I wanted to draw my readers’ attention to the following offerings, currently available for free at my Substack newsletter, previously known as “The Epimethean.”
- Putting the Wildness Back into Classical Education: Homer, John Senior, WCC, and the Recovery of Reality. For decades, the classical education movement has been colonized by rationalist Presbyterians who, not quite knowing what to do with their intuition that medieval Christians got something right, end up stultifying our literary tradition through turning it into an abstraction or, worse—following in the model of Veritas Press’s disastrous Omnibus project—instrumentalizing the Great Tradition for pragmatic and programmatic ends. This gives us a field guide approach to the classics but no field; it gives us students who may know the ins and outs of Odysseus’s adventures but would go to pieces if they were called to embark on a real adventure themselves. From the article, “One of my critiques of the modern classical education movement is that it often treats the Great Books as if they can be unbundled from the entire experience of reality and then dished up as a product… The classics become simply an academic subject that can be disengaged from a broader experience of reality, from good habits, from the holistic integration of body, mind, and soul.” But there is hope. In my article I show how one classical college is working to redress this by positioning lived experiences, especially the adventures of hiking, at the forefront of classical education.
- How We Are Raising Fragile Children: Why Pain isn’t Always Bad, and How Healthy Activities Protect us from Addiction. In this article I suggest that modern parenting methods are producing fragile children, including adolescents lacking in resiliency to the basic ups and downs of life. From the article: “One of the core problems behind addiction can be found in the fact that children growing up in the modern west are increasingly socialized to be fragile. We live in a society that pathologizes any type of discomfort. Believing we need to run from all pain, the result is not resilience but fragility, weakness, and ultimately addiction.”
- MAGA Goes Woke: Will the Real Neo-Marxists Please Stand Up. The tide seems to finally be turning in the narrow one-sided discourse on “wokeness,” as conservative thought leaders are finally catching onto the fact that Social Marxism hasn’t merely colonized the left, but has become systemic to the Republican Party under the hegemony of the Trump personality cult. From the article, “now that the categories of ‘right wing wokery’ are going mainstream, sooner or later the intellectual wing of the MAGA movement will need…to either repudiate their neo-Marxist conceptualizations, or else have the courage to stand up and own Neo-Marxism as their new realpolitik. But as the MAGA movement takes this Neo-Marxist turn, let us not lose sight of the insight of Tolkien. In the greatest series of books written in modern times, he warned us against feeling so hopeless that we succumb to the thinking and techniques of the enemy. The Lord of the Rings offers a timely warning never to let fear drive us to wield the enemy’s weapon, even in pursuit of good.”
- The Mythic Vision of George MacDonald. In this article, I’ve used the life and thought of George MacDonald (1824-1905) as an opportunity to explore the spiritual significance of imagination. I argue that if we do not recognize the imaginative element in all of life and work, and if we do not healthfully nurture the innate longing for beauty, transcendence and enchantment, then our longings will inevitably be colonized by subversive forces. As parents, teachers, and clergy, our goal should not be to eradicate dreams and visions from our youth, but to cultivate noble dreams and visions, which is to say, a rightly ordered imagination. In that important work, MacDonald can be our guide.
- Subverting the Hero’s Journey: How Modern Stories Malform the Imagination. In this essay, I argue that many modern movies are offering our children a type of reverse catechesis that subverts the classic hero’s journey. From the article, “Contemporary cinematography is filled with many wonderful stories—often in the superhero genre—that remain true to the narrative arc of the hero’s journey. Yet increasingly we are also seeing a plethora of stories that blur the lines between protagonist and antagonist, standing the traditional roles of hero and villain on their head. Viewers have been invited to reimagine iconic villains—including Maleficent, Cruella de Vil, the Joker and, of course, the Wicked Witch of the West—more positively. The flipside of villain revisionism is confusion about what it means to be a hero. Is a hero someone like Penelope in The Odyssey, who remains faithful to her missing husband at great personal cost, or is it someone like Elizabeth in the 2010 movie Eat, Pray, Love, who leaves her family to go on a journey of self-discovery? As Hollywood reimagines hero and villain, the narrative arc of the hero’s journey has subtly changed. Rather than the protagonist having to make sacrificial changes to overcome obstacles, the burden of change is placed on the society in which the protagonist’s journey is situated…. Contemporary cinematography also subverts the hero’s journey by interiorizing the point of tension that longs for resolution, relocating it in the inner landscape of the hero or heroine’s self-doubt, unfulfilled desires, fear of not being understood, anxiety about not fitting in, etc. Viewers can ultimately see the story about themselves; the fall motif becomes vague enough to function as a grab bag into which viewers can project their own issues, with the result that the hero’s victory becomes a mechanism for vicarious self-empowerment.”
You can read these and other articles at my Substack Homepage.