Free Republic

REASON 4: EDUCATION A classical education focuses on the study of the classical languages, Latin and Greek, and on the study of the classical civilization of Greece and Rome. But why is the word classical reserved only for the languages of the Greeks and Romans and only for their civilization? What really is so special about the Greeks and Romans and why should Christians study them? After all they were not Christians, they were pagans. Some have objected to the word pagan and misunderstood its meaning. Pagan is a word Christians coined in the later Roman Empire to refer to...

Reason #3: SCIENCE Because we live in the aftermath of what has been called the “scientific revolution,” we modern people consider ourselves quite superior to the ancients in regard to the study of the natural world. We are polished practitioners of what C.S. Lewis called “chronological snobbery.” We think ancient people were ignorant of the natural world and that we, with all our advanced scientitic knowledge, have little to learn from them. But one of the problems with having your nose so high in the air is that you can miss the thing right in front of you. Science, as...

REASON #2: VIRTUE In the last article, we learned that the Greeks established the first principles of architecture by studying nature. The proportions that are most pleasing to the human eye are those of nature’s greatest work of art—the human body. We learned that God gave man reason and the desire to know, but he did not leave us without guides. He gave us the Greeks, the world’s first systematic, abstract thinkers. And so we study and honor the Greeks because they teach us how to use reason to explore and understand our world, a world that is material and...

REASON #1: ARCHITECTURE Of all of the points that I will make, this is the easiest to understand because it is so visible: we see its evidence every day. The power and beauty of classical architecture is everywhere, from grand buildings like our Supreme Court to our humble everyday homes. The Greeks discovered the proportions that are most pleasing to the human eye which, they tell us, are based on nature’s greatest work of art: the human body. Scale, mass, proportion, and symmetry—the principles of classical architecture—were worked out by the Greeks in great detail and built upon in succeeding...

The power of the word classic cannot be underestimated, communicating as it does the idea of excellence, truth, order, discipline, and beauty. The word “classic” brings to mind something that has withstood the test of time, and by virtue of this fact, participates in some way in the timeless and the eternal. And what is the only thing we know of with these attributes but God and His Eternal Word? When looked at this way, every Christian should want a classical education for their children: It has everything we instinctively want. But when we examine this word “classic,” we find...

The International Monetary Fund anticipates that the economic fallout from COVID-19 will plunge the world into a recession, the likes of which we have not experienced since the Great Depression. This seems increasingly likely. Over 30 million Americans have already lost their jobs, and the Federal Reserve estimates that this figure could climb to over 47 million in the coming months. Adding fuel to this fire is the fact that 78 percent of American workers live paycheck to paycheck, and over 30 percent have no savings whatsoever. There will be lean times ahead. And to whom will Americans turn for...

REASON #8: PHILOSOPHY PHILOSOPHY IS A DEEP SUBJECT THAT CAN BE QUITE INTIMIDATING. MODERN PHILOSOPHY IS SO ESOTERIC THAT FEW CAN UNDERSTAND OR RELATE TO IT, BUT CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHY IS DIFFERENT. As with so many things, if you go back to the beginning and learn first principles, you can develop a deep and satisfying understanding of a subject that is baffling in its modern form. While philosophy may seem abstract and unrelated to the real world, quite the opposite is true. In fact, we are all philosophers; we all have a view of reality, a worldview, as we say today....

Reason #7: RELIGION Saint Augustine in his Confessions tells us that after many years of wandering in the desert of indecision, it was Cicero who led him to Christ. Cicero’s Hortensius set him on the path to Christian conversion by implanting in him a longing for the immortality of wisdom. The text of Hortensius did not make it to the modern world and thus is probably the most famous lost treatise in world literature. Wouldn’t we all love to read this work that St. Augustine praises so highly? Well, I have read a lot of Cicero and, like most writers,...

It’s often said that most of what the academic elites call “philosophy” is nothing but some underutilized minds worrying themselves about questions that common-sense folk find obvious. The saying came to mind as I listened recently to some of these folks straining to fit their various theories to the Age of Trump. More precisely, they were double-helixing themselves trying to explain why the amoral, relativist, truth-denying theories they’ve championed for so long are actually good reasons for hating the supposedly amoral, relativist, truth-defying current President. Listening to this theorizing crystallized (at least for this initially reluctant Trump supporter) why President...

shorter link to blog bit.ly/2y32EQt political, historical ramifications of long coronavirus shutdown, and governmental response (shoehorning changes into bailout legislation), considering the Hegelian Dialectic, where the "Problem - Reaction - Solution" process takes place as a result of the crisis.

Sir Roger Scruton has died and Britain has lost her greatest conservative thinker, writer, fox hunting man, philosopher and all-round-hero of the right. Like so many of the bravest and best, he was a prophet almost without honour in his own country.

Skeptics and atheists insist that belief in God is irrational.  All too many believers in God, due to the same theological illiteracy affecting the non-believers and unbelievers, lend credence to this charge by way of their inability and/or unwillingness to defend their belief in God. Thankfully, there has been no short supply of men of genius over the centuries who have shown that there is nothing at all irrational about theism.  In fact, some, like the 12th century theologian and philosopher Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109), were at pains to establish that it is atheism that’s irrational.By way of the “ontological...

The man taken into custody Wednesday night after allegedly trying to walk into St. Patrick's Cathedral, in the heart of New York City, with two gasoline cans and lighter fluid had booked a one-way $2,800 flight to Italy for Thursday, police said. He was also arrested days earlier at a New Jersey church, law enforcement sources familiar with the investigation tell News 4. Marc Lamparello, 37, would've been out of the country by Thursday night, NYPD officials said in announcing formal charges against him. Police said he had purchased the ticket to Rome Wednesday morning, hours before they say he...

This week, WBC fellow Jonathan Bartlett, along with co-author Asatur Zh. Khurshudyan, published a paper showing that elementary calculus contains a longstanding flaw that has been present for over a century. The paper was published in the peer-reviewed journal Dynamics of Continuous, Discrete & Impulsive Systems, Series A: Mathematical Analysis: Mathematical Analysis (DCDIS-A, for short). The journal has been published for a quarter of a century and many major universities across the United States subscribe to it. The flaw they discovered is one of notation. Now, you may be thinking, how can notation be wrong? Well, notation can be wrong...

Perhaps American Christians cannot think clearly about homeland security, borders, and immigration for the same reason Americans cannot think clearly about anything else. As Christians we have rich, intellectually credible traditions and frameworks for ethical reflection at our fingertips, and yet, as Americans, we suffer from a historical amnesia. What we need is a historically-attuned theological framework that can lay the foundation for our debates and political deliberations. Without one, we risk acting in ways that contradict the Gospel that we profess. To jump, as we tend to, from Plato and Aristotle to Locke and Hobbes is to ignore crucial...

There are at least three areas of inquiry traditionally in the purview of philosophy that now are often claimed to be best — or only — studied scientifically: metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. Let us discuss each in turn. Physicists Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow open their 2010 book The Grand Design by asking: What is the nature of reality? Where did all this come from? Did the universe need a creator? ... Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics. Scientists have become the bearers of...

It may be inferred again that the present movement for women’s rights, will certainly prevail from the history of its only opponent, Northern conservatism. This is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is today one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will tomorrow be forced upon...

There are many things that a person can do to improve themselves. In my case, I could lose some weight, and eat better. I could be kinder to people, and stop reading the news so much. I could spend more time with friends and family, and I could spend more time in nature. I think that if I did those things, I would be a better person. It’s not just me. I look around the world and see all kinds of things that could be improved with a modest amount of effort. The key here is the word “modest”. For...

The goal of education has always been to achieve critical thinking. Needless to say, this involves a two-step process: first, students learn a great deal about a topic, whether in history, science, art, or anything else; then students learn to arrange the information in new ways, to set one fact against another, to find new insights among this knowledge. Not anymore. Today's educators are in a hurry; they don't bother with the first step. They jump directly to step two. In this scenario, students who know nothing are expected to talk intelligently about it. What absurdity.Having just heard about X,...

(snips) ---- Victor Davis Hanson says he lives in the nineteenth century—a fact that can get him into some trouble. “Let me give you an example,” he says. Hanson was in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart one day when he saw a young woman struggling to move a big screen television into her Honda. When he went over to help her, he noticed that she was holding an EBT card, a government-issued debit card for cash and food stamps. Hanson told her, “You shouldn’t be using the food card to buy the big screen TV.” She told him to...