Author Archives: Martin Cothran

The God of Men — & of Elves

elves

From earliest times, Christians have argued about the role of pagan learning in Christian education. The debate has never gone away, but generally speaking, the church has preferred rather to use the learning of the pagans than to repudiate it. An essential part of the classical Christian education that held sway in schools from the […]

How Not to Insult an Angel

angel

I once got an e-mail from a friend who took me to task for something in my Traditional Logic text. I had said that angels are not rational. He thought this was a sort of insult to angels. Angels are indeed rational, he said, and to argue otherwise was to argue a non-Christian position. Is this true? […]

The Dangerous Article for Boys

It is now well-recognized that boys are not reading. What is the problem? Most commentators want to say that boys have an aversion to books. But the problem is quite the opposite: books—modern books, that is—have an aversion to boys.   A recent edition of The New York Times Sunday Book Review featured a Robert Lipsyte article that attempts to […]

Greek to You… Is Classical Education Really Dead?

Greek

  Kathryn Jean Lopez: When you write about classical education, you mean more than learning enough Latin to help with the SATs. What is a classical education? Tracy Lee Simmons: This was the Humanist’s education, in the sense in which Erasmus and Thomas More were Humanists. A classical education used to mean simply a curriculum based upon […]

Letter from the Editor: Winter 2011

We are often asked, at our school and at Memoria Press, why we use the King James Bible in our program. There are many reasons, but one occurred to me a couple of years ago as I was teaching a young adult Sunday school class on the New Testament book of Mark, which begins with […]

Letter from the Editor: Late Summer 2011

My daughter and I recently went out on a date. After missing the movie we wanted to see, we ended up watching The Book of Eli, a movie I had not heard anything about. The movie opens in the future, after some sort of apocalypse. There is little vegetation, water is scarce, the roads are littered with abandoned cars, […]

Becoming as Rational as We Think We Are

Rational

G. K. Chesterton once said that the “whole modern world is at war with reason.” “The tower,” he added, “already reels.” In what sense can this be true? When we think of ourselves in all of our modern glory—unadulterated by the myths and superstitions of the past, don’t we think of ourselves as more informed, more enlightened, more rational than we […]

What is Classical Rhetoric?

Classical Rhetoric

This meant that, in his education, a great man must not only study the rules and principles of eloquent expression, but he must know and do the good; he must not only have mastered certain techniques, but he must be familiar with the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. The discipline that taught a man […]

Letter from the Editor: Summer 2011

Letter

In Pearl S. Buck’s short story, “A Field of Rice,” Wang Sun, a Chinese villager in the early 1950s, is in a situation in which he is told to do something he knows won’t work. Mao Tse Tung has taken over China, and he has sent functionaries out to every village to tell the farmers (who […]

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