extended session with an...
School Consolidation and Slow Democracy
April in West Virginia smells like wild leeks: pungent and oniony. In the woods, their slim green leaves look like lilies of the valley,...
On Commencement Addresses
Holland, MI
It is graduation season. On campuses across the country graduates will be subject to the last compulsory and least remarkable rite of passage:...
The Loss of a Culture of Personhood and the End of...
Philadelphia, PA
The idea and practice of limited government begins with Christianity. Pagan antiquity could not imagine such a thing, because there was no distinction...
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...
Life Under Compulsion: Play and No Play
In East Bangor, Pennsylvania (pop. 800), there’s a little diner named for the trolley that used to take people to the once bustling steel...
An Ancient Legacy of Form: Guardini on Mastery and Nearness
Our dwelling place is the state not of nature but of culture.
Life Under Compulsion: If Teachers Were Plumbers
This is Part IV of a series of essays. For previous installments of "Life Under Compulsion," see Part I, Part II, and Part III.
“Good morning,...