Tag: education
What is a Nation, Anyway?
Proper forgetting depends on the idea of a nation itself. For Renan, “a nation is a soul, a spiritual principle” built on two things, the past and the present.
Ode to Gettysburg at 161
To prove the American proposition, we must dedicate our lives to its truth with our deeds every day, and maybe someday with our lives themselves.
Straw Men and the Possibility of Community in Modernity
Between these extremes, however, is free choice within reasonable limits, which I believe makes the value of community and its deliberative fruits still possible, even within the reality of the fractured and deracinated world in which we are living.
Searching for The Thing: A Review of The Thing That Would...
While she relates the years of kaleidoscopic confusion, she provides waypoints to keep the reader grounded: “This is where we are, and this is where we’re going.”
The Middle Ground of Wit and Insult, Considered Together With Their...
In other words, knowledge and reason are no match for our gargantuan vices. The giants passion and pride cannot be held at bay by the ignorance that prevails in public discourse and certainly not by the bluster it hides behind.
On Abortion, Uncompromising Values, and the Value of Compromise
Perhaps one day moral clarity on this issue will be found or the values of the American people will align more neatly. Until that day arrives, if ever it does, let the people themselves reach across the proverbial aisle so that they may reach one another.
Road Kill
I had to understand life and nature not as something to be mastered, but as gifts afforded to me to steward by a God abundant in goodness.
What Plays in Peoria
You don’t have to be normal. You don’t have to be weird. You just have to be a person – which is a moral ideal, not a fact of nature – and let the chips fall.
The Art of Good Gossip: Unexpected Lessons about Virtue and Community...
To love and learn from each other in our communities is what good gossiping accomplishes.
Unpacking My Library (Again)
Maybe, in the end, a home library does what a long-inhabited home does: charts a middle ground between the chaos of the world and the hyper-rationality of modernity.