Category Archives: Subjects

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? […]

How Shakespeare’s Hamlet Led Me Back to God

Hamlet

The great books speak to us of honor and love and sacrifice; but they do not always speak in familiar phrases. They do not tell us what we already know. Transcending current opinion and fad, through symbol and metaphor they reveal a clear and uncluttered access to the realities that determine our lives. Sometime back, […]

How Can I Teach Latin if I Don’t Know it Myself?

There are a lot of good reasons for thinking that Latin should be restored to its former place of honor as the Basic Subject in the elementary years. In previous issues of the Classical Teacher, I talked about some of these. But knowing that you should teach it and knowing how to teach it are […]

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 […]

CLSA on Pharr Oratory Academy

Oratory

McAllen, Texas is at the lower tip of the Lone Star State. Just across its border is one of the most violent places in the world: Reynoso, Mexico, where infighting between Latin American drug cartels has resulted in firefights in the city streets. But just a couple of minutes outside McAllen, and just several miles from the frightening […]

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 […]

The Noblest Monument of English Prose

monument

When we were deciding which version of the Bible to use at Highlands Latin School, there were a number of things we took into consideration that led to our choosing the King James Bible. There are undoubtedly different criteria one could apply to decide what Bible to use, depending on the context. A person might […]

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 […]

In Defense of Latin

Defense

SOME CRITICS HAVE SAID that the value of Roman literature is that it has been the vehicle which conveyed Greek ideas to the world. The Romans took their art and, as far as their civilization rests on these, their civilization from Greece. Why, then, do we study Latin? Some of the reasons are given by Cicero […]

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