"The Giant"

I have always enjoyed good illustrators who capture the characters or circumstances described in good books well. My favorite has long been N.C. Wyeth (1882-1945). I have collected images of many of his paintings and use them as my ever-changing desktop background. A while back, I joined a Facebook group called "The N.C. Wyeth Fan Club," and have contributed a few of the images I have collected. By far, the most popular of my contributions is the one I posted yesterday: "The Giant" (1923). Right now, there are over 680 "likes" with more constantly appearing.

A comment on Facebook informs me that the painting is hung in the dining room of Westtown School in West Chester, PA. It was "a memorial commissioned by the Westtown School Class of 1910 for their deceased classmate, William Clothier Engle."

Poirot and twelve suspects

In the mail yesterday arrived a 4K Blu-ray of Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express (1974) from Kino Lorber. Watched it last night, and it was a completely enjoyable experience. My favorite Poirot is David Suchet, but an almost unidentifiable Albert Finney (fat suit, waxed mustache, etc.) was fine. The rest of the cast included Lauren Bacall, Martin Balsam, Ingrid Bergman, Sean Connery, John Gielgud, Wendy Hiller, Anthony Perkins, Vanessa Redgrave, Richard Widmark, and Michael York. A remarkable gathering of film stars — none got top billing. Another star in the film was the train itself, looking very much like the actual train as presented in documentaries. I saw another such documentary the other day about the food served on that train during the 1930s, and enjoyed seeing what appeared to be some of the same in the movie. The plot is well presented. And the photography is beautiful. Whether the 4K version looks better than a Blu-ray, I can't say. I haven't read the book in years, but it is one of her most famous plots and the movie seemed faithful. If you like Christie, I recommend this film version. I also have the PBS Mystery version with David Suchet as Poirot and like it, too.

From agnosticism to belief

From Barton Swaim's review of Charles Murray’s Taking Religion Seriously:

.... A Christian friend, asked by Mr. Murray how he had come to faith, named C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity (1952). Lewis’s argument that Jesus couldn’t have been a “great moral teacher” if he wasn’t the Son of God, as he claimed to be, grabbed Mr. Murray’s attention. The usual response—that the Gospels don’t record what Jesus said and did, and that belief in his divinity was a much later invention—led Mr. Murray to read an array of books on the four Gospels’ origins. (In a series of vignettes, Taking Religion Seriously lists all the books the author read in his journey from agnosticism to belief.)

One of those books on the Gospels’ formation is perhaps the greatest of them all: Richard Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses (2006), a densely researched and dispassionate argument that the synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) are more or less what they present themselves to be: accounts of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, compiled from the testimonies of eyewitnesses. Mr. Murray also read prominent critical accounts of the Gospels—books by Bart Ehrman, among others, that reject all supernatural claims—and wasn’t so impressed.

These latter accounts, Mr. Murray concludes, falter under the weight of unanswered questions. Among those questions: If the idea of Jesus’ divinity was so late an invention, as all critical biblical scholarship must assume, how is it that not a single New Testament book so much as alludes to the most cataclysmic event of ancient Judaism, the destruction of the Second Temple in A.D. 70? Jesus foretells its destruction in the Gospels, and this has been interpreted as a later insertion to make him sound prophetic, but are we to believe that any mention of the temple’s actual destruction never found its way into any New Testament book?

And why does the Acts of the Apostles end with the reader wondering what became of its two most important characters, when we know they were martyred? “If people kept augmenting and altering the books of the New Testament as the revisionists insist,” Mr. Murray wonders, “why wouldn’t someone have added a few lines at the ending of the Acts mentioning the deaths of Paul and Peter?” The most plausible answer, of course, is that Luke’s account was finished before their deaths and no one in subsequent decades felt sufficiently bold to tamper with it. And most puzzling of all: Why did Jesus’ disciples go to their deaths insisting he had been raised from the dead when they had neither hoped for nor expected such a thing in the first place, if they knew it never happened? .... (more)

Barton Swaim, "Taking Religion Seriously Review: Faith Makes a Comeback," Oct. 17, 2025.

It isn't just phonics

In "There Are No Silver Bullets for Illiteracy" the author explains what some states are doing right about teaching literacy. A curriculum reform that has to be a part of the solution was recommended by E.D. Hirsch some time ago. Phonics is necessary but not sufficient.

...[C]reating literate children is a years-long process. As phonics advocates rightly point out, children must first understand how to decode words through phonics instruction. But phonics is only the beginning. To progress further, children—especially children from low-income households who aren’t exposed to significant background knowledge at home—need lots and lots of factual knowledge about the world. To get there, it helps to have motivated teachers who appropriately teach phonics in the early grades, and then switch over to building knowledge in the later ones. It helps to motivate students—including through retention policies and curricula that are designed to be interesting. It also helps to have frequent assessments so struggling students can be identified and helped. ....

...[T]eaching general reading comprehension skills is not useful if kids don’t have enough background knowledge to actually understand what they are reading. Even if I know to look for the main idea in a passage, that study tip does me no good if the passage is still inscrutable when I read it. Yet many schools focus on this kind of attempted “skill development,” without a recognition that comprehension, reading, and writing skills follow mastering content, and not the other way around. .... (more)

Ivana Greco, "There Are No Silver Bullets for Illiteracy," The Dispatch, Oct. 16, 2025.

Amicable adversaries

From Robert Louis Stevenson in "Talk and Talkers":

.... There is a certain attitude, combative at once and deferential, eager to fight yet most averse to quarrel, which marks out at once the talkable man. It is not eloquence, not fairness, not obstinacy, but a certain proportion of all of these that I love to encounter in my amicable adversaries. They must not be pontiffs holding doctrine, but huntsmen questing after elements of truth. Neither must they be boys to be instructed, but fellow-teachers with whom I may, wrangle and agree on equal terms. We must reach some solution, some shadow of consent; for without that, eager talk becomes a torture. But we do not wish to reach it cheaply, or quickly, or without the tussle and effort wherein pleasure lies. ....

It is the mark of genuine conversation that the sayings can scarce be quoted with their full effect beyond the circle of common friends. .... Good talk is dramatic; it is like an impromptu piece of acting where each should represent himself to the greatest advantage; and that is the best kind of talk where each speaker is most fully and candidly himself, and where, if you were to shift the speeches round from one to another, there would be the greatest loss in significance and perspicuity. .... [T]he true talk, that strikes out all the slumbering best of us, comes only with the peculiar brethren of our spirits, is founded as deep as love in the constitution of our being, and is a thing to relish with all our energy, while, yet we have it, and to be grateful for forever.

Robert Louis Stevenson, "Talk and Talkers," Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson (1906)

Where you belong

Reposted because I love it:

Tell me, where is the road I can call my own That I left, that I lost So long ago? All these years I have wandered Oh, when will I know There's a way, there's a road That will lead me home

After wind, after rain When the dark is done As I wake from a dream In the gold of day Through the air there's a calling From far away There's a voice I can hear That will lead me home

Rise up, follow me Come away, is the call With the love in your heart As the only song There is no such beauty As where you belong Rise up, follow me I will lead you home

"Chesterton's fence"

Seen on Twitter a while back:

Daniel could, of course, have searched for and easily found a definition online.

This is the passage from G.K. Chesterton:

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."

This paradox rests on the most elementary common sense. The gate or fence did not grow there. It was not set up by somnambulists who built it in their sleep. It is highly improbable that it was put there by escaped lunatics who were, for some reason, loose in the street. Some person had some reason for thinking it would be a good thing for somebody. And until we know what the reason was, we really cannot judge whether the reason was reasonable. It is extremely probable that we have overlooked some whole aspect of the question, .... (The Thing, 1929)

"Begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father.”

From "Athanasius against the world." Well worth reading (but it may be behind a paywall):

Seventeen hundred years ago, in a.d. 325, the Roman Emperor Constantine invited all the bishops of the world to assemble at Nicaea, in modern-day Turkey. The Council of Nicaea rejected the heresy of Arius, who denied the divinity of Jesus Christ. It composed a creed that (with some additions) is recited around the world today. It also set in motion a wrestling match of church and state engaging each other in the halls of history down through the generations.

A popular notion of that history laments “the Constantinian Church.” By this account, the church lost its integrity in consorting with the emperor. It joined the establishment and ever since has tended to align with hierarchies of secular power.

Of course, there’s a measure of truth in this paradigm. Constantine played a large role at Nicaea, and the church has often suffered through entanglement with regimes. But the larger story of Nicaea presents a much different balance of facts. For 50 years after the council, the Roman State supported the Arian heretics and oppressed the orthodox faith. A few courageous bishops resisted, and the laity stood firm. That is the story of Saint Athanasius and the fight for the Nicene Creed. ....

Arius first announced his heresy around the year 318. He reasoned that the biblical concept “Son,” “begotten of the Father,” implies a beginning. Therefore, the Son is not eternal as God the Father is eternal. He was created out of nothing, different in nature from God, as we are. ....

Constantine utterly misunderstood the significance of the issue. Arius’s opponents perceived it clearly. If Christ is not God, the Good News loses force. Our redemption depends on God’s entry into the world and His self-sacrifice. If Christ were merely a creature adopted by the Father, or a demiurge projected into the world, Christianity would fade away among all the Gnostic and Neoplatonic sects of the Hellenistic era. .... (more)

John D. Hagen Jr., "Athanasius against the world," National Review, Sept. 18, 2025.

The hope of a Christian

Last weekend, I attended a memorial service for a Christian believer who was a pastor and a friend. I came across this today: from the The 1662 Book of Common Prayer: International Edition. This prayer appears at the end of the service for "The Burial of the Dead."

MERCIFUL God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who is the resurrection and the life, in whom whosoever believeth shall live, though he die; and whosoever liveth, and believeth in Him, shall not die eternally; who also hath taught us (by his holy apostle Saint Paul) not to be sorry, as men without hope, for those who sleep in Him: We meekly beseech Thee, O Father, to raise us from the death of sin unto the life of righteousness, that, when we shall depart this life, we may rest in Him, as our hope is this our brother doth, and that, at the general resurrection in the last day, we may be found acceptable in Thy sight, and receive that blessing which Thy well-beloved Son shall then pronounce to all who love and fear Thee, saying, 'Come, ye blessed children of my Father, receive the kingdom prepared for you from the beginning of the world': Grant this, we beseech Thee, O merciful Father, through Jesus Christ, our mediator and redeemer. Amen.

Amazon sells The 1662 Book of Common Prayer: International Edition (InterVarsity) for a little over $20.00.

Deliverance

Robinson Crusoe is, of course, a classic work of fiction. Few, I suspect, think of it as a work of Christian fiction. The illustration is by N.C. Wyeth, followed by a commentary on quotations from the book.

Three times a verse of Scripture comes to Robinson Crusoe in an hour of special need.

The first came in a spell of sickness. Recalling that the Brazilians used tobacco as a medicine, he searched in one of the chests for a roll of tobacco — and found a Bible. This he opened casually, and the first words that came to him were, "Call upon me in the day of trouble; I will deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify me." (Psalm 50:15).

"The words," he wrote in his diary, "were very apt to my case, and made some impression on my thoughts at the time…though not so much as they did afterwards. .... Before I lay down I did what I had never done in all my life: I kneeled down and prayed to God to fulfil the promise to me."

The second occasion was during a sense of sin. Recovered from his sickness, he began reading in the New Testament with the not uncommon result that he had found himself more deeply and sincerely affected with the wickedness of his past life. "Now," he records, "I began to construe the words mentioned above, 'Call upon me, and I will deliver thee,' in a different sense from what I had ever done before; for then I had no notion of anything being called deliverance, but my being delivered from the captivity I was in…the island was certainly a prison to me…but now I learned to take it in another sense.

Now I looked back upon my past life with such horror, and my sins appeared so dreadful, that my soul sought nothing of God but deliverance from the load of guilt that bore down all my comfort…. And I add this part here, to hint to whoever shall read it, that whenever they come to a true sense of things, they will find deliverance from sin a much greater blessing than deliverance from affliction." .... (more)

"Robinson Crusoe and the Bible"

The intrinsic value of a human being

A humane society requires an understanding that precedes politics:

.... Classics in the history of Western thought place a strong emphasis on the moral and familial institutions that precede the State. The State must preserve these prior bonds and arrangements to retain its legitimacy, as the State is beholden to the natural dictates of morality, never capable of floating free of them. In his 2011 address to the German Bundestag in Berlin, Pope Benedict XVI succinctly articulated the essence of the pre-political:

The conviction that there is a Creator God is what gave rise to the idea of human rights, the idea of equality of all people before the law, the recognition of the inviolability of human dignity in every single person, and the awareness of people’s responsibility for their actions. Our cultural memory is shaped by these rational insights. To ignore it or dismiss it as a thing of the past would be to dismember our culture totally and rob it of its completeness. (Pope Benedict XVI, “The Listening Heart: Reflections on the Foundation of Law”)

As referenced by this quote, the value of a human person is at the heart of the pre-political. However you attempt to explain this value, it surely cannot be derived from the political. If so, the failure of any given political regime to recognize human value would mean that human beings under that political arrangement are valueless. If we wish to preclude this possibility, we need a metaphysics of the human person that precedes the political and that can deliver us something like intrinsic value. This is the kind of value that can constrain the political instead of being its subject. .... (more)

Laura Siscoe, "To Fix Politics, Think About What Comes Before Politics," Fusion.

Sons of the Father

From the final chapter of John R.W. Stott's Basic Christianity, "Being a Christian":

We saw earlier that our sins had alienated us from God. They had come as a barrier between us. Put differently, we were under the just condemnation of the Judge of all the earth. But now through Jesus Christ, who bore our condemnation and to whom by faith we have become united, we have been "justified," that is, brought into acceptance with God and pronounced righteous. Our Judge has become our Father. "See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are," wrote John. "Father" and "Son" are the distinctive titles which Jesus gave to God and to himself, and they are the very names which he permits us to use! By union with him we are permitted to share something of his own intimate relation to the Father. Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage in the middle of the third century AD, well expresses our privilege when writing about the Lord's Prayer:

How great is the Lord's indulgence! How great are his condescension and plenteousness of goodness towards us, seeing that he has wished us to pray in the sight of God in such a way as to call God Father, and to call ourselves sons of God, even as Christ is the Son of God—a name which none of us would dare to venture on in prayer, unless he himself had allowed us thus to pray.

Now at last we can repeat the Lord's Prayer without hypocrisy. Previously the words had a hollow sound; now they ring with new and noble meaning. God is indeed our Father in heaven, who knows our needs before we ask and will not fail to give good things to his children.

It may be necessary for us sometimes to receive correction at his hand, "for the Lord disciplines him whom he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives." But in this he is treating us as sons and disciplining us for our good. With such a Father, loving, wise and strong, we can be delivered from all our fears.

John R.W. Stott, Basic Christianity, Eerdman's Publishing, 1974.

Identifying the enemy

"How do we fight nothing?"

Nihilism’s root is nihil, Latin for “nothing.” No meaning. Empty; soulless. What we see is all there is. Nothing else. Nothing beyond. Nothing more. Nothing. What is the meaning? What is gained? What is lost? What is the point? Nothing.

Decades ago, Pope John Paul II popularized the phrase “culture of death.” A culture of death is a culture of nihilism. No meaning to life, nothing to aim toward or organize around, no intrinsic worth or dignity to each person, and no standard of what is good, right, and true to guide and govern us. ....

In C.S. Lewis’s 1942 book The Screwtape Letters, a senior demon coaches his nephew on how to demonize human subjects. To corrupt the soul of a person, he says, the apprentice demon must get his subjects to misidentify the enemy. Using satirical fiction, Lewis was warning readers not to confuse our real foe. ....

The modern playbook for mobilizing others is to sow seeds of fear and harvest actions in service of someone else’s agenda. Such ground is fertilized, writes 20^th-century philosopher Hannah Arendt, under conditions of isolation. Loneliness, she says, heightened in an antisocial century, “prepares men for totalitarian domination.” Related, Kyla Scanlon writes, “Anxiety creates the psychological conditions that algorithms exploit.” ....

When unity is lost, when our bonds crumble, when we literally dis-integrate—who gains? Yes, promoters, programmers, platformers, propagandists, and politicians gain. But who else benefits, spiritually speaking?

I think we are in a war. And there are forces corrupting our souls and stirring our angst.... But let us not misidentify the enemy, which must be named: evil, sin, meaninglessness, and nihilism. Nothing.

So, what do we do? How do we fight? Specifically, how do we fight nothing?

We fight nothing with something. Christians point to something—they point to Someone.

In the Gospel of John Chapter 6, the crowd following Jesus began to leave him. His teaching was hard. They did not like his absolutist claims. He failed to meet their expectations of the coming Messiah. Jesus asked the 12 disciples if they, too, wanted to leave. “Lord, to whom can we go?” responded the Apostle Peter. “You have the words of eternal life.” The most powerful response to nothingness is that which is eternal. Nihilism must not, will not, have the last word. Echoing Peter, Christians ultimately believe meaning, hope, and life are found in a person. .... (more)

Kevin Brown, "Our Real Enemy in the Culture Wars Is Nihilism," The Dispatch, Sept 21, 2025.

Where I live

I've lived on Madison's isthmus since 1982. I had been "surplused" from LaFollette High School because I was the junior member of the department. I had no idea where I would be teaching in the fall, so I decided to find a place to live in the center of the city and moved into the brand new Capitol Centre on the day it opened. I've lived here ever since, although I did move apartments a couple of times to get further from street noise and, finally, to get a much bigger balcony.

The pictures are of the apartment where I have lived for the last couple of decades. I have nested.

My study, where I spend much of the day:

 

 

The living room, balcony beyond:

 

 

 

The bedroom. The bed is seldom made:

 

 

 

The balcony, where I spend hours when the weather permits:

 

 

Autumn

Beginning in 1907 and annually from the 1930s to the '90s, the Sunday Chicago Tribune would publish these on the front page at some point in the fall. The cartoonist was a nationally famous Tribune cartoonist, John T. McCutcheon.

The story of the cartoon is here

"Further up and further in"

I've been reading C.S. Lewis and books and articles about him for a very long time, but I knew little about what Jews think about him. I'm curious about how representative this is. From Rabbi Mark Gottlieb on "C.S. Lewis and the Jews":

C.S. Lewis, the Oxbridge scholar, literary giant, and religious apologist, is arguably every Orthodox Jew’s favorite Christian author. My own extended engagement with Lewis may be representative of this feature of contemporary Jewish intellectual life. I first encountered Lewis as a student in an AP English class at my Manhattan yeshiva high school some forty years ago. .... Lewis has been a lifelong companion and guide, a religious and intellectual lodestar for me and so many other faithful Jews. Why has this Belfast-born Anglican writer and lay theologian held such sway over me and so many of my coreligionists?

The reasons for Lewis’s popularity among believing Jews are easy enough to identify. He is a world-class polymath, deftly shuttling between the discourses of imaginative literature soaked in spirituality and hard-headed, analytic dialectic in defense of traditional religious beliefs like creation, the reality of good and evil, reward and punishment, theodicy, the afterlife, and the purpose of prayer. As a champion of creedal religion living in the university and popular literary cultures of modernity, Lewis is a skillful role model for rationality and imagination in the service of a biblical worldview, values and dispositions desperately needed by today’s tradition-oriented seekers. But if learned Jews, from laymen to rabbinic giants, think so highly of Lewis, a similar question might be asked in reverse: what did Lewis think of Judaism and the Jews who played a significant role in his life? ....

...[L]ate in life, Lewis married the American poet and former radical Helen Joy Davidman Gresham, a Lower East Side–born, Bronx-bred Jewish convert to Christianity. Joy had two sons, David and Douglas, from her first husband, William Gresham, a modestly successful author with an outsized alcohol problem. With Joy’s death from cancer in 1960, the occasion of Lewis’s profound meditation, A Grief Observed, Lewis adopted the boys as his own children and did what he could, as an aging, almost-lifelong bachelor, to care for their every need. Douglas, the younger son, continued to be nurtured by the Christian home Lewis and his brother Warnie made just outside Oxford. But in the case of the older boy, David, Lewis’s support included buying new pots and pans and kosher goods from the covered market in Oxford, as Joy’s oldest son began to reclaim his ancestral Jewish identity. Lewis also consulted with his friend, the historian Cecil Roth, in whose Oxford home David would sometimes celebrate Shabbat. ....

A careful reading of Lewis’s own writing on Judaism is a decidedly more complex—and frustrating—affair. In a 1959 letter to his friend Dom Bede Griffiths, Lewis flatly says that the “only living Judaism is Christianity.” ....

Lewis’s views of Judaism, while disappointing from some contemporary ecumenical perspectives, is really the best that Lewis could do. But, for me at least, none of that seriously compromises the wellspring of imaginative wisdom or doctrinal clarity Lewis so clearly offers—to the faithful Jew as well as the Christian. My rabbinical mentors who encouraged reading Lewis were suggesting, usually implicitly, that Lewis could deepen and enrich my own growing Jewish faith, giving me the language, lexicon, and, crucially, the arguments to articulate a full life of traditional Jewish belief in an age of aggressive secularism. I would soon come to realize that even more than a peerless champion of reason, Lewis created the conditions for modern religious man to redeem (or, as he preferred, “to baptize”) the imagination, consecrating the entirety of the human person, even—perhaps especially—the sensual, to his Maker. ....

Lewis is needed, now more than ever, to help men and women of faith move “further up and further in.” Jews will be much better off for the journey with him. (more)

Mark Gottlieb, "A Tale of Two Jacks: C.S. Lewis and the Jews," Public Discourse, Sept. 16, 2025.

Ugly thoughts

This seems correct. When I first engaged in social media, I was often guilty of making instant comment that I regretted almost immediately (although not "horrific, cruel, and vindictive").  Jim Geraghty:

On Friday, John Podhoretz of Commentary offered a series of posts on X that succinctly encapsulated what we’ve seen since the rise of social media and why so many previously normal-ish seeming people are suddenly blurting out the most horrific, cruel, and vindictive ideas imaginable. You should read the whole thing — I hope John turns it into a column or essay — but this is the gist:

Here’s the danger of social media. It allows people to publish their internal monologues. Our internal monologues and fantasies are often incredibly ugly. People go to therapists because they feel so guilty about them, and one of the tasks of a therapist is to explain that thoughts are not actions. You can rage in your thoughts about your brother, or someone at work, even fantasize about them dying — but you have done nothing and are guilty of nothing, and you need to forgive yourself and learn how to calm yourself down.

Since 2007, people have [had] a means of externalizing that interior monologue....

If the world knew what was going on inside us, we would all be punished viscerally for it. Until 2007, for the most part, the world would not, could not, know. The question is, and I mean this literally: Can civilization survive now that we have been made witness to the interior lives of others?

Just about everybody’s got ugly thoughts sometimes. Thankfully, the percentage of people who act on those thoughts is pretty small; otherwise, society would be anarchy. And thankfully, most people keep those thoughts to themselves.

I would note that if you say something that violates other people’s sense of right and wrong — “I’m glad that guy is dead, I wish I had killed him myself” — in front of other people, you’re likely to see visible reactions of disapproval. You might even lose friends over it or get the sense that other people see you as a broken, hateful lunatic. That dormant sense of shame might awaken. But online, it’s much easier to dismiss those who criticize your comment, and also much easier to bask in the approval of other people, as well. ....

Jim Geraghty, "‘Consequence Culture’ Comes for the Angry Left," National Review, Sept. 15, 2025.

The Bird and Baby

The world's richest man has purchased the Oxford pub where the Inklings once met. From The Telegraph:

The most unlikely part of Ellison’s plan to put his stamp on Oxford is his purchase of one of its most historic and best loved pubs. In 2023, EIT reportedly paid the eye-watering sum of £8m for the Eagle and Child, in the centre of the city, which is being restored by Foster + Partners.

The pub, which first opened in 1684, closed its doors in March 2020 because of the pandemic and has never reopened. Until its closure, its most famous feature was the wooden plaque in the back room, known as the Rabbit Room, commemorating the literary group known as the Inklings, which included C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and Charles Williams, who would meet there regularly to socialise and discuss their work.

It was here, when Tolkien was reading The Lord of the Rings to the assembled company, that the academic Hugh Dyson is said to have remarked, “not another f------ elf”.

In one of the group’s last meetings, Lewis distributed literary proofs for The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. ....

Ellison bought the pub from St John’s College – co-incidentally, [Tony] Blair’s old college – with a pledge to refurbish and reopen it as a place where technologists and university scholars can come to meet and exchange ideas – as well, of course, as to drink. The pub’s menu will also, apparently, become rather more refined. .... (more)

I had a drink there when in Oxford and, of course, visited the area in the pub where the Inklings would gather, usually on Tuesday. They would also meet in Lewis's rooms in Magdalen College on Thursday evenings. I hope the restoration of the pub retains reference to its association with Lewis, Tolkien, and the others. The Bird and Baby picture is one I collected some time ago..

Mick Brown, "How the world’s richest man is buying up Oxford," The Telegraph, Sept. 13, 2025.

"But"

Jonah Goldberg:

...[Y]ou often hear a lot of “buts” after an event like this. When Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare CEO, was murdered, there were a lot of statements along the lines of “murder is wrong, but people need to understand how bad insurance companies are.”

(It’s depressing how I had to look up the name of the innocent victim, but knew the suspect’s name by heart).

Not everybody who said that kind of thing thought they were condoning or somehow justifying murder, but some did and more came across as if they were. And that is grotesque.

When it comes to murder—not self-defense or combat in war—there is nothing one can say after the “but” that can mitigate the wrongness of murder.

Murder is axiomatically unjustifiable.

It’s literally the word we use to describe an unjustified and unjustifiable taking of a human life. Under the law, if the justification is persuasive then it’s not murder but something else, and we use other words to describe it (negligent homicide, self-defense, manslaughter, etc.). ....

When you fail to condemn a murder because you don’t like what the victim said or believed, you are suggesting at some fundamental level that some speech or ideas should be punishable by death. That is atavistic. That is literally barbaric in that it is a throwback to a time when the powerful could kill the powerless simply because they gave offense. Every person who surrenders, even at the margins, to the idea that one can justify murdering people for expressing their beliefs is not a sophisticated modern advocate of some edgy new way of thinking. They are, all of them, reactionaries at the most metaphysical level, rejecting the core convictions of not just “modernity” but of Judeo-Christian civilization itself. .... (more)

Jonah Goldberg, "There Is No ‘They.’ Only ‘We.’," The Dispatch, Sept. 12, 2025.

Politics

George Will:

Today, on both sides of the barricades, politics is practiced with a snarl. It makes people cranky, permeates everything, and in two months, will spoil innumerable Thanksgiving dinners. Why then must we have politics? ....

Trout get along swimmingly without politics. Ants and beavers collaborate building anthills and dams, and bees in apiaries have hierarchies (queens and drones), but we do not speak of the “politics” of ants, beavers and bees.

Only humans have politics, for two reasons: We are opinionated, and we are egotistical. We think our opinions are preferable to others’ opinions. Hence the primary purpose and challenge of politics is to keep the peace among such creatures living together.

Many visionary nuisances think that keeping the peace is a contemptibly modest, even banal purpose for politics. They believe that social peace — living together congenially — is not merely overrated, it is evidence of bad character: too little passion for perfecting the world. Sacrificing social peace is, they think, an inevitable price worth paying for a politics with properly elevated ambitions, including the suppression of those whose opinions and egotism are impediments to politically driven progress.

Addressing what he called, with notable understatement, “my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen,” Lincoln said in his first inaugural: “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies.” When he spoke, seven states had voted to secede. The nation was fractured by disagreement about the right of some human beings to own other human beings.

Today, American politics is embittered by many disagreements, but not even all of them cumulatively begin to justify the insanely disproportionate furies that so many people on both sides of the metaphoric barricades relish feeling. Perhaps they feel important, even to themselves, only when cloaked in the derivative importance that comes from immersion in apocalyptic politics. Politics too grand to settle for merely keeping the peace that gives congeniality a chance. ....

George Will, "William F. Buckley Jr. would recognize Charlie Kirk as a kindred spirit," The Washington Post, Sept. 11, 2025.

Compassion and permissiveness are not the same

"The Taboo That Killed Iryna Zarutska" describes what happened, but also why it shouldn't have happened:

Until the...security footage from that night was released—footage that shows not just the moments leading up to Zarutska’s murder, but the horrifying aftermath as Brown stalks up and down the car leaving a literal trail of blood in his wake—the story oddly flew under the radar. It did so for the same reasons that it’s now become a flashpoint in the online discourse about crime, disorder, and public safety in American cities today. ....

The greater issue is a cultural one: a growing frustration with what often feels like limitless tolerance for public disorder and antisocial behavior—and with it, a sense that one must not only avoid discussing these things to remain a liberal in good standing, but actively pretend they don’t exist. ....

In shying away from what is politically inconvenient, ugly, or otherwise uncomfortable, we not only cede the conversation to racist idiots, but relinquish with it all hopes of a better future. The problem is not politics per se, but an inability to course correct when what seemed like progress turned out to be a misstep.

Nowhere is that clearer than in a well-intentioned attempt to give the mentally ill more agency that instead resulted in vastly fewer people accessing the care they desperately needed. ....

...[T]he tragedy is not just how badly this country failed to protect Iryna Zarutska from someone like Decarlos Brown Jr.—or to save Decarlos Brown Jr. from becoming the monster who killed her. It’s that we have fallen for the misguided idea that compassion and permissiveness are one and the same. In doing so, we have lost sight of the fact that a country founded on the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is also founded on the promise that when you come here, you will be not just free but safe. The tragedy is that a woman who fled the terror and disorder of war for a better life in a peaceful America instead ended up, unknown to her, in an America where we have tacitly abandoned certain public spaces to the most disordered and depraved among us because enforcing the law feels mean and makes us uncomfortable. .... (more, perhaps behind a paywall)

Kat Rosenfield, "The Taboo That Killed Iryna Zarutska," The Free Press, Sept. 8, 2025.

The best of the past

A friend thought I might appreciate this by Peggy Noonan. He was right. The excerpts below begin with a quotation from David McCullough:

.... “At their core, the lessons of history are largely lessons in appreciation.” Everything we have, he says, all the great institutions, the arts, our law, exists because those who came before us built them. Why did they do that? What drove them, what obstacles did they face, how are we doing as stewards and creators? “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude.” This is a wonderful sentence because it is true and bluntly put. Ignorance is a form of ingratitude. ....

Earlier this summer I wrote that we now routinely say and do things in our public life that are at odds with our history, that are unlike us. I focused on President Trump’s language and imagery when speaking to the troops at Fort Bragg, N.C., in early June. His remarks were partisan in the extreme, even for him; it was a Trump rally, not a president addressing the troops. Elsewhere, on sending the National Guard into Los Angeles: “When they spit, we hit.” All of it, the rally and what he said, was, I said, the kind of thing we don’t do. And we mustn’t lose sight of what we don’t do. ....

You can’t be dreamy about the past and say, “It was nice then.” It was never nice, it was made by human beings. You can’t say, “People were better then.” They weren’t. But in even the recent past the allowable boundaries of public behavior were firmer, and the expectations we held for our leaders higher. And their public behavior (not private, or not necessarily private) was often preferable to the public behavior we see today. So you don’t want to live in the past, but you do want to bring the best of the past into the present. .... (more)

Peggy Noonan, "We Need to Know History, Especially Now," The Wall Street Journal, Sept. 4, 2025

What the law requires

On September 9^th, Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett's Listening to the Law will be published. Her decisions on the Court have annoyed both liberals and MAGA types, but not, I think, those who understand what judges are supposed to do. "Swearing to apply the law faithfully means deciding each case based on my best judgment about what the law is, not what it should be." This is excerpted from an excerpt from the coming book:

...[I]n our system, a judge must abide by the rules set by the American people, both in the Constitution and legislation. Thus, the most important question for a nominee is whether she will honor her commitment to do so. Though the confirmation process sometimes suggests otherwise, it shouldn’t matter what the nominee thinks about the death penalty, abortion, affirmative action, or any other politically charged topic. What matters is whether she will respect the people’s resolution of such issues.

The judicial oath demands no less. The Constitution requires that all federal and state officials, including judges, “be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution.” To enforce this requirement, Congress mandates that all federal officials swear to “bear true faith and allegiance” to the Constitution and to “well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office.”

Federal judges take an additional oath, swearing to “administer justice without respect to persons” and to “faithfully and impartially discharge” their duties under the Constitution. Each of these oaths is a promise to leave personal preferences and biases at the courthouse door. The guiding principle in every case is what the law requires, not what aligns with the judge’s own concept of justice. .... (more)

Amy Coney Barrett, Listening to the Law, The Free Press, Sept. 3, 2025.

Vocation

Tomorrow is Labor Day in the US. As I have done in the past for Labor Day, I re-post part of a 1942 address by Dorothy L. Sayers: "Why Work?" (pdf):

I HAVE already, on a previous occasion, spoken at some length on the subject of Work and Vocation. What I urged then was a thorough-going revolution in our whole attitude to work. I asked that it should be looked upon—not as a necessary drudgery to be undergone for the purpose of making money, but as a way of life in which the nature of man should find its proper exercise and delight and so fulfill itself to the glory of God. That it should, in fact, be thought of as a creative activity undertaken for the love of the work itself; and that man, made in God's image, should make things, as God makes them, for the sake of doing well a thing that is well worth doing. ....

It is the business of the Church to recognize that the secular vocation, as such, is sacred. Christian people, and particularly perhaps the Christian clergy, must get it firmly into their heads that when a man or woman is called to a particular job of secular work, that is as true a vocation as though he or she were called to specifically religious work. .... It is not right for her to acquiesce in the notion that a man's life is divided into the time he spends on his work and the time he spends in serving God. He must be able to serve God in his work, and the work itself must be accepted and respected as the medium of divine creation. ....

Where we have become confused is in mixing up the ends to which our work is put with the way in which the work is done. The end of the work will be decided by our religious outlook: as we are so we make. It is the business of religion to make us Christian people, and then our work will naturally be turned to Christian ends, because our work is the expression of ourselves. But the way in which the work is done is governed by no sanction except the good of the work itself; and religion has no direct connexion with that, except to insist that the workman should be free to do his work well according to its own integrity. ....

Dorothy L. Sayers, Creed or Chaos?" Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1949, pp. 46-62.

Repent!

Paul Kingsnorth writes "I Found Freedom Along the Alaska Highway," sometimes quoting from Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance as here:

Pirsig’s 1968 road trip took place in a revolutionary year. There were fires all around him in America, but he could see where the real enemy lay:

Programs of a political nature are important end products of social quality that can be effective only if the underlying structure of social values is right. The social values are right only if the individual values are right. The place to improve the world is first in one's heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.

There’s a Greek word for this: metanoia. In English, it is usually translated as “repent.” It’s the first word Jesus of Nazareth is recorded as saying as he begins his mission. Sometimes we think it means “say sorry to God or get cast into hell,” but actually it means “turn around.” It means “change yourself”—your heart, your mind, your way of seeing. It all starts there. We all know this really, but simply accepting it would leave all the overthinkers with nothing to do.

Paul Kingsnorth, "I Found Freedom Along the Alaska Highway," The Free Press, August 28, 2025.

Reading when young (or old)

Once again this summer, The Telegraph offered "The best children’s books for every age group." It's a pretty good list. A few examples:

Four- to five-year-olds

Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) by AA Milne

In his 1939 memoir, It’s Too Late Now, AA Milne raged at how the “bear of very little brain” had undermined his reputation as a serious writer. For though Milne wrote seven adult novels and 34 plays, the extraordinary success of Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner (1928), with line drawings by EH Shepard, eclipsed any of the Englishman’s other literary efforts. They show Milne to be a brilliant observer of human behaviour, to the extent that the animals in the Hundred Acre Wood, be it pompous Owl or melancholic Eeyore, have become part of the cultural lexicon. And just as you’re never too old to read Pooh, you’re never too young: the books will give any inquisitive child an Arcadian first step into plot-driven stories.

The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1901) by Beatrix Potter

Beatrix Potter’s stories contain all manners of horrors, from Squirrel Nutkin’s tail being broken off by Old Brown the owl to Benjamin Bunny’s young family being kidnapped by a hungry badger. The Tale of Peter Rabbit begins with a particularly gruesome image, as Peter’s mother warns him not to go into Mr McGregor’s garden: “Your father had an accident there; he was put in a pie by Mrs McGregor.” Not always a comforting read, then. But Potter’s exquisite illustrations, with their teasing interplay between fantasy and realism, make for some of the most enchanting children’s stories of all time.

Nine- to eleven-year-olds

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950) by CS Lewis

CS Lewis’s postwar fantasy has inspired more literary analysis than almost any other work of children’s fiction; but it’s part of the novel’s magic that its subtext can be enjoyed in blissful ignorance. Countless fans have reported that they read it for the first time unaware even of its Christian allegory – let alone the academic theories that link the trees in the Narnian woods, like Kerr’s hungry tiger, to the Gestapo. Lewis understood the unbridled power of a child’s imagination: no child who has followed the adventures of the Pevensie children will look on a wardrobe the same way again.

The Wind in the Willows (1908) by Kenneth Grahame

The poetic language in Grahame’s story, which is set in a bucolic Edwardian England, might strike the modern child as old-fashioned. But they should persevere: the tale of Mole, Ratty, Badger and their trouble-prone friend Toad is a dazzling combination of enchantment and psychological acuity. As with Winnie-the-Pooh, the characters have acquired a universal quality. We may not be lucky enough to know a Ratty – but we all know a Toad: “I have the gift of conversation. I’ve been told I ought to have a salon, whatever that may be.”

(more, perhaps only available to subscribers)

Emily Bearn, "The best children’s books for every age group," The Telegraph, July 15, 2025.

Buchan

Although published more than three years ago, I only came across it yesterday while searching for something else. Buchan is one of my favorite early 20^th century authors. From "Important lessons from a neglected Christian writer":

If asked to list important lay Christian writers from the twentieth century, people tend to list names such as GK Chesterton, CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien. One name that will probably not figure is John Buchan. Yet this omission is unfortunate, because Buchan was one of the twentieth century's most prolific and widely read British Christian authors, and, more importantly, he is an author whose works still have much to teach Christians today.

Buchan is best remembered today as the author of The Thirty-Nine Steps, but there was far more to his life than the writing of this single book. ....

Buchan...stands in the Christian tradition of moral realism. In his writings he teaches us that right and wrong, good and evil, are not mere human political inventions, but have objective existence, and that human beings have to take the right side in the battle between them. ....

[I]n Greenmantle, his hero, Richard Hannay, is rescued by the wife of a woodcutter while lost on an undercover mission in Germany in World War I. Her husband is away in the German army fighting the Russians, and she and her children are poverty-stricken and have very little food. However, out of Christian charity, she unhesitatingly offers food and shelter to Hannay, who is suffering from a bout of malaria, and her example changes Hannay's attitude completely:

'When I saw the splintered shell of Ypres and heard hideous tales of German doings, I used to want to see the whole land of the Boche given up to fire and sword. I thought we could never end the war properly without giving the Hun some of their own medicine. But that woodcutter's cottage cured me of such nightmares. I was for punishing the guilty but letting the innocent go free. It was our business to thank God and keep our hands clean from the ugly blunders to which Germany's madness had driven her. What good would it do Christian folk to burn poor little huts like this and leave children's bodies by the wayside? To be able to laugh and to be merciful are the only things that make man better than the beasts.' .... (more)

Buchan wrote in the inter-war years, and his books sometimes reflect prejudices common in Britain then, particularly anti-Semitism. I have posted about that before, and especially recommend this Gertrude Himmelfarb essay.

Martin Davie, "Important lessons from a neglected Christian writer," Christian Today, April 23, 2022.

Silent people

Cosmo Landesman "In praise of the silent people":

We Silent People don’t sign on-line petitions or go on protests to show solidarity with this group or that one. We don’t tweet our outrage, or blog our bile. We prefer to keep what we think to ourselves. When a verbal punch-up erupts over Gaza or trans rights at a dinner party, I stay silent and wonder what’s for pudding. ....

We do not lack empathy or understanding. We watch what is happening – in Gaza, Myanmar, Sudan, the Congo – with the same amount of horror as any activist. So why do we remain silent?

Because so much protest in the age of social media is just noise, theatre and virtue-signalling. Digital activism is the fomo of politics. It’s not about the rights and wrongs of issues and actually trying to resolve the great conflicts of our time, and everything to do with identity politics and tribal affiliations. In taking positions at dinner parties, we are presenting who we are.

Our political discourse has become so adversarial there’s no longer any point in exchanging opinions with the person sitting next to you. The days in which debates or conversations were conducted to inform and expand minds are over. ....

Cosmo Landesman, "In praise of the silent people," The Spectator, August 19, 2025.

"Christian nationalism"

Mark Tooley on "Douglas Wilson’s America." The subtitle is "His work to create a confessionally Christian state is the wrong antidote to what he seeks to cure." From that post:

...[T]he chief challenge to Christianity in America, and perhaps even to the broader unity of our democracy and civil society, is the stunning decline in religious affiliation. Only several decades ago, 90 percent of Americans identified as Christian, and now just about 60 percent do. Nearly 30 percent identify with no religion. Americans are not bewitched by Hindu statues or other religions; they are less interested in institutional religion. The fault can lie only with America’s Christian churches, which no longer command transgenerational loyalty. Yet few postliberals, religious or not, talk about the imperative of reviving churches and their affiliated institutions in America, absent which there can be no “Christian America.” Many postliberals celebrate Hungary under Viktor Orbán, who stresses his nation’s Christian identity. Recent data shows that church attendance in Massachusetts is 50 percent higher than in “Christian” Hungary, where the regime, despite its rhetoric and state-controlled media, has not increased religious observance. No government can.

Christianity can survive and thrive in America, as everywhere else, only through evangelism—making new converts—and discipling—strengthening its adherents in the faith. An agenda of state promotion of Christianity may rhetorically scratch itching ears eager to attack liberalism and its principles of religious freedom and legal equality for all. But it almost certainly will have no effect on rejuvenating Christian influence. At least Wilson, unlike most of the rhetoricians and social influencers touting Christian nationalism of some sort, is a pastor who plants churches and builds Christian institutions. Many of his ideas are offensive, unhelpful, or implausible. The company he keeps and the followers he attracts are often disturbing. .... (more)

Mark Tooley, "Douglas Wilson’s America," The Dispatch, August 17, 2025.

Conviction or compliance?

I was a public school teacher in Madison, Wisconsin. Many (most?) of the students in my high school classes had political and social opinions that differed from mine. If I created the kind of classroom atmosphere described below, it was certainly not my intention, and it would have definitely contradicted my teaching philosophy. This article from The Hill discusses what many college students believe they need to do to succeed.

On today’s college campuses, students are not maturing — they’re managing. Beneath a facade of progressive slogans and institutional virtue-signaling lies a quiet psychological crisis, driven by the demands of ideological conformity.

Between 2023 and 2025, we conducted 1,452 confidential interviews with undergraduates at Northwestern University and the University of Michigan. We were not studying politics — we were studying development. Our question was clinical, not political: “What happens to identity formation when belief is replaced by adherence to orthodoxy?”

We asked: Have you ever pretended to hold more progressive views than you truly endorse to succeed socially or academically? An astounding 88 percent said yes.

These students were not cynical, but adaptive. In a campus environment where grades, leadership, and peer belonging often hinge on fluency in performative morality, young adults quickly learn to rehearse what is safe. ....

Late adolescence and early adulthood represent a narrow and non-replicable developmental window. It is during this stage that individuals begin the lifelong work of integrating personal experience with inherited values, forming the foundations of moral reasoning, internal coherence, and emotional resilience.

But when belief is prescriptive, and ideological divergence is treated as social risk, the integrative process stalls. Rather than forging a durable sense of self through trial, error, and reflection, students learn to compartmentalize. Publicly, they conform; privately, they question — often in isolation. This split between outer presentation and inner conviction not only fragments identity but arrests its development.

This dissonance shows up everywhere. Seventy-eight percent of students told us they self-censor on their beliefs surrounding gender identity; 72 percent on politics; 68 percent on family values. More than 80 percent said they had submitted classwork that misrepresented their views in order to align with professors. For many, this has become second nature — an instinct for academic and professional self-preservation. .... (more)

Forest Romm and Kevin Waldman, "Performative virtue-signaling has become a threat to higher ed," The Hill, Aug. 13, 2025.

"The sage on the stage"

My teaching style was primarily the lecture. There was pressure, especially in the '70s, to avoid lectures in favor of students sitting in a circle and sharing what little they knew. However, it always seemed to me that, having formally studied a subject in college and graduate school, I was qualified to share it, translating it into understandable terms for my students. It was incumbent on me to make the lectures interesting and to respond to questions. But what was the point of requiring teachers to have advanced education if it wasn't intended to be used? Consequently, I liked "Don’t Yank the Sage From His Stage":

.... Relegating the teacher to a secondary (or even tertiary) supporting role as a “guide on the side” implicitly devalues what it is that sets him apart from his students: his education, knowledge, and professional experience. We reduce him to a mere repository of information. This may have initially been a bug in the system, but, in any case, it is now a feature. The transformation of the teacher’s role from “sage” to “guide” and the corollary “flip” of the classroom have been aided by obsessions with “power,” biases against “privilege,” and efforts to dismantle “systemic” and “institutional” structures of “oppression”—all of which are represented by the “sage on the stage.” ....

Contrary to widespread characterizations, the sage on the stage does far more than merely transmit information to a necessarily passive audience. The lecture, writes Amanda Fulford and Áine Mahon, “should … be seen as a special form of human encounter.” And it is a human encounter that allows for the kind of “guidance” that the flipped classroom may or may not actually provide in practice.

This is particularly true when the lecture is delivered live. Students not only are able to think critically about the material that is being presented, but they may also be able to ask questions about it and receive answers in real time. They may even be able to engage in dialogue with the lecturer. ....

A good lecture isn’t the regurgitation of information gleaned from sources that could be provided directly to students to be read on their own. It is the product of the kind of active learning that teachers seek to promote—a synthesis of information, critical analysis, and informed interpretation on a specific subject, carefully prepared within a particular context for a target audience for specific purposes. In this, it serves as a real-world example of “active learning.” In a piece titled “In Defense of Lecturing,” professor Mary Burgan notes that lecturers serve as “models of knowledgeable adults grappling with first principles in order to open their students’ understanding. […] The phenomenon of a grown-up person capable of talking enthusiastically and sequentially can show students how they themselves might someday be able to think things through.” Lectures thus provide students with the opportunity to see that “the passionate display of erudition [is] valuable in itself—regardless of the rewards of approval or popularity.” Those students “rarely … have the chance to observe intellectual mastery and excitement in their daily world. When they find it on a campus, it validates the life—the liveliness—of the mind.” ....

None of this means that direct instruction is always the best approach—that there is no room at all for facilitated “active learning” in an occasionally “flipped” classroom. In practice, almost every sage occasionally leaves the stage to guide from the side. As Peter Stanton argues, “the ideal teacher should be able to act as both a sage on the stage and a guide on the side, and they should carefully evaluate when it’s most valuable to use each approach.”

What I do mean, however, is that the guide on the side is no substitute for a sage on the stage. Students do, in fact, need a sage—for his education, knowledge, experience, and expertise. And if students are to receive the full benefit of these things, the sage needs his stage—even if he may occasionally leave it to guide from the side. (more)

David C. Phillips, "Don’t Yank the Sage From His Stage," Martin Center for Academic Renewal, August 8, 2025.