There is a common theme in most Christmas stories of a man who is too cynical, or depressed, or crotchety (sometimes even evil) to participate in the spirit of Christmas, and who, because of some event or insight, has his eyes opened to the wonder of the world. We all know this cast of characters: […]
Author Archives: Martin Cothran
Too Many Books Too Soon I was asked by someone in a post on Memoria Press’ forum to comment on an article by Douglas Wilson, author of Rediscovering the Lost Tools of Learning, the book that jump-started the Neoclassical schools movement in the United States in the late 1980s. The article is about an academic […]
You’ve heard the word before, but what does it mean? Here’s the lowdown on the second leg of the trivium. Introduction The best way to answer the question “What is logic?” is with a definition. But that is easier said than done. Throughout history, many people have thought and written about the subject of logic, […]
One of the measures of how hard it is to articulate the case for the value of a classical education is that you have to use the assumptions of those who don’t value it in order to persuade them that it has value. That’s a mouthful, I know. But what I mean to say is […]
Narrative accounts and musical commemorations follow in the wake of every disaster. From the Iliad and the Odyssey, written about events related to the Trojan War, to Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” literature and music have dealt with destruction and death. What great crime doesn’t have its own documentary? What great disaster […]
Everyone agrees that education is a good thing. Unfortunately, the agreement pretty much ends there. Although almost everyone agrees that education is good, there is wide disagreement on what education is. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, there has been a sometimes heated debate, not only about what schools should do, but what they should be. Generally speaking, there are […]
The United States is in the midst of a presidential election. Like all such elections, it involves two, sometimes three, major candidates, each of whom tries to persuade the voters to vote for him or her. Some candidates do this well and others don’t. But they could all do it better if they knew Aristotle’s principles of rhetoric. Classical rhetoric is […]
Over the last several years, I have planted a number of trees in my yard. I notice that when I plant a tree, it takes a year or two in order for its root system to become established. Only when this happens does it start growing in earnest. A plant has to grow down before it can grow up. […]
Letter from the editor When I was in junior high school, my father began adding on to our house. For the foundation he dug a lot of trenches in the ground, built wood forms to pour the cement in, and hired a cement truck to fill them up. I remember thinking that it seemed like a lot of […]
My father was an aerospace engineer. When I was growing up, I never really knew what he did, since his job involved mostly top-secret projects. In fact, I never once visited his office, which required a high-security clearance even to enter. But over the years, I did manage to piece together a few facts about what he did. One day, when […]