Black Tape at Harvard Law - Randall Kennedy, NYT
Cambridge, Mass. — IN a grand corridor of Harvard Law School, framed professors’ photographs hang on a wall. A week ago, someone put slivers of black tape over the faces of most of the African-American professors. I am one of those whose photograph was marked.
Liberal Education Makes You Free - Christopher Nelson, Imaginative Conservative
The aim of liberal education is to help people become free. It tries to educate people who are free to search out knowledge on their own, people who are not dependent on others to tell them what they need to know, and ultimately, people who are the best judges of their own needs. It tries to help people master the abilities needed for self-directed learning.
This is Not a Day Care. It's a University - Everett Piper, OkU
This past week, I actually had a student come forward after a university chapel service and complain because he felt “victimized” by a sermon on the topic of 1 Corinthians 13. It appears that this young scholar felt offended because a homily on love made him feel bad for not showing love! In his mind, the speaker was wrong for making him, and his peers, feel uncomfortable.
Christopher Dawson, Education, and the Transcendent - Leo Ward, Imaginative Conservative
Dawson wanted to know what, given our situation, could be done about a liberal education and about an effective acquaintance with transcendent purpose in and through education. Is either a liberal education or an education in divine transcendent things now possible?
A Monastic Response to Islam - Dwight Longenecker, Imaginative Conservative
“What can man do against such reckless hate?” asks the trapped and helpless Theoden King in Peter Jackson’s The Two Towers.
The Coming of Advent - Fr. Gerald E. Murray, The Catholic Thing
The pagan notion of time, and thus history, is an endless, circular repetition of events – similar to the annual cycle of the seasons. Yet this repetitive way of interpreting reality imprisons man in a pointless round. Where are we heading if there is no end point to time, just a constant replay involving a changing cast of characters who come and go?
Congress vs. The Administrative State - George Will, NRO
In four opinions in 112 days between March 9 and June 29, Thomas indicted the increasing incoherence of the Court’s separation-of-powers jurisprudence. This subject is central to today’s argument between constitutionalists and progressives...
A Plea Regarding "Liberal" - Daniel Klein, Modern Age
Here I make a plea, addressed to conservatives and libertarians, regarding the word liberal: please do not describe leftists, progressives, social democrats, or Democrats as “liberal.” I do not ask that you describe yourself as “liberal.” Continue to call yourself “conservative” or “libertarian.” I propose only a single step: don’t call leftists “liberal.” By this single step, we can make great strides.
Examples of Media Hypocrisy on Gun Violence - Mollie Hemingway, The Federalist
And yes, that was Planned Parenthood approvingly linking to an article decrying dehumanizing others as a means to legitimizing violent action against them. You cannot make this stuff up.
Schopenhauer and Postmodern Ethical Affectation - Pedro Blas Gonzalez, University Bookman
Postmodern ethics is the illicit child of the argumentum ad populum rejection of gravitas—the destruction of what Unamuno calls a “sense for life.” In effect, we have successfully transformed ethics into a cottage industry.
Has Christianity Become a Coward’s Religion? - Bruce Frohnen, Imaginative Conservative
It is up to each one of us to see to it that we face the much lesser though more insidious temptations of cowardice in the face of mere, empty secularism to kill our faith.
Did the Constitution Kill the Common Good? - Thaddeus Kozinski, Imaginative Conservative
Michael Hannon and Robert George are both orthodox Catholic thinkers who subscribe to a personalist anthropology and Aristotelian/Thomistic social philosophy, one that interprets the character of the modern, autonomous individual as an evil fiction, one that recognizes the existence and priority of intrinsic, common goods, and one that posits the indispensability of social communities ordered by and to such common goods and the virtues for human flourishing.
Reforms...Save An Average Household $4,440 a Year - Salim Furth, Daily Signal
Just 12 economic policy reforms would save the average household $4,440 a year. Opening up markets to more competition, treating outsiders and insiders equally, and squeezing out bureaucratic delays could push prices down enough to give American families some budgetary breathing room.
Moms, Like College Students, Can’t Handle Criticism - Bethany Mandel, The Federalist
No longer are college students demanding “trigger warnings”—they’re out for blood from anyone who dares to not bend to politically correct whims of the week.
Master of None - John V. Fleming, Gladly Lerne, Gladly Teche
From 1969 until 1972, then again for an eight-year period after the universal college system was instituted at Princeton, I served as the Master of Wilson College. I poured my heart into a job to which I devoted a full quarter of my teaching career.
On Corporations and LGBTQ Political Correctness - D.B. Holiday, Public Discourse
Foreshadowing current controversies, in late October South Park created a music video entitled “Safe Space.” The short clip featured its various characters celebrating their “bully proof windows” and “troll safe doors” while thwarting the attempts of the villainous “reality” to puncture their carefully constructed comfort zones.
Does Mens Rea Reform “Provide Cover” for Executives? - Jonathan Keim, NRO
In other words, basic justice is at stake. Saying that mens rea reform provides cover for defendants is like saying that the Commerce Clause provides cover for drug dealers.
On Human Sexuality, Conservative Victory is Inevitable - Jeremy Neill, Public Discourse
Human history is a story of sexual restrictions. Across the world and down through the centuries, humans have strictly controlled their sexual activity. There are no exceptions: in all cultures a freewheeling primal instinct has been seen as too great a threat to human emotional and physical flourishing to leave unchecked.
Why the Pro-Life Movement Opposes Violence - Ross Douthat, NYT
In the wake of the Robert Dear shootings at a Planned Parenthood facility in Colorado, the tendency from pro-choice writers has been to get the pro-life movement coming and going — on the one hand accusing pro-lifers of at least semi-deliberately fomenting violence, on the other accusing them of being inconsistent for abjuring the violence that their own premises seem (to pro-choice eyes) to inevitably justify.
Censors on the Flagship - Wendell Berry, Lexington Herald
Though I willingly would do so if it were possible, I cannot understand the University of Kentucky’s decision to hide Ann Rice O’Hanlon’s fresco in Memorial Hall. The reason given is only that it shows people doing what they actually did. Black people did work in tobacco fields. Black musicians did play for white dancers. Indians did seriously threaten the settlers at Bryan’s Station.
Public Schools Force Kids Into Transgender Wars - Walt Heyer, The Federalist
Recent high-profile demands that schools let boys shower and pee right next to girls are having ripple effects in schools across the country as the transgender wars more militantly encompass young children.
Left Prays After...Shooting, To Its God Of Government - Mollie Hemingway, The Federalist
Many in the media at first focused, as they tend to do during mass shootings, on their anger with the National Rifle Association, a large gun rights and gun safety organization. Some focused on the fact that the shooting took place about a 25-minute walk from a Planned Parenthood facility. Really.
Prayer Shaming After a Mass Shooting in San Bernardino - Emma Green, The Atlantic
Directly after a mass shooting, in the minutes or hours or days between the first trickle of news and when police find a suspect or make arrests, it is very difficult to know what to do. Some people demand political action, like greater gun control; others call for prayer. In the aftermath of a violent shooting spree in San Bernardino, California, on Wednesday, in which at least 14 victims are reported to have died, people with those differing reactions quickly turned against one another.
Kennedy, Thoreau, and the Children of Gays and Lesbians - Roberto Oscar Lopez, Public Discourse
In Kennedy’s rhetorical world, Henry David Thoreau is impossible. Yet same-sex marriage, and indeed Obergefell, would be impossible without Henry David Thoreau. Without Thoreau, there would have been no Martin Luther King Jr. (Thoreau’s influence on King is well documented), no nonviolent civil rights movement, no Stonewall, and no crescendo of the Supreme Court redefining marriage complete with a fluorescent rainbow illuminating the White House.
No Room for Sanity at the Inn - Anthony Esolen, Public Discourse
When I was a junior in college and looking for a summer job to defray the next year's tuition, I answered an ambiguous ad in a newspaper and found myself selling high-quality pots and pans, china, and cutlery to unmarried working girls. It actually was a good job for a good company. I ended up selling $20,000 of merchandise in eleven weeks.
A Dangerous Chemical Combination - Dave Carlin, The Catholic Thing
One of Bentham’s golden nuggets is this – his contention that there is no rule of conduct, no matter how good, that will not produce harmful effects. Any rule will produce good and bad effects. Society should not aim at choosing rules that have no bad effects, for there are no such rules. We should choose those rules whose good effects greatly outweigh its bad.
Have the Courage to Say, “Jazz is Not a Girl” - Austin Ruse, Crisis
Jennings has become a breakout star in the transsexual firmament. Starting with self-made YouTube videos that drew an immediate audience. When he was seven-years-old his parents actually let him appear on a Barbara Walters show announcing his transsexualism. “Jazz” now has a reality show on TLC.
Centerville Students Debate Coddle U - Jonathan Haidt, Heterodox Academy
Last week I wrote a post titled The Yale Problem Begins in High School. I talked about an odd experience I had giving a talk at a private high school which I called “Centerville High.” The school was very progressive, very concerned with issues of diversity and inclusion. Yet I found in discussions that conservatives and boys felt silenced, and that most students felt that they were “walking on eggshells” and afraid to speak up on some issues.
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