In 79 A.D., the catastrophic eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in eastern Italy covered nearby towns in ash and completely buried many of them. Accounts of the ancient eruption paint a horrific scene: Volcanic pumice rained from the skies and waves of searing hot gas and debris swept over the nearby landscape. Thousands died where they […]
Modern educators love to talk about “critical thinking skills,” but not one in a hundred even knows what he means by this term. Every time our country goes through an education reform spasm-which it has experienced about every twenty-five years since the 1920s- the education establishment trots out a set of slogans that always sound […]
One of the most common modern beliefs is that science is rational while religion is not. This dogma has been asserted again and again, most loudly by atheist thinkers. I say “asserted” rather than “argued” because, like most dogmas, it is never actually argued for, only assumed. It is simply repeated, again and again, almost […]
God blesses some of us with vision and with lives of clear purpose and meaning— and to some of us he adds the time and opportunity to accomplish what we have been given to do. The life of Cheryl Lowe, Publisher at Memoria Press and Headmistress of Highlands Latin School, was this kind of life. […]
I guess it’s because I’m starting to get old (some would say I’m already there), but with each succeeding Christmas I think more about what has become of the holiday. There is, of course, the problem of the secularization of Christmas. The “War on Christmas” that we have heard so much about in recent years […]
We late twentieth and early twenty-first century Americans are the first people in history who do not know poetry. Every civilization prior to our modern American civilization has read and heard and memorized poetry. This was still done in schools when I was young. We use poetry to a certain extent every day, of course, […]
In Walter Isaacson’s 2008 biography of Albert Einstein, he quotes the great scientist as saying, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” Einstein was certainly an example of this maxim, with many of his scientific discoveries having resulted from his own thought experiments. But this maxim applies even more so to the newest object of Isaacson’s […]
In a blog post published at her website, “The Argument Against Raising Well-Rounded Kids,” homeschool writer Penelope Trunk argues, well, against raising well-rounded kids. I myself am in favor of raising well-rounded kids. In fact, not only am I in favor of raising well-rounded kids, I have actually done it. And one of the things […]
One of the things a logic student learns is that, of the 64 possible kinds of arguments (also called syllogisms), only 19 of them are valid. Let’s take the most common argument form of all: PREMISE #1: All flowers are plants (A) PREMISE #2: All roses are flowers (A) CONCLUSION: Therefore, all roses are plants […]
In his Autobiography, G. K. Chesterton tells the story of having only recently come to public attention as a result of a running debate on the pages of The Clarion with that newspaper’s editor, Robert Blatchford. Blatchford was a proud and voluble atheist who had issued an open challenge to readers to respond to his […]