I had occasion recently to go on a Sunday afternoon drive. Sunday afternoon drives used to be a fixture of American culture. I remember them from my childhood in southern California, when my parents would load my sister and me in the car and just take off. Driving today is a purely utilitarian activity: You […]
My family delights in finding older, out-of-print books on Christian education because I delight in reading them. Written by Christian pedagogues in the 1800s or earlier, such books become a time capsule for all of us interested in passing on the best of classical Christian education. In a recent find called The Discourse of Errors […]
Occasionally—okay, frequently—my wife asks me if I have done something that needs to be done. When I look at her blankly and say, “No. Was I supposed to do that?,” she says “You didn’t see the list I put on your desk?” as she scans the various disorganized stacks of paper. Then she makes me […]
In 1965, on the small island of Tonga in the South Pacific, six schoolboys, ranging in age from thirteen to sixteen, “borrowed” a local fisherman’s boat and took it on a joyride that lasted over fourteen months. They were bored, and so they decided to sail for Fiji, another South Pacific island five hundred miles […]
In Ernest Hemingway’s book A Moveable Feast, he gives the best advice I have ever read on dealing with writer’s block. He tells you to sit down, take up a pen, and write one true sentence. That’s it. Just one true sentence. For example, I had writer’s block as I sat down to write this […]
The expression “dark ages” refers to the period of time after the fall of Rome in the fourth century A.D. until the resurgence of learning in Western Europe that started in about the eighth century. We call it “dark” because the light of learning that had been ignited by the Greeks and carried on by […]
In Amor Towles’ new book, The Lincoln Highway, we find eight-year-old Billy Watson in a railroad freight car waiting for his brother to get back. It is the 1950s and Billy and his older brother Emmett are riding the rails east to New York from Nebraska. A man drops into the car. The boy strikes […]
In Natalie Babbitt’s Tuck Everlasting, which is set in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a twelve-year-old girl named Winnie Foster is dissatisfied at home in her little village of Treegap. She is tired of being cooped up and considers running away. One day, while wandering in the woods, she meets a boy named […]
Letter from The Editor Winter 2021: Two Stories When my wife and I visit my mother and stepfather, we often duck out to go for a walk in nearby Holton, a beautiful old town that lies on the prairie in eastern Kansas. We park along the street, walk the neighborhoods, and then poke around in […]
In Orthodoxy G. K. Chesterton articulates the Christian worldview in a way that will sound odd to the modern ear. Like later writers he influenced (such as C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien), Chesterton was steeped in the mythology and literature of the West. His wide reading in the old Western literature gave […]