Tuesday, January 01, 2013
Friday, December 21, 2012
Mayan Apocalypse Day
As a follow up, if through some failure of calamity the world still exists Saturday, go here.
Monday, November 26, 2012
Professor Glenn on the Tyranny of Public Education
Most Americans are products of the public school’s 140-year near-monopoly on education, and have an understandable residual loyalty to our current educational settlement; many believe, as advocates of the “myth of the common school” have been arguing since Horace Mann, that only the public school can form citizens. But low test scores and concern over the moral vacuousness of both curriculum and school life dominated by peer culture have shaken faith in the public system. Parents are seeking alternatives, not only in private schools but in charter schools (legally “public” but functionally private), homeschooling, and cyberschools. Even those parents who do not want religion taught in the schools their children attend usually see no problem with other children attending schools whose religious character is preferred by their parents.
America did not always have a rigid educational establishment that claimed religious neutrality. Its rise was propelled by anti-Catholic sentiment, leading to a unified educational system that displaced the patchwork of local arrangements that prevailed in the early republic and that provided a degree of religious pluralism surprising to those raised with the contemporary idea of the separation of church and state. It was common in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries for public funding to be provided to schools that we would now consider “private” and religious, the great majority of them Protestant but some of them Catholic. These denominational arrangements were actually the norm in federally funded schooling for children on Indian reservations until the late nineteenth century.
Our nation needs to confront the loss of faith in public education, a loss fueled both by disappointing international comparisons of test results and by a severing of the rootedness of schools in local communities. Consolidation of school districts, professionalization of educational administration, the unresponsiveness of teachers’ unions to the concerns of parents, and ballooning state and federal requirements, all have led to a loss of confidence in America’s schools.
Read the whole article here.
Tuesday, November 06, 2012
Remember
Wednesday, October 31, 2012
From The Spiritual Life and How to be Attuned to It
In the soul and body are needs, including such ordinary ones as family and social needs. These needs in and of themselves do not constitute any distinct desire, but merely form the pretext for seeking gratification for themselves. When a need is satisfied in a particular way on a given occasion, then ever afterwards, whenever this need is aroused, along with it is born the desire for that which has satisfied it previously.
There is no gap between the time we make our prayer and when it is heard; the only necessity is that it comes from our heart. It is our telegraphic line to Heaven. The very same prayers, which are not from our heart, but which come only from our head and tongue, do not produce as ray which rises to heaven, and they are not audible there. Those are not even prayers, but only prayer-like modes.
Saturday, October 13, 2012
To the States
Reist much, obey little,
O nce unquestion obedience, once fully enslaved,
Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city of this earth, ever afterward resumes its liberty.
Leaves of Greass, Walt Whittman
Wednesday, August 22, 2012
CWR on Both Lungs
Below is an excerpt to whet your whistle:
“There’s not just one way to be Catholic,” says Father Thomas Loya, radio host of “Light of the East” and pastor of Annunciation Byzantine Catholic Church in Homer Glenn, Illinois. The different cultural and liturgical practice of Catholics around the world “is what makes the Church truly Catholic.” Father Loya emphasizes the complementarity of the traditions: “You can take the same faith and express it in a variety of ways. This creates unity in diversity.”
The Divine Liturgy (Mass) is the heart of Eastern Christian theology, mysticism, and culture. The old axiom is, “If you want to know what the Eastern Christians believe, attend the liturgy.”
One of the first things Roman Catholics will notice about the liturgy is that there is no quiet meditation. There are no pauses—the chanting never ceases. Yet, the Byzantine liturgy is an active meditation with a very rich vocabulary of prayer. Eastern Christian theology is at the service of prayer, because the entire aim of that theology is to find words fitting for prayer.
Check it out here.
