A Response to Mr. M. about Bias
More than a year ago (17 months to be precise) Mr. M. emailed me a question. He had intended to post his question as a comment on the old blog, but ran into technical difficulties. His email has sat in my email inbox ever since. Today, at long last, I respond. Hopefully it will have been worth the wait. I am posting this discussion apart from its original post, which can be found here. Mr. M: "To me, it seems that a textbook published in Utopia would actually have NO bias, an
A “Quint”-essential Education | Why the loss of The Good also leads to the loss of The Orator
Education is a terribly abstract thing. You can neither see it nor hear it. It's existence, rather, is adjectival -- it serves to imbue some real object (a person) with a certain set of characteristics or attributes (educated). Education is also an artificial quality. To be educated can only be said of man, but not man in his original state. Education enhances the original product. Consequently, we may look to the perfectly educated man to help define this term, education, by
They just don’t write ‘em like they use to…
I am a lifelong textbook connoisseur. I snagged my first teacher’s manual in second grade and never looked back. By middle school, I could tell you the comparative differences between the textbook series of dozens of publishers. Today nearly all the 20th century textbook publishers have been conglomerated into the “Big Three” – Pearson, McGraw-Hill, and Houghton Mifflin. On the upside, these publishers have been able to upgrade their product in significant ways, including bet
When a Culture is in the Process of Denying its Own Roots...
When a culture is in the process of denying its own roots, it becomes most important to know what these roots are. We had best know what we reject before we reject it. […] We are not a culture that never understood what a human being was in his nature and in his destiny. Rather we are a culture that, having once known these things, has divided against living them or understanding them. Indeed, we have decided to reject most of them, almost as an act of defiance – as an act of
BOOK BLOG | The Dogma is the Drama (Sayers - Letter 3)
“…for the cry today is: ‘Away with the tedious complexities of dogma – let us have the simple spirit of worship; just worship, no matter of what!’ The only drawback to this demand for a generalized and undirected worship is the practical difficulty of arousing any sort of enthusiasm for the worship of nothing in particular.” In this, the third essay in Dorothy Sayer’s Letters to a Diminished Church, we turn again to the central theme of the collection, namely that doctrine is
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