Hillsdale College Faculty Statement on Academic Freedom

Written by Russell Amos Kirk; Adopted by the Hillsdale College Faculty on March 2, 1995.

There is a species of freedom peculiar to the academy: it is commonly called academic freedom, and has historically been linked with tenure and various forms of due process designed to ameliorate conditions of implacable dispute.   Ideally, academic freedom is that freedom to examine, dissect, describe, and explore the validity, utility, and consequences of ideas, beliefs, and institutions. Hillsdale subscribes to the ideal, but recognizes that it takes meaning only in the complex of principles which govern the entire College community and its several constituencies.  The College suggests, then, the  following summary statement, which may very well serve as a summary for all its principles:

Every right is joined to a corresponding duty.  So it is with the principles of academic freedom to which Hillsdale College subscribes.

Hillsdale College, an independent educational institution governed by its Board of Trustees, affirms its freedom from direction by public political authority.  Correspondingly, Hillsdale College recognizes its duties toward American society and toward the civilization of which we are a part.

Hillsdale College, as an independent institution, affirms its freedom from interference by interests or associations not related to the College by law or custom.  Correspondingly, Hillsdale College recognizes its duties toward persons rightfully associated with the College—alumni, members of faculty and staff, and students.

Hillsdale College, as dedicated to ordered liberty in private and public concerns, affirms its concern for the intellectual freedom of members of its faculty and staff.  Correspondingly, Hillsdale recognizes its duties of ensuring thorough competence and good character in its faculty and staff, as such competence and character relate to the canons of their profession.

Hillsdale College, in keeping with its commitment to principles of ordered liberty, affirms its desire to develop responsible freedom of thought and choice among its students.  Correspondingly, Hillsdale College recognizes its duties of imparting to students habits of mind and conduct which develop an understanding of private and public order. 

Hillsdale College affirms that academic freedom is bound up with a valuable legacy of other freedoms and duties.  Among these are the following aspects of ordered liberty to be considered with their related moral and social obligations: freedom of worship; freedom in work; freedom in politics; freedom in the economy. 

Hillsdale College affirms that all these freedoms are dependent upon the maintenance of a moral order; and that academic freedom in particular requires attachment to a body of truth, made known through the order and integration of knowledge.  Of such truths the College is the conservator and renewer, and the primary function of the College is to transmit, through these truths, some measure of wisdom and virtue.

As found on Dr. Bradley J. Birzer's website, Stormfields.

Year-End Giving

December 29, 2011

Dear TIC Reader,

As you prepare for the annual American ritual of year-end giving, please consider donating—at whatever level you can—to the sponsor of The Imaginative Conservative, The Center for the American Republic (CAR), a program of the Free Enterprise Institute (FEI).

If you enjoy our articles, reviews, discussions, rants, debates, and general thinking out loud about ideas that we believe really matter as much yesterday as they do today as they will in the future, please support us.

As I am sure you know, your contributions keep us afloat. 

Donate now via Paypal (no membership required).

I’ve had the opportunity to participate in fundraising activities for a variety of groups over the last decade. Much to my initial surprise, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed this aspect of my professional career. Why? Because I fully believe in the causes.

What President Winston Elliott does for TIC, FEI, and CAR is nothing less than life transforming. I believe in his mission, his integrity, and his vision. He has devoted his professional career to defending what the best of the Greeks would have called The True, The Good, and The Beautiful, and what the American Founding Fathers understood as republican liberty and virtue.

These are timeless truths that must be remembered, treasured, and passed on to those who come after us.

Please help us redeem the time and bring the soul of our republic back to right order.

Yours, faithfully,

Bradley J. Birzer
Chairman, Academic Board of the Center for the American Republic

The Bill of Reichs: Is America Fascist?

by Stephen Masty

Irredeemably or not, has America become a fascist state? How many products can you buy, services hire, or activities perform that are still utterly free from the hand of government? Where has law permitted state intrusion of dubious constitutionality, and in how many realms has law been abandoned to bureaucratic whim?

Explaining how modern America might make Mussolini jealous, the Austrian School libertarian guru and founder of the Mises Institute, Lew Rockwell, gives an informed and thought-provoking analysis on his eponymous website, in print and podcast.

After dispelling the associated pejoratives, Mr. Rockwell explains that:

Fascism is the system of government that cartelizes the private sector, centrally plans the economy to subsidize producers, exalts the police State as the source of order, denies fundamental rights and liberties to individuals, and makes the executive State the unlimited master of society. This describes mainstream politics in America today. And not just in America. It’s true in Europe, too. It is so much part of the mainstream that it is hardly noticed any more.

Since the 1930s America has increasingly fit the definitions of fascism, Mr. Rockwell explains, citing eight reasons which he elaborates in his commentary (quoting section headings): “(1) the government is totalitarian because it acknowledges no restraint upon its powers; (2) government is a de facto dictatorship based on the leadership principle; (3) government administers a capitalist system with an immense bureaucracy; (4) producers are organized into cartels in the way of syndicalism; (5) economic planning is based on the principle of autarky; (6) government sustains economic life through spending and borrowing; (7) militarism is a mainstay of government spending; and (8) military spending has imperialist aims.” This author finds his analysis largely immune to challenge.

He notes that American household incomes, cannibalized by state expansion, have fallen since 1999, flat-lined since 1989 and scarcely risen since 1972 at the end of the Gold Standard, when politicians seized full control of money in order to buy financial, industrial, military and bureaucratic power, largely unchecked and unscrutinised.

Full-scale economic collapse was postponed by millions of women entering the workforce: “The intellectuals cheered this trend, as if it represented liberation, shouting hosannas that all women everywhere are now added to the tax rolls as valuable contributors to the State’s coffers.” Conservatives and libertarians may note that as mothers were often compelled to leave home for work, their children’s values were increasingly inculcated by state apparatchiks.

Mr. Rockwell describes the roots of fascism in early Twentieth Century Europe and America.  Mussolini, initially a socialist, attracted Italian socialists in droves as they saw a vast, powerful state as the means to achieve most of their progressive objectives, even though fascism was propelled by corporatist interests that they opposed traditionally.

Do We Really Understand What an Economy Is?

by John Willson

M. Stanton Evans once said, in defense of free markets, “It all depends on how prosperous you want to be.” Prosperity, most of us would agree, is generally a good thing. The Western World has been quite good at it, although prosperity has often required that we compromise on the important things that got us prosperity in the first place. An “economy” meant in Greek and Roman terms (and Hebrew as well) the proper management of a household, which required the close cooperation of a husband and wife, and usually members of the extended family. To survive and prosper our ancestors had to grow things, make things, and fix things. This is still the rule of an ordered economy, and we must recapture its moral center in order to work our way back from the present distress.

“The economy,” as we anthropomorphize it, is of course much more complicated than the trinity of grow, make, and fix. But just as central to a properly managed household as the trinity, is work. In fact, there can be no meaningful economic activity without respect for work. From long before Xenophon’s Oeconomicus the ancients revered work as man’s purpose; Plato went so far as to equate justice with doing one’s own work and tending to one’s own business. Interpreting Plato nearly twenty-five centuries later, Irving Babbitt remarked that the only true freedom is the freedom to work. Among the Romans, Plutarch describes the elder Cato as dedicated to the work of his farm, the work of teaching his children and writing treatises on many aspects of agricultural life, the work of the law in helping neighbors, and the work of politics and war in service to the res publica; such was Cato’s definition of Roman virtue. The poet Vergil used the term labor to represent the dignity of work, without which the mission of Rome would have little to offer the republic or the world.

Western religions sacralized work from the beginning. Adam and Eve were supposed to tend the garden. Hebrew civilization was based on faithfully doing good work for God and man, according one’s calling. “Six days you shall work” precedes the day of rest in the fourth commandment. The Catholic tradition is that human work is “called to prolong the work of creation,” and is to “be exercised within the limits of the moral order” in the service of the whole man and the community (Catechism of the Catholic Church, p.583). Our Puritan and Quaker ancestors in this country accepted--insisted upon--”an idea that every Christian had two callings...The first was a Christian’s duty to live a godly life in the world. The second was mainly his vocation (David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed, p.156).” In trying to explain the origins of modern economic systems Max Weber should probably have called the cultural precursor the “Judeo-Christian Work Ethic.”

Pagans and Jews and Christians all knew, says Russell’s Kirk, “we must find our happiness in work, or not at all.” Or, as my mother-in-law is fond of saying, “What would we do if we didn’t have our work!” An economy does not produce happiness for either the person or the community. But work can make for happiness, and make a good economy. Again, the CCC: “Work is for man, not man for work.”

Some classical liberal economists argue that free markets (“the economy”) are the only real guarantors of strong families and communities. Many socialists contra-argue that only command economies can accomplish this same goal. Most of our best historians and poets, on the other hand, have always known that the best economies are driven by church, family, and community--that is, morally driven and nurtured. It is the person in the context of the natural and eternal structures of church, family and community who is himself truly natural and whole. And as members of the cult, those whole persons create economies (and for that matter, governments) that are best for them given increasingly complex circumstances over time. Culture is antecedent to economics; if the cult is not healthy, the economy, however much we try to abstract it or anthropomorphize it, will not be healthy for long.

Having made an extraordinary claim for historians and poets, let us take a brief look at the historical wisdom of Forrest McDonald and the poetic vision of Robert Frost to illustrate the point. First, a definition:

Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. (Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary, 1911)

Bierce, writing his wicked definitions in the midst of the period of greatest change in the history of the human race (roughly 1870-1920, the first fifty years of my grandparents’ lives), saw around him the real American Revolution: a fundamental alteration of our relation to nature, which among other things created prosperity unknown to any other generation since the Creation.

A Useful, New Introduction to the Inherited Tradition of Political Ideas

by Lee Cheek

Spellman, W. M.  A Short History of Western Political Thought (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011).

In this readable and succinct volume, Spellman (University of North Carolina, Asheville) provides an introduction to the evolution of political ideas that have shaped the West.  The author synthesizes a tremendous body of historical and philosophical sources into an accessible survey, generally following the tradition of interpretation of the “Cambridge School” of political thought.  The book is divided into six chapters that represent transitional periods, beginning with Hellenic political theory (chapter one), and concluding with 20th century political theory (chapter six).  The greatest contribution of the survey is found in chapter two’s thoughtful analysis of the diversity of political thinking in the Late Middle Ages.  Spellman poignantly surveys the intellectual landscape, arguing “Our penchant, for the most part, is to applaud history’s great centralizers, and in the Middle Ages the list is short.  The modern growth imperative, together with the drive to concentrate power, simply did not inform the thinking of most medieval leaders” (p. 34).

The regular, astute Imaginative Conservative reader will also be pleasantly surprised to see the attention given to Edmund Burke’s and Adam Smith’s (p. 105) contributions to political thought, as these central figures are often neglected or purposely omitted from texts of this variety.  The author even alludes to the work of Sir Robert Filmer (p. 77) and Joseph de Maistre (p. 116) in his attempt to include all perspectives into his narrative.

The book’s lack of attention to the structure and arguments of primary texts under evaluation is a significant weakness, however.  While considerable attention is devoted to historical events, the continuing relevance of central texts in the Western political tradition is ignored.  Regardless of any criticism, the tome is a useful primer on Western political thought for the general reader and undergraduate student.

A Post-Modern Christmas

by Stephen Masty

 

T’was the day after Christmas: a knock at my door

Came loudly and suddenly. I, from mid-snore,

Threw open the portal and found with chagrin

A white-bearded fatso all reeking of gin.

“I gave at the office,” I snapped with a frown

While I gave that old wino the quick up-and-down:

He’d presumably gargled his gin, and some beers,

On a bender begun on the night-shift at Sears.

“Good man, don’t you know me?” the poor fellow cried,

“It’s Yuletide and I should be welcome inside!

“Pray, pour me a toddy, an eggnog and more,

“For I’m Father Christmas!” he cried with a roar.

 

“Then where were you yesterday, buddy?” I sneered,

While the stumble-bum mumbled and pawed at his beard:

“Our stockings hang empty, no fire in the grate,

“And no presents - my ex took the kids out of state;

 “They were sobbing that Santa had stiffed them and so,

“The broad took my Buick and off did they go.

“So, if you’re Father Christmas and telling me true,

“Then, Bozo, you’ve got some explaining to do!”

The man staggered past me and slumped in my chair,

And gave me a miserable, woebegone stare

So tragic I poured him a bourbon-and-Coke:

His mittens stopped trembling as finally he spoke,

And I shall remember for many a day

How Saint Nicholas shuddered and said, “TSA.”

 

For up at the Pole he had loaded his sleigh

As the elves and his Missus cried ‘Up and away!’

While Dasher and Dancer pulled hard as you please,

Some guys dressed in black pulled out guns and cried “Freeze!”

“They handcuffed my reindeer,” he said with no pause,

“Then they donned rubber gloves and they groped Missus Claus,

“Then they de-pantsed an elf, a young fellow named Ray,

“And what they did to Ray I would rather not say,

“But ever since then he has talked in a squeak

“And I doubt the poor chap can sit down in a week.”

 

“Why?” I demanded. Again I asked, “Why?”

And a tear trickled down from the kindly man’s eye.

He said, “In a manner both callous and crude

“They wanted to photograph us in the nude!

“But they left their machine somewhere else, and then so had

“To manually squeeze every soft bit and gonad

“While probing those parts that my reindeer keep private,

“’Til Donner and Blitzen were ready to riot,

“’Til Comet was ready to vomit and Cupid

“Was roaring to gore them and, equally stupid,

“Dear Rudolph began to short-circuit his beezer

“To send umpteen amps up one uniformed geezer.”

 

“They stared at my beard and the cap on my head:

“Asked the cops, ‘are you Mozzlem?’” Saint Nicholas said:

“These gifts are for children,” I begged with a smile,

“Then they called me a pervert, a rank paedophile.

“They unloaded the presents straight off of my sleigh

“Then they handcuffed and hooded me, took me away.

“Just where are we going, I wanted to know,

“Afraid that it might have been Guantanamo:

“I got dumped in a Washington dumpster, you see,

“Having only this gin, which I got duty-free.”

 

So I made instant coffee and gave him a cup

And after a while Old Saint Nick sobered up;

Then I logged onto Skype and the sorry old gnome

Soon spoke to his wife at their cold arctic home:

“Of course I’m not flying back,” Santa Claus said,

“I’m walking! Have you got a hole in your head?
“American airspace is something to fear,

“So American kids get no presents next year,
“But if TSA calls you, then say I’m upset:

“Merry Christmas to most, but not them and not yet!’”

 

S. Masty lives in London and Afghanistan.

Kirk and the Intellectual

In February 2005, Winston Elliott and I hosted a two-day conference at Hillsdale College commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Russell Kirk's deeply profound and philosophical work, Academic Freedom.  

Sadly, the book is little remembered, though it's probably the most Christian Humanist of all of his works.  

Gleaves Whitney offered the keynote address, and Winston MCed the event.  We had an excellent audience, and Mark Kalthoff, Cicero Bruce, Larry Arnn, Bruce Frohnen, John Willson, Annette Kirk, David Whalen, and others spoke.  

Now, almost seven years later, I've had the chance to  reread Academic Freedom.  I find the book to be even better than I remembered.  

For several years, Kirk saw it as a mission to fight for a true understanding of academic freedom--in its classical and medieval context--not as a right for those in power to impose their will upon their students, but as a duty to pursue and seek Truth in all things.  

This article (below) is one of the many such pieces Kirk wrote to augment the argument advanced in his book.

***

The following quotes are all from: Russell Kirk, “The American Intellectual: A Conservative View,” Pacific Spectator 9 (Autumn 1955): 361-371. 

“By implication, and intellectual neglected the imagination, the power of wonder and awe, and the whole realm of being which is beyond mere rational perception.” (Page 362)

“The words used to describe persons possessed of what Burke called ‘a liberal understanding’ were varied, and none of them was wholly satisfactory: scholar, bookman, philosopher, university man. Coleridge coined a new word to describe the teachers and preceptors of society, including the clergy and the lay scholars: the clerisy. A principal reason why no one word adequately describe such a class of persons was that, in most of Europe and America, and particularly in Britain and the United States, intellectuality was not the particular property of any class or order.” (Page 362)

“Newman's ‘liberal education,’ the world of contemplation and silence, was not what they were after: they wanted to mold society nearer to their hearts’ desire, not to adhere to traditional humanism by improving private mind and character.” (Page 363)

“It never has attained to corresponding influence in the English–speaking states, in part because of the tradition of liberal learning there (closely joined to the old humanistic disciplines and the concept of free and dignified personality in all walks of life), in part because representative government and social mobility have provided safety valves.” (Page 364)

“Only as Britain and America lost their comparative isolation from European ideology, and only as there began to grow up in these nations a body of persons educated be on their expectations in life, opposed to established social institutions, did the word intellectual obtained currency and the place of the intellectual in English and American society began to be argued about.” (Page 366)

“Had not the New England farmer who read good books as much a right to be considered an intellectual being as any coffee–house Bohemian?” (Page 367)

“Only when a doctrinaire hostility toward ‘capitalism,’ traditional religion, and established political forms began to make itself felt in America, particularly with the growing influence of Marxism and other European ideologies in the 1920s and the vague discontents of the Depression, did a number of educated Americans commence to call themselves intellectuals.” (Page 368)

Sonnet No. 6: Nisi Credideritis

They laboured hard to kill the very thing
They swore at length did surely not exist;
Their modern electronic imaging
Came nowhere close to showing what they missed;
Within their shining labs they laboured long,
Expending effort far beyond belief
While learning not where they went sadly wrong,
And this, too, plunged them into mortal grief;
Vain hope to slay what none of them could find,
Which dullards said they saw by night and day,
Rebuked each finely educated mind
Much more than any one of them could say;
Again they studied every chart and graph,
And cooing thus, the Paraclete did laugh.

Stephen Masty

Beauty and the Beholder

by John Willson

Beauty, n.  The power by which a woman charms a lover and terrifies a husband.

Ambrose Bierce

My Imprimis arrived today.  It is “The Unity and Beauty of the Declaration and the Constitution,” an interview of Dr. Larry Arnn, President of Hillsdale College, by Peter Robinson of the Hoover Institution.  The full interview can be viewed here.  It is a remarkable interview, prepared carefully by Mr. Robinson, conducted with gravitas, and carried out with wit, charm, and high intelligence by Dr. Arnn.  I wish to reply, hoping to achieve the same.

When asked by Mr. Robinson to put the documents in historical context, Dr. Arnn says (about the Declaration), “First, there had never been anything like it in history,” second, “its signers were being hunted by British troops,” and third, “even more extraordinary, “It opens by speaking of universal principles.”  The problem with saying things this way is that it is not historical.  Nobody at the time thought that Jefferson’s opening represented universal principles or that what they were saying had never been said before (including Jefferson, who went out of his way many times to say that he had expressed only “the common sense of the matter”).  The only members of the Continental Congress who were being “hunted” were New Englanders who had already won their secession, having been fighting the Regulars since April 19, 1775.  The war was over in New England before it began any place else.

Furthermore, there were about ninety other “declarations of independence” around by July of 1776.

Their beauty was indeed universal, and quite soon terrifying to the husbands.  Lovers were needed to go and fight, but husbands had to clean up the messes.  Patrick Henry, Samuel Adams and his cousin John, the trembling Jefferson, the scheming Hamilton, and above all, the imperial Washington had to make order.  The Constitution was not the logical outcome of what they hoped for, nor was it the first constitution.  The Articles of Confederation was the only possibility of keeping very distinct cultures together long enough to celebrate the secession.  And if John Dickinson’s draft had been adopted there would have been no need for the nationalist document that followed.  It was the flawed version of the Articles of Confederation government that passed the Northwest Ordinance, the most complete statement of liberty ever written into American law during the lifetimes of the “founders.”

Dr. Arnn finds “three fundamental arrangements” ( a wonderful phrase, by the way) in the Constitution that he says unify the two major documents.  Before we parse them we should note that the “Organic Law” of the United States as ratified by our first Congress includes not only the Declaration and the Constitution, but the Northwest Ordinance, the Articles of Confederation, and the English Common Law.  The “arrangements” Dr. Arnn offers are representation, separation of powers, and limited government.  I would suggest that the only beauty which unites the documents, the only beauty which unites the concepts, and the only beauty which unites the complex and often hostile cultures of early America is limited government.  Under no other banner could the secession have survived.  The others were old, and worked well sometimes and sometimes not.  They have also largely been abolished in our regime, almost completely by 1945.

Here we should turn to what Dr. Arnn apparently thinks of as “beauty,” and what appeals to me about it.  It comes down to the “universal principles” he believes the documents represent, and represent in unity.  I confess to being a terrified husband when it comes to beauty.  The Good, the True, and the Beautiful can be the property of pagans, atheists, or any religious cult, but if they are to have permanent meaning they must be attached to something that is beyond the self, or they have no meaning at all.  It is not enough for the Declaration to call upon “nature’s god,” or upon other abstractions that unitarians like Jefferson and Adams use to appeal to higher law.  I have never thought that they were deists.  They were Stoics, probably, noble pagans attempting to find meaning beyond even the unity that was Greece or Rome. Stoics talked of god, but not God.

Quote of the Day: Christmas Night

[Christmas] night bestowed peace on the whole world; so, let no one threaten; this is the night of the Most Gentle One, let no one be cruel; this is the night of the most Humble One, let no one be proud.... Today the Bountiful impoverished Himself for our sake; so, the rich one, invite the poor to your table. Today we received a gift, for which we did not ask; so let us give alms to those who implore us and beg. This present day cast open the heavenly door to our prayers: let us open our doors to those who ask our forgiveness. Now the Divine Being took upon Himself the seal of humanity, in order for humanity to be decorated by the seal of Divinity. -St. Isaac the Syrian

The Gift by Ray Bradbury

by Ray Bradbury

Tomorrow would be Christmas, and even while the three of them rode to the rocket port the mother and father were worried. It was the boy's first flight into space, his very first time in a rocket, and they wanted everything to be perfect. So when, at the customs table, they were forced to leave behind his gift, which exceeded the weight limit by no more than a few ounces, and the little tree with the lovely white candles, they felt themselves deprived of the season and their love.

The boy was waiting for them in the terminal room. Walking toward him, after their unsuccessful clash with the Inter-planetary officials, the mother and father whispered to each other.

"What shall we do?"

"Nothing, nothing. What can we do?"

"Silly rules!"

"And he so wanted the tree!"

The siren gave a great howl and people pressed forward into the Mars Rocket. The mother and father walked at the very last, their small pale son between them, silent.

"I'll think of something," said the father.

"What...?" asked the boy.

And the rocket took off and they were flung headlong into dark space.

The rocket moved and left fire behind and left Earth behind on which the date was December 24, 2052, heading out into a place where there was no time at all, no month, no year, no hour. They slept away the rest of the first "day." Near midnight, by their Earth-time New York watches, the boy awoke and said, "I want to go look out the porthole."

There was only one port, a "window" of immensely think glass of some size, up on the next deck.

"Not quite yet," said the father. "I'll take you up later."

"I want to see where we are and where we're going."

"I want you to wait for a reason," said the father.

He had been lying awake, turning this way and that, thinking of the abandoned gift, the problem of the season, the lost tree and the white candles. And at last, sitting up, no more than five minutes ago, he believed he had found a plan. He need only carry it out and the journey would be fine and joyous indeed.

"Son," he said, "in exactly one half-hour it will be Christmas."

"Oh," said the mother, dismayed that he had mentioned it. Somehow she had rather hoped that the boy would forget.

The boy's face grew feverish and his lips trembled. "I know, I know. Will I get a present, will I? Will I have a tree? Will I have a tree? You promised ---"

"Yes, yes, all that, and more." said the father.

The mother started. "But ---"

"I mean it," said the father. "I really mean it. All and more, much more. Excuse me, now. I'll be back."

He left them for about twenty minutes. When he came back, he was smiling. "Almost time."

"Can I hold your watch?" asked the boy, and the watch was handed over and he held it ticking in his fingers as the rest of the hour drifted by in fire and silence and unfelt motion.

"It's Christmas now! Christmas! Where's my present?"

"Here we go," said the father and took his boy by the shoulder and led him from the room, down the hall, up a rampway, his wife following.

"I don't understand," she kept saying.

"You will. Here we are," said the father.

They had stopped at the closed door of a large cabin. The father tapped three times and then twice in a code. The door opened and the light in the cabin went out and there was a whisper of voices.

"Go on in, son," said the father.

"It's dark."

"I'll hold your hand. Come on, Mama."

They stepped into the room and the door shut, and the room was very dark indeed. And before them loomed a great glass eye, the porthole, a window four feet high and six feet wide, from which they could look out into space.

The boy gasped.

Behind him, the father and the mother gasped with him, and then in the dark room some people began to sing.

"Merry Christmas, son," said the father.

And the voices in the room sang the old, the familiar carols, and the boy moved slowly until his face was pressed against the cool glass of the port. And he stood there for a long, long time, just looking and looking out into space and the deep night at the burning and the burning of ten billion, billion white and lovely candles....

A Fine Christmas Tale....The Invention of Lefse

by Robert M. Woods

So it is that time of year when the "seasonal" reader is bombarded with lots of maudlin Christmas tales with the main objective of giving that warm, sappy feeling. It is always refreshing when a rare story comes along that gives a window into another time and place and gives the reader a reason to appreciate the simple gifts of life.

Talented author, Larry Woiwode offers a story revealing the innocent longings of a precious child, the heartbreaking realities of life and the spirit of due diligence. Through out the reader is given numerous morsels of goodness and beauty.

This lovely little book would be perfect Christmas reading to be read aloud for the whole family. It would remind older hearers of harder times, and possibly teach the younger listeners that Christmas is about much more than the longed for technological acquisition.

This essay was originally published on Musings of a Christian Humanist and appears here with Dr. Woods' gracious permission.

"The Gift": Ray Bradbury Short Story is Perfect Seasonal Read

by Robert M. Woods

She simply asked, "so have you ever read Bradbury's The Gift"? Honestly, I had not and worse, I had never even heard if it. It was not long after that question before I made it my goal to find and read this story. This was a few years ago and since that time I have read Bradbury's The Gift around Christmas time repeatedly and I also read Colossians 1:15-19.

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.

I encourage you to read both and be moved to gratitude for the gifts that surround us all.

This essay was originally published on Musings of a Christian Humanist and appears here with Dr. Woods' gracious permission.

Pointing God's Pilgrims Home

by Cicero Bruce

Aliens in America: The Strange Truth About Our Souls. By Peter Augustine Lawler. ISI Books. 298 pages. $24.95.

In Aliens in America, Peter Augustine Lawler argues convincingly, if disturbingly, that Americans, having been seduced by the latest manifestations of philosophical nominalism and by the new utopianism of biotechnology, are blindly and in dangerously large numbers opting to be something other than fully human. He cautions that we may be living near the end of an epoch, at a time when human nature, as we have traditionally understood it, is under attack by those who would, in the name of equality and for ostensibly humane reasons, either explain it in terms other than those of a proper philosophy of being, or transform it through biochemical alteration.

Aliens in America is steeped in the wisdom of St. Augustine. According to this formative voice of the early Church, man was created to be — at best — ambiguously at home in the world. As Augustine himself discovered after much searching and contemplation, nothing in this life satisfies completely of itself. Still, man longs to be satisfied and complete. What we desire, says Augustine, is to be at home with the Creator, in whom we have our first and final cause. We are sojourners in a distant land, as he puts it in The City of God, from which “we must fly to our fatherland. There is the Father, there our all.”

Also predominant in Lawler’s important book is the thought of Catholic novelist and philosopher Walker Percy. Like Augustine, Percy was a sapient mediator between the seen and the unseen. To 20th-century nominalism he opposed Thomistic realism. He wrote, it seems, with a pen in one hand and an “Ontological Lapsometer” in the other (to recall the invention of Dr. Thomas More, the protagonist of Love in the Ruins). Indeed, “his great legacy is his books,” remarked his friend Robert Coles in a fond remembrance piece written for the NEW OXFORD REVIEW (May 1992). Said Coles: “I pray that more and more of us will meet him that way, be touched and edified by his singular presence, which remains with us that way, even as his soul, surely, rests in the final comfort of its Maker.”

If he has read it, Coles must relish Aliens in America, for Lawler adverts, in literally every chapter, to Percy’s instructive essays and fiction. In fact, while it intentionally and mockingly calls to mind the trendy Broadway show Angels in America, the title of Lawler’s book really comes from a question that Percy had about the popular scientist Carl Sagan: “Why did Sagan spend his time searching the cosmos for aliens when beings stranger than any extraterrestrials we could imagine are right here on earth?”

The answer to Percy’s question is obvious, Lawler contends. Sagan, one of several contemporary thinkers whom Lawler scrutinizes, has clearly misunderstood his innermost longings. While betraying a natural aversion to the world, his fascination with life elsewhere and his belief that earth can sustain life here only for a few hundred more years mislead him to seek a new home for humanity on some distant planet or star. To be sure, Sagan’s cosmic wanderlust is human and healthy, observes Lawler. But as a thoroughgoing materialist and a proponent of atheistic scientism, Sagan desires not to transcend the world spiritually but to carry it with him bodily. Nor does he aspire to any definite end; for him the traveling is all that counts.

Rhetorical Education and Citizenship

by Sean Lewis

We Americans will soon find ourselves in the maelstrom of another presidential election. Like most Americans, I am interested in what the candidates have to say about the economy and foreign policy, healthcare and immigration, pro-life matters and religious liberties. As a professor of Rhetoric, however, I am perhaps more interested than most of my fellow Americans in not only what candidates say, but how they say it. For Rhetoricians, the contemporary election year is a sad and frustrating phenomenon.

It is all too easy to romanticize the past: the politicians of yesteryear were as noble or as slimy as the politicians we have today. There is, however, a major difference between how past politicians spoke to our ancestors and how current politicians speak to us today. Before televised speeches—let alone the 24-hour news cycle, a development that may spell the doom of the American republic—politicians spoke face-to-face with voters in public speeches and debates. Presidential candidates still do this, of course, but mainly as a supplement to recorded statements, recorded statements that are usually little more than sound bites or bullet points, giving stock answers to predictable questions. Instead of thoughtful, researched, drawn out arguments the American public gets reductive slogans worthy of an Orwellian regime (“Hopeful compassionate change we can believe in from mavericks who are straight shooters!”).

Again, God gets the Last Word

by Stephen Masty

Writer Christopher Hitchens is dead, a controversialist whose love of war was only less than his militant atheism. Within days, Italian scientists claimed to have discovered a method of replicating the Shroud of Turin that needed Divine intervention. One could not make these things up.

Hitchens’ friend, the former scientist turned full-time anti-God activist Richard Dawkins, celebrated the writer’s bravery in the face of the quite inevitable: “Every day of his declining life he demonstrated the falsehood of that most squalid of Christian lies: that there are no atheists in foxholes.” Other obituarists noted that the writer left behind no books of lasting value amid a large legacy of lucrative periodical ephemera.

Indeed the glib, angry and volatile Hitchens was child of his age in media, where writers who take the cheapest and most prosaic shots are hailed by the Chattering Classes as daring, innovative, and (their favoured word) anarchic.

Trashing Ronald Reagan, Muslims and Mother Theresa, to such an audience, was shooting fish in a barrel. Real iconoclasm would have challenged the Global Warming orthodoxy or been anti-war throughout the past decade. Call it coincidence, but Hitchens took his “bravest” stands on positions guaranteed popularity among the elites and assured of fat fees from publishers hot for crowd-pulling controversy.

He sounded quite unpleasant. Writing on Hitchens in Canada’s National Post, Father Raymond J. de Souza observes, (presumably calling David Frum “estimable” because he is a fellow Canadian, which is only a venial sin):

“The estimable David Frum wrote that, ‘If moral clarity means hating cruelty and oppression, then Christopher Hitchens was above all things a man of moral clarity.’ Clarity he had. But hating cruelty? He was himself both hateful and cruel. Upon Bob Hope’s death, Hitchens wrote that he was a “fool, and nearly a clown.” When Ronald Reagan died, Hitchens called him a “stupid lizard,” “dumb as a stump” and “an obvious phony and loon.” On Mother Teresa: “The woman was a fanatic and a fundamentalist and a fraud, and millions of people are much worse off because of her life, and it’s a shame there is no hell for your bitch to go to.”

Pretty nasty, but no matter what Hitchens may have felt, this is stage-craft in the modern media age: take a position shared by the denizens of cocktail-parties and talk-shows to which you wish to be invited, go overboard with vituperation, then cash in big time. I am informed that Miss Ann Coulter and others have done the same successfully on the political Right.

Father de Souza concedes that, “Professionally, only his campaign against the mendacity of the Clintons was courageous,” but one wonders. President Bubba’s trailer-park buncombe was already an international joke when Hitchens repeated it for the benefit of the elites.

The priest added that after Hitchens wished Mother Theresa to an everlasting torment that he thought did not exist:

“The sadness is that there is a hell for Hitch to go to. He was granted a long farewell, with the opportunity for reconsiderations and reconciliations with those he hated and those he hurt. He declined to take advantage of it. Mother Teresa is fine, and no doubt prays for her enemies, including that Hitchens would be delivered both from hell and the nihilistic oblivion, which he thought awaited him.”

Sonnet No. 5: Nascentes Morimur

The subject of a thousand nervous scenes

With only fondest hope forfending doom,

Amid the stacks of dog-eared magazines,

The family perches in the waiting room,

Inhaling disinfectant from the halls

Greenwashed in their standard, sterile hue,

They blankly wad the tissues into balls

And pray that there is something left to do;

A doctor and a stench waft through the door,

“We need one more transfusion, that’s the trick!

“The patient will be healthy as before,

“No more will our economy be sick.”

The corpse is dessicating, as we know,

So just the hair and nails appear to grow.

Stephen Masty

Saving America From Empire-Brad Birzer, Winston Elliott III & Host Mike Church

by Mike Church

20 December, 2011, Mandeville, LA -EXCLUSIVE AUDIO - in today's final episode of the 2011 Post Show Show, host Mike Church welcomes Prof. Brad Birzer and Winston Elliott III of The Imaginative Conservative to a round-table discussion of the American Empire and how it may be possible to bring it back in line with the Constitution and the republican way of life/tradition that Americans once cherished and defended.. Among today's thrilling conversation topics

How the classics from Greek & Roman literature are sorely missed today

How to work these back into our busy lives and our kids busy live

When the American military is called it should do its job and go home

Why the Founding generation was just as dirty with their politics and what we can learn from that

What does "conservative" mean and what should it do?

Link to the audio here or  Download the audio.

Posted by permission from MikeChurch.com. Mr. Elliott and Dr. Birzer interview begins approximately 10 minutes into the audio.

Among the Paynim: Moonlight Sonata

by Stephen Masty

“I heard the Afghan crowds in the street. They were all chanting or mumbling,” said my Australian colleague the next morning. “I thought there was some kind of protest underway, but then I realised why. They were all staring into the night sky and praying aloud.”

Our Eastern Hemisphere had a lunar eclipse that evening and the public reaction puzzled me.

My colleague seemed convinced that our Afghan hosts had panicked and were outside praying for Allah to bring back the moon. There was no reason to doubt her except that it didn’t seem very Afghan, especially in her swank Kabul neighbourhood.

Perhaps the streets had filled with uneducated guards and servants, rather than the wealthy home-owners. But she insisted that they were all outside, praying up a storm so to speak: the civil engineer and his wife and children, the gynaecologist and his elderly parents, the well-heeled importer of electronic goods and his teenaged nieces visiting from Herat - the lot of them.

We all know of Columbus dazzling the Jamaican natives in 1503, predicting a lunar eclipse and how they begged him to bring back the moon. Earlier, a similar eclipse plunged the Ancient Greeks into confusion over bad omens, giving their foes in Syracuse a chance to break the siege and win the Peloponnesian Wars.

Meanwhile, superstitions die hard even among the modern and educated. Some Japanese are said to still cover wells lest the waters be polluted by a lunar eclipse, and some Eskimos allegedly overturn utensils to avoid contamination. 

But Afghans tend to be practical folk who, despite being often deprived of education, are still good Muslims who know that God created everything including science. The unlettered ones retain plenty of fascinating, medieval legends that coexist alongside antibiotics, for example, but science holds no threat to the Afghan Weltanschauung.

They are not much like the 40 percent of Americans who, a year ago, told pollsters that, “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so." Afghans schooled enough to have heard of Natural Selection assume that it must be true; that at some time God turned earlier beings into humans; and that we call the first one Adam. No problems there.

Yet there they all were, outside and praying until the moon came back.

My friend and driver Fatah, bright and inquisitive despite his lack of formal education while he was a refugee, gave me a garbled answer in tentative English. The eclipse had something to do with planets “moving upstairs,” he suspected. But he is deeply religious, and concluded that any excuse that makes people remember Allah and pray is a good thing anyway. I was not fully convinced.

Over lunch I asked the Minister of Agriculture whether many Afghans had problems understanding eclipses. The wise and well-travelled man scowled thoughtfully. He had grown up in a rural village outside of Kabul, where his uncles were farmers and his father was a civil servant. “They taught us all that stuff when I was a small boy in school,” he replied, “but I can’t remember exactly when.”

The Tribunal of Great Writers

by Cicero Bruce

Why Literature Matters: Permanence and the Politics of Reputation. By Glenn C. Arbery. ISI [Intercollegiate Studies Institute] Books. 255 pages. $24.95.

An overwhelming majority of those who teach literature and thereby determine what imaginative works will -- or will not -- be taught in subsequent decades have forgotten, or deliberately ignored, the purpose of literature. Many teachers are simply unable to distinguish writing that is forever contemporary from that which speaks only to an age or generation. Now more than ever in the past two-score years, literary scholars and critics, whose publications inform the classroom curriculum, are pursuing literature not as an end itself, but as a means to advance social agendas and academic careers. Professors of English at supposedly respectable universities across the country continue to promote the very theories and practices that have been undermining their profession since the deconstructionists first besieged it in the early 1970s. Such is the situation that troubles distinguished poet and critic Glenn C. Arbery, author of Why Literature Matters.

The destructive forces that Arbery opposes in this important book have lately manifested themselves in multiculturalism, a radically egalitarian ideology that predominates practically everywhere in higher education. Multiculturalism, as Arbery correctly observes, insists that all cultures are equal and denies the existence of a supervening high culture by which cultures are comparatively and normally appraised. With regard to literature in particular, multiculturalism, says Arbery, caricatures the time-tested process of assigning rewards according to what Aristotle called "distributive justice." It contradicts what every accomplished writer knows: that he is finally accountable to that tribunal of great dead writers who judge his work without regard to his race or ethnicity, neither of which has anything to do with literature qua literature, or with literary eminence.

Arbery regrets that masterpieces such as Moby Dick are often taught today merely because their racial dynamics can be reductively exploited in the classroom to instill "correct" attitudes. He would have us remember, though, that in the end a classic attains permanent reputability not because it proves useful to one regnant ideology or another, but because it presents us with a unifying vision of nature and man's place in it. This vision views man as a created being contingent upon something greater than himself and conveys an experience of what Arbery calls "a common glory that intimates something otherwise unsayable about the nature of the Word through whom all things were made."

There have been a number of other recently-published volumes lamenting the demise of literary study as a once reverent, ennobling discipline. Two that Arbery mentions in his introduction are Literature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of the Humanities (1997) and At War with the Word: Literary Theory and Liberal Education (1999). In the first, John Ellis concludes that the messianic proponents of multiculturalism, deconstructionism, and the political trinitarianism of race-gender-class theory have so entrenched themselves in English departments everywhere that the road back to a meaningful literature program on college campuses will be long and difficult, if even possible. In the second, R.V. Young defends the traditional understanding of art as a means to engage students with timeless and consequential ideas that find concrete expression in serious literature.

As Arbery describes it, the stance that Ellis and Young take in bemoaning the apparent decimation of the humanities in the culture wars is like that of two Trojan warriors gazing wistfully upon Priam's burning city, which once seemed impregnable. Clearly Arbery sympathizes with Ellis and Young, but he believes the city may not, after all, be worth saving: "Unless literature itself, not the academic industry around it, not the competition for tenured positions or endowed chairs, is the central concern, then perhaps the academy deserves to fall." For Arbery the academy has largely fallen already, and he argues that the thing to do now is not to prop it up again, but to acknowledge the fortune beyond the ruins, or what he calls the "greater good" toward which things may often fall, as in the case of Troy, which fell toward Rome, or of mankind, which fell toward Calvary.