History

RELIGIOUS BACKGROUND OF AN AMERICAN REVOLUTIONARY

As a woman who knows her husband very well, my wife taped a Ken Burns PBS special on Thomas Jefferson, knowing that her husband has a keen interest in early American history.  So, on a cold, icy February winter evening in central Michigan we set ourselves down to sup and

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THE GOOD SAMARITAN AS GOOD NEIGHBOR POLICY

There was a scholar of the law who stood up to test him and said, “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”  Jesus said to him, “What is written in the law? How do you read it?”  He said in reply, “You shall love the Lord, your God, with

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ALASDAIRE MACINTYRE: JOURNEY OF A MIND

As a blog devoted primarily to culture, I view culture as the moral repository from which all politics and economics are derived.  But culture, in itself, cannot be understood without accounting for the historical situation that develops and produces the arts, philosophies, and values that constitute a civilization.  This includes

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WHY THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE? 

Although the presidential election is now over, with the “vote” in favor of the Republican candidate Donald Trump, the electoral college must still meet to vote on, and certify, that Donald Trump is the President-Elect of the United States.  Although many consider it a needless formality, since the electoral college

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ADVENT MEDITATIONS

As I pondered the subject of Advent on this unusually mild and sunny Friday afternoon, November 22, my recollections drew me back to a very sad day of remembrance sixty-one years ago, November 22, 1963.  As a fourth grader at the time, the principal of my school announced over the

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OLGA OF KIEV: FROM AVENGING ANGEL TO CHRISTIAN SAINT

If you have read the newspapers and watched media accounts of daily news events, you would think that the Russian Federation and its allies were responsible for all that has gone wrong in the world in the third millennium of the Common Era.  Whether that is a true account of

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THE CONSECRATION OF LEARNING

BACKGROUND As a new Western Europe was approaching the second millennium, the kingdoms that for centuries had been warring among themselves, and with fighting bands of organized (and disorganized) plunderers fighting for “their share,” the nations of Western Europe as we know them today began to emerge.  These “old and

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Prelude: Towards the Consecration of Learning

In my previous two postings [See Aristotle’s Impact on The Wisdom Tradition; and Carolingian Renaissance] I discussed the state of education – its goals, its effects, and the conditions in which it flourished or floundered – to provide background and context for the subject of this post.  The title (Prelude:

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