Dec 14, 2023
https://www.wordonfire.org/articles/barron/ivy-league/Why Rome’s Best Emperor Shunned Government Schools by Lawrence Reed at FEE Stories. No less a figure than Emperor Marcus Aurelius (121-180 A.D.) noted in his Meditations that he learned from his great-grandfather “to avoid the public schools, to hire good private teachers, and to accept the resulting costs as money well-spent.” It’s a good bet that were Aurelius with us today, he’d be an advocate for school choice. He was a smart man who believed, though he was a ruler, that he wasn’t smarter than parents who wanted the best for their children. Read
St. Edith Stein’s 5 Tips for Religious Education by Susanna Spencer at National Catholic Register. Young minds and hearts will only be successfully formed in the faith “when the people who introduce the children to the mysteries are themselves permeated and their lives formed by these mysteries.” This last point is in some sense the most important. We cannot guide children to a lifelong faith if we do not live out what we are teaching them. Read
Why We Return to Augustine by Michael R. Gonzalez at The Catholic Thing. The philosophers of modernity claim that we find personal and social peace when we subordinate our religious inclinations to private pleasure. They argue that we can comfortably ignore religion because we don’t really need anything more than material goods. We should change the subject whenever potentially uncomfortable claims about beliefs come up in conversation (don’t talk about religion at Christmas!). But this attempt to organize society solely around material prosperity fails to satisfy the human heart. Instead, it results in miserable escapism – or worse. Read
The Man of God Is a Man for Others by Bishop Gregory John Mansour at What We Need Now. The most important aspect of our human identity is what is in our soul, our longing for God, our desire for the good of others and for ourselves as God’s beloved. Since we were created by Love for love, our spirituality, philosophy of life, and Christian worldview should be grounded in our firm belief that God created us good so that we might be morally good. This should be the moral compass guiding all the decisions of our lives. Read
A Culture That Needs the Immaculate Conception by Thomas Griggin at Crisis Magazine. The Immaculate Conception shows us that each and every single human life has the capacity to change the world. If the life of Mary inside of her mother was not protected and held as beautifully made, the Savior of the world would have never been born. Although we are not going to be born without the stain of original sin, today’s solemnity should remind us that every person has a vocation and task in life that no one else (who ever has or ever will exist) can accomplish. Read
Why Every High Schooler Should Read To Kill a Mockingbird by Andrew Zwerneman at Cana Academy blog. It was not long ago that Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird was cherished as a must-read for all high schoolers…. Alas, the times have changed…. If we are true to the characters as they are given to us, Mockingbird moves us in ways we ought to be moved. That is what Harper Lee does for us within Maycomb, a worlTolkien, Chesterton, and the Adventure of Mission by Bishop Robert Barron at Word on Fire on December 11, 2018. [T]he ultimate purpose of Lord of the Rings is not to celebrate domesticity but rather to challenge it. Bilbo and Frodo are not meant to settle into their easy chairs but precisely to rouse themselves to adventure. Only when they leave the comforts of the Shire and face down orcs, dragons, goblins, and finally the power of evil itself do they truly find themselves. They do indeed bring to the struggle many of the virtues that they cultivated in the Shire, but those qualities, they discover, are not to be squirreled away and protected, but rather unleashed for the transformation of a hostile environment. Readl “Flamer” including illustrations of nude teenage boys showering and masturbating. Read
Throwback Thursday
School Choice Provides Opportunity for All of America’s Kids to Have Better Life by Lindsey Burke at The Daily Signal on February 11, 2021. Ten out of 16 randomized control trial evaluations of the impact of private school choice on student academic achievement have found statistically significant positive effects for participants. Rigorous evaluations of the impact of school choice also show improved student attainment (high school graduation and college enrollment), improved student safety, and positive effects on character development, such as increased political tolerance, charitable giving, crime reduction, and paternity-suit reduction. In other words, private school choice not only elevates students’ academic outcomes, but enhances critical later life outcomes about which parents care deeply. Read