The Question

I got the question last Saturday night. I suppose I should have known it was coming, but I have to admit that it caught me off my guard. If anything, I would I have more likely expected it from our twelve year old son than from our eight year old daughter, but she was the one who asked. I was putting her to bed, and in her sweet, innocent voice, she asked it.

What made it so uncomfortable was that I should have been more prepared to answer it. After all, I am a well-educated man and a teacher myself. I have even written and spoken on the topic, albeit in circumstances of my own choosing. Perhaps that is what threw me off. I was like a general whose success had always been based on his choosing advantageous ground. This was more like an ambush. In the blink of an eye I had to come to grips with the fact that my little girl was old enough and aware enough to ask the question and that I had to sort through the torrent of responses that flooded my brain to find one that was accurate, was at her level of comprehension, and that would serve her well in the future. It is not easy being a dad these days, especially when his sweetie pie asks,

"Daddy, why do public schools not talk about Jesus?"

I stumbled at first and tried to buy myself some time by asking why she had come up with such a question. She said that some of her friends had told her that you can't talk about Jesus in public schools, and since she is used to prayer, to say nothing of the thoroughly Christian curriculum at the tutelage school she attends, she could not understand why this would not be the case at a public school.

Where, oh where, to begin? One of my favorite quotations from Montaigne is what he said in, of all essays, his On the Education of Children. "It is the mark of a strong and lofty soul that knows how to come down to a childish gait and guide it. I walk more firmly and surely uphill than down." This was not the time for a rant, a fulmination from the pulpit denouncing the evils of a godless system of education. It was not the place for high-flown discourse on the Bible, St. Augustine, Plato, Horace Mann, John Dewey, and Dorothy Sayers. My nanosecond of space for thought, which is about the limit in decent conversation lest the other person think you a mute or a halfwit, was about to expire. What could I say?

I have no doubt that my inability to recall my precise words is that my words were not precise. In fact, if I could remember them, I would likely paraphrase or re-state them so they sound better here. My confession is that I stammered something about how some people do not believe in God and think it is wrong to talk about Him, even though they are wrong for doing so.

Groan. What an ugly, flat, clunker of a response. Perhaps this post is my attempt to write my spoken wrong.

I could begin by filling it with links to books and articles that have something to say on the matter. For more than fifteen years, I have been reading, writing, thinking, speaking, and acting on this very issue. I could give you great resources that clearly delineate the historical development of our current, godless system of public education, that lay out the details and consequences of such a system, and that provide historical, faithful, and philosophical support for as well as plans for constructing God-honoring, academically rigorous alternatives.

Instead, let us return to an eight year old girl's question by considering the context of her life. She has been reared by two parents and a brother for whom the fulness of God as revealed in Jesus Christ is a daily, living reality. The adults in her life, from relatives to leaders at church to teachers, all share the conviction of a Christian life. Prayer is as common in and around her life as are the McDonald's arches in her hometown. She is as likely to hear Mommy and Daddy talk about Jesus as about Indiana University basketball. In short, while not isolated from the secular culture around her, her life is interwoven with the stories, beliefs, and practices of the Christian faith.

Another way to say this is that our children have been brought up in a Christo-normative environment. For a Christian, there really can be no other. Father Richard John Neuhaus once wrote, "If what Christians say about Good Friday is true, then it is, quite simply, the truth about everything." Of course, what Christians say about Good Friday is derivative of what they say about God. If He is indeed the Alpha and Omega; if He really is the way, the truth, and the life; if no one comes to the Father but through Jesus Christ (and, it should be noted, Christians are only saying what God Himself has said), then the truth about God and our relationship with Him must be the truth about everything. This truth has as much to say about our dealings at the auto repair shop as it does about our activities at church. It does not have a right to be in the public square, if a right is something that may or may not be extended to something that is not logically necessary, but rather it cannot be excluded from it without the slipping of the public square into falsehood.

This is something that our daughter, age eight, already knows. For her, there is no distinction between the secular and the sacred, for the sacred pervades all aspects of her life in this age. It is no wonder, then, that she would wonder how anyone could rend that which God has created as one.

And in asking this question, she passes condemnation on such a divisive model of life and education. Once again, the emperor parades without clothes, and it takes a child to notice. We adults campaign and get elected on educational reform. We pass state and federal legislation ad nauseam to improve our schools. We pose for photo ops to celebrate our latest program and the funding for it. Yet as we congratulate ourselves for initiating reforms that will last only until the next election, we miss a simple truth. We cannot hope to educate successfully in anything if we reject out of hand the One Who is the truth about everything.

Because A Woman Is Beautiful

In the comment box to a recent post on young girls being allowed to perform in slutty outfits, blogger and catechist Christian LeBlanc wrote, "To paraphrase Frederick the Great: If everything is sexual, then nothing is sexual."

That is right, and we used to know it. Yes, there were some pretty graphic pictures on the walls of Pompeiian houses, but Vergil still knew not to include up-close, full-frontal when depicting the love scene between Aeneas and Dido in Aeneid 4. His scene was, if you will permit the comparison, like the old movies in which the man and woman begin to kiss, there is a fade to black, and the scene picks back up the following morning. Is there anyone who does not know what went on? Of course not.

A friend and I had several discussions about the HBO series Rome when it ran a few years ago. I argued that many, if not all, of the sex scenes were gratuitous and pure HBO. He argued that this is how it was in ancient Rome. I countered that surely Julius Caesar voided his bowels from time to time or had the sniffles, yet such things were not depicted. The choice to show full nudity and sexual intercourse was made to draw viewers. It was titillation pure and simple.

Consider now some of the passionate, heavy-breathing, steamy stuff in the Song of Songs. This is about as sensuous as it gets. It is hot, and it is good. Its passionate, blush-inducing poetry comes from a culture in which virginity was an ideal and the sexual act was not to be experienced outside marriage. Yes, this may have led to trepidation on the wedding night, but a great amount of excitement and anticipation, too.
I can only write from a man's perspective, but a woman's body is a beautiful, wonderful, exciting, mysterious, powerful thing. It was created last in the human drama, the crowning jewel of humanity. It is uniquely capable of hosting human life and birthing it into the world.

Why should such a creation be cheapened by constant exposure to a public that is at first lusting and then disregarding? Someone commented on Red Cardigan's blog with regard to the post I cited above, saying that my objection to the slutty outfits of young girl dancers was an objection to what most women wear at the beach and the gym. He was right in that most wear such attire, but wrong in thinking that made it okay. As wrong as the drooling wolf is ogling women who are three-quarters naked, an equally wrong response is to say of their nudity that it is no big deal. It is an incredibly big deal. Ask any man who knows all the layers of passion with his wife. To discover, literally to uncover, his wife's nakedness, to savor her and give to her in the passionate dance of love, is to know true intimacy.

What is gained by constant exposure to flesh? What is gained by wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am interaction? It is merely orgasm as Christian LeBlanc said elsewhere "to no adult purpose." It cheats both the man and the woman of the true joy, which is a combination of the physical, spiritual, and emotional.

Some would cover women from head to toe. Some think women should be hidden because of an inherent inferiority. I would suggest that women, and men, too, should dress modestly to retain the value of delight that should be a gift for their spouses alone. The gift of sexual interaction should not be cheapened by casual exposure that makes commonplace what should be mystery.

O Mores Times

O tempora!  O mores!

O the times!  O the customs! -- Cicero

Yesterday I was felt the need to mock the absurdity, sin, lunacy...all of the above...of our current culture by putting together an Onion style, mock newspaper.  Titled O Mores Times, it has articles on the F.D.A. decision on Plan-B, President Obama's congratulations to Jason Collins for confessing his homosexuality, and California bill AB 1266 that would allow students to use whatever they chose based on the gender with which they have identified.  Click the picture to see the full thing.

 

No, Virginia, There Isn't a Santa Claus

Virginia O'Hanlon's question regarding Santa Claus, her father's encouragement to write the New York Sun newspaper, and Francis Pharcellus Church's response, have become a part of the American consciousness. "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus" is an expression that addresses the childlike simplicity and purity that jaded adults long to recapture.
The end of innocence comes in many ways. One of my undergraduate professors quipped that it had arrived for one of my classmates who was so busy she was forced to use a pocket calendar. For the most part, I believe that our daughter, age 8, is still innocent of most of the ugliness the world has to offer. She knows that there are bad guys and good guys, but that is about the extent of it. Yet my wife recently shared with me a chipping away at that innocence that happened at a family gathering.
My wife had gone to see her nephew and his date before they left for prom and took our daughter with her. My wife's sister's husband was out of town, but her first husband and father of the boy was at the house. Our daughter had never met this man, and when he introduced himself as the boy's father, she was utterly confused. How could he be the boy's father, she asked my wife. Wasn't Uncle ----- his father?
Thus will come a discussion of divorce, one that my wife, appropriately, put off on me. She told our daughter to ask daddy, and although she has not yet, I will likely address it soon. I will have to explain that even though God created marriage to be between a man and woman forever, some people sin and break their marriage through something called divorce. I will tell her that this is not an unpardonable sin, for the blood of Jesus washes all sins clean. That it is a sin, however, is something I will not whitewash. I will also assure her that her daddy and mommy will never get divorced and that even when we disagree or get angry with each other, it is no reason to make things worse by sinning.
Oh, there are many things a parent must face as a child leaves the Eden of early life for the fallen world she will inhabit for the rest of her days or until Christ returns. Explaining divorce is hardly the worst or the most challenging.  After all, we live in a world where we consider newsworthy the manner in which a multi-million dollar athlete achieves an orgasm.  In fact, it is so newsworthy that it warrants public commendation from the President of the United States, a country that has decided the smart thing to do is make the "morning after pill" available without consent to girls from age 15.  Still, I love that our daughter finds it puzzling that the man she has known as uncle is not the father of her cousin and that some other man is. I am glad she finds it strange. It means she knows how things are supposed to be, and that is something I hope she never forgets.

Where Is Your Man Card?

One of my chief interests is mentoring boys as they become men, and nowhere is this calling more important to me than in the life of our son. I have savored every moment of his boyhood, but even since he was a baby I have been praying and planning for the man he will become. Taking a tip from my childhood pastor, I have long prayed for the future spouses of our son and daughter. I eagerly anticipate living out some of the key stages in our son's life, marking them with special events and ceremonies.
Imagine, then, my sheer joy when he he said to me recently, "I've got a man card." This sparked my curiosity, so I asked to see his "man card," and he presented me with this.

This was a promotional card our church had used for a sermon series leading up to Easter. I was blown away. I grabbed him around the shoulder and shared my excitement and joy with him. I pointed out that if he wanted to know what a real man looked like, he had found the right person.

If you want an excellent look at what it means both to be and to rear a boy in the present age, look no further than Antony Esolen's excellent article, "A Boy's Life with Unisex Scouts." Don't let the title fool you. This is far wider reaching than a piece merely about the Boy Scouts. Then again, it needs to be to understand properly the crossroads at which the Scouts find themselves. Read this article and then share it with everyone you know. It deserves a wide and thoughtful reading by all who care about boys, the men they will become, and the girls and women with whom they interact.

Girls, Not Showgirls

It was an event to raise money for an organization that helps children with terminal illnesses fulfill a dream. At the request of a good friend, I had joined a team of ten people to pull a 35,000 pound jumbo jet fifteen feet. Each of the 37 teams had raised money for the Indiana Children's Wish Fund, and I was initially bummed that my wife and children could not be with me to watch daddy "heaving on a jet plane." Once I arrived, I really wished they could have seen some of the other teams who had dressed in costumes. There was a team of Elvis impersonators, a team of characters from Ghostbusters, and so forth.

And then came the pedophile's dream. A group of dancers from a group called Dance Legacy kicked off the event by lounging around a Vegas-styled backdrop and performing dance routines. Clad in gold sequined bras, brightly colored bikini bottoms, and feathers in their hair and on their hips...and not a stitch more...these girls, who I would estimate ranged from 4-14, shook their money makers.

Oh, I'm sorry. Was that a crass expression? Well, excuuuuuuse me, BUT DON'T DRESS YOUR DAUGHTERS UP LIKE THAT IN FIRST PLACE! ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME?
I refused to look. Instead, I watched the families holding up phones and video recorders to capture the memory of their daughters presenting their bodies for a crowd of strangers.

I will be the first to admit that I do not really "get" dance as an art form. It just does not work for me. What can I say? I appreciate blues over jazz and have a palate more discerning for scotch than wine. Such is life. That said, I can acknowledge that dance can be a perfectly legitimate form of art. What I cannot accept is that it must include sexually provocative moves or that it must be conducted in a state of seventy-five percent nudity. Are you seriously telling me there was no dance routine these girls could have performed that would not have involved those two components?

They were acting as showgirls in a Vegas act. Let's unpack that for a moment. Where else do we see the word "show" compounded with another noun? Three examples come readily to mind: show horse, show dog, showman. These are not, however, similar compounds. "Show horse" and "show dog" are terms used to describe animals that are bred and trained to display certain physical characteristics for an admiring audience. "Showman," on the other hand, conjures the image of the circus ringmaster, the man who shows, or draws our attention to, acts of entertainment. Now, in which category does the term "showgirl" belong?

Right.

There is much talk these days about a rape culture that seems prevalent in our schools and on our college campuses. It is true that a woman should be able to walk unclothed down a dark alley at night and not have to worry about being attacked. It is also true that no matter how a woman is dressed, an attack upon her is not her fault, and I am in no way advocating that all women should wear a burqa. At the same time, we have to ask what the purpose is in dressing young girls like Vegas showgirls (think "show horses") and telling them to perform for a bunch of strangers.

From Marathon to Boston

I began each of my classes today with this picture. It is of a statue near Marathon, Greece, commemorating the famous run by Phidippides, who in 490 B.C. ran the 26 miles from Marathon back to Athens to announce the Athenian victory over the Persians. After fighting in the battle and then running full out the entire distance, he exclaimed, νικωμεν, or "We have won," and collapsed to his death.
The vastly outnumbered Athenian forces prevailed in that battle in part thanks to the cause for which they were fighting. They fought for democracy and to prevent a tyrannical take over. It is no surprise, then, that the generals could not wait for the entire army to march back to Athens, but sent a runner to share the news.
I shared this story with my classes today, along with the picture, which I captioned to say, "Boston, we shall win," in a nod to the Classical quotation of Phidippides. We talked about how free people then and now do not bow to tyranny of any kind, including that which uses the cowardly tactics of terrorism. We talked of how the Race for the Cure, the Indianapolis 500, and the London Marathon will still go on as planned. We talked of how, as the President said in his press conference, justice will prevail.
It would have been a dereliction of duty had Latin classes not spent a few minutes discussing our national tragedy and commitment to triumph, given the ancient connection to it all. None of this will appear on any test, but then again, this was of genuine importance.

From Thessaly to Steubenville

My Latin II students conclude the year with a focus on ancient Greece, which includes our reading in translation the play Alcestis by Euripides.  As always, the play gives us much to discuss, mostly about life and death and surrounding euthanasia and life support.  This year we also talked about something else.  Rape.

In the play, Apollo has made a deal with Death on behalf of his friend, King Admetus of Thessaly, whereby the king will not have to die if he can persuade someone to take his place.  The queen, Alcestis, courageously steps up when both the king's mother and father have refused.  Along comes Heracles who, after discovering the reason for the king's sadness, goes forth to wrestle death in order to return the queen to her husband.  He is successful, but draws out the suspense when he returns, for he comes with a veiled woman whom he does not at first reveal to be Alcestis.  Heracles claims she is a prize he has won in a contest, but King Admetus refuses this gift for several reasons, one of which being he has no where to put her.  He is concerned about letting her stay among the young, male servants, and says,

καὶ πῶς ἀκραιφνὴς ἐν νέοις στρωφωμένη
ἔσται; τὸν ἡβῶνθ᾽, Ἡράκλεις, οὐ ῥᾴδιον
εἴργειν....
And how will remain pure, going about among
The youths?  It is not easy, Heracles, to restrain
A strong, young man?  (Translation mine)

This elicited some laughter from one of my classes, and I decided it was time for, not a discussion, but a lecture.  I asked if anyone knew about the heinous crime recently committed among high school students in Steubenville, Ohio, and a few did.  I gave a rough sketch of the events, bluntly, but avoiding salacious details.  I then stated in no uncertain terms that this was wrong.  It was wrong for so-called friends to drag an incapacitated, inebriated young woman from party to party.  It was wrong to defile her in variety of ways in her unconscious state.  It was a special kind of stupid, in addition to being wrong, to tweet and post video of mocking derision heaped upon this young woman.  I stated directly that the tweeting, texting, and posting on Facebook of pictures of yourself or others in states of undress or in compromising positions was simply wrong, and that if my students were doing, they must stop.

For the most part, I go for a more Socratic approach in my classes.  I enjoy asking questions, arguing both sides of an issue, and trying to help my students come to the truth on their own.  This was not one of those times.  As I prefaced my little lecture, this was my duty as a responsible adult.  I could also have said it was my duty as a teacher, as a man, as a citizen, as a husband and father, and as a Christian.

As is so often the case, it is the great works of literature, art, and music that provide the material for the truly important conversations.  That which represents the true, the good, and the beautiful opens up a natural path to those very things, and it is the true, the good, and the beautiful, that should be the aim of all education.

1 vs 100

As we discussed the attack by Gallic forces on Roman troops in 54 B.C. during our A.P. Latin class, one of the students brought up the topic of decimation, the practice in which a general would execute every tenth man in the legion if the legion had disgraced itself by running from battle.  One of my students asked why the Romans did not simply execute those who had actually fled, rather than punishing everyone in the legion.  I pondered that for a moment, struck by the oddity of the question.  It was a question no Roman would have asked.  No Greek or just about anyone else in the ancient world would have asked it either.  It is a question indicative of a particular worldview that assumes the greater importance of the individual over the community.

I responded to my student's question by pointing this out and using the example of Socrates as an illustration.  So great was his indentification with his city that he refused to flee from it, even when convicted unjustly by its laws.  To be called a Roman, a Greek, an Israelite, an Egyptian, a Persian...these were not casual distinctions of little importance.  They were identity as deeply rooted as that of being male or female.

Clearly this kind of identity does not exist in much of the world today.  We may feel patriotic and wave some flags around on Memorial Day as we picnic with family and friends, but this is a pale candle in comparison with the national identity of the ancient world.  It could be argued that a lessening of national identity was a natural consequence of the spread of Christianity, given that Galatians 3:28 says that there is no longer Jew, Greek, slave, free, male, female, but all are one in Christ.

While this does decrease the importance of national identity, it does not justify the hyper-individualism of our day.  Constant references to unity and the idea of the Church as the body of Christ throughout the Bible show that even as our national identities take on less importance, these are replaced not with individualism, but with a different type of community.  This gives rise to the expression sentire cum Ecclesia, "to think with the Church."

It is a lonely and exceedingly narrow way of approaching life if I only think as an individual.  Socrates thought as an Athenian, for there was no other way he could have thought.  The Christian has the most wonderful, glorious identity, for he can think as the Church thinks.  He is united with the great cloud of witnesses, to say nothing of the divine community that is the Holy Trinity thanks to the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.

I am a particular person, in my case a male of certain height, weight, and eye color.  I lose none of the distinctive qualities that make me who I am by being a Christian, but none of these, even taken together, form my full or primary identity.  I am a Christian, and that is my defining characteristic.  Sentio cum Ecclesia. 

Skyrockets in Flight

I am a recent, although no less ardent for that, fan of P.G. Wodehouse. Having read My Man Jeeves and Right Ho, Jeeves, I have now been savoring The Clicking of Cuthbert, a collection of short stories centered around golf. I doubt I have ever highlighted so much in a work of fiction. His lines of wit are priceless, and I suspect I could run a long series of posts on some of his best.

This post, however, is not so much about wit as it is a reflection on the changes in times from when a boy or man fell head over heels in love to the present when "wham-bam" is the order of the day. I omitted the customary "thank you, ma'am" from the sexual tricolon, as few even bother with this much simple gratitude.

I was put in the mind of the stark difference when reading Wodehouse's story "The Rough Stuff" in The Clicking of Cuthbert. He describes the appearance of a beauty and a certain man's reaction.

"About a medium approach-putt distance, moving gracefully and languidly towards him, was a girl of such pronounced beauty that Ramsden Waters's heart looped the loop twice in rapid succession. It was the first time he had seen Eunice Bray, and, like most men who saw her for the first time, he experienced the sensations of one in an express lift at the tenth floor going down who has left the majority of his internal organs up on the twenty-second. He felt a dazed emptiness. The world swam before his eyes. Ramsden yammered noiselessly. As always in the presence of the opposite sex, and more than ever now, his vocal cords appeared to have tied themselves into a knot which would have baffled a sailor and might have perplexed Houdini. He could not even gargle."

Now, this post is not a dissertation on wit or delicious turns of a phrase, although the passage cited provides ample meat for either, and yes, I know, the passage is from a fictional piece and not a sociological work on dating and fashion in the early 20th century. Nevertheless, we can see an important contrast with the present age here.

Think for a moment of the beautiful women one sees in public these days. This may be at the beach, at the grocery store, or at church. I am willing to go on record for my gender here, but in any venue, the reaction for us guys is not the heart-looping numbness of Ramsden Waters. Even a good man, a Christian man, has to fight off the thoughts that invade his mind, thoughts whose description I am not going to provide here, but which would require little more than grunting expletives. Women today are hot, sexy, and fine (pronounced as a ten syllable word). It is all about boo-tay, in their case how to show and accentuate it, and for men how to "tap dat." The one word that comes to mind is "hard." It is a hard, sharp, cruel, even venal culture. It is about painfully exquisite orgasm achieved through raw, animal rutting.

Put that over against the Wodehouse passage. Chances are many of those who read this blog will actually remember something of what he describes. I clearly remember being just knocked out at the sight of the co-ed who would become my wife as she waited in the hallway outside the classroom where we took a course in Latin prose composition. When I asked her over the phone if she would go out on a date with me, and she said yes, I had to double, triple, even quadruple check to make sure I had heard correctly. I could not believe SHE had said yes to the likes of me. Oh, I know the experience of Ramsden Waters.

So, too, did Catullus in the first century B.C. when he caught sight of Rome's most notorious beauty at the time, Clodia Metella. In his famous poem, Carmen 51, he writes:

ILLE mi par esse deo uidetur, ille, si fas est, superare diuos, qui sedens aduersus identidem te      spectat et audit dulce ridentem, misero quod omnis eripit sensus mihi: nam simul te, Lesbia, aspexi, nihil est super mi lingua sed torpet, tenuis sub artus flamma demanat, sonitu suopte tintinant aures gemina, teguntur      lumina nocte.

That man seems like a god to me who, sitting opposite you watches you over and over and listens to you sweetly laughing. Such a scene snatches all the senses from miserable me, for as soon as I have caught sight of you, Lesbia, there is nothing left for me. My tongue grows numb, a flame drips down beneath my slender limbs, my ears ring with pumping blood, and my both my eyes grow dark. (Translation mine)*

No one can say that a mind-blowing sexual experience is not pleasurable. Of course it is. A quick meal at the drive-through can satisfy hunger, but those who have savored a truly elegant meal know that there is so much more. There is the experience of the restaurant itself, a proper pairing of wine and meat, a slow, deliberate tasting of each aspect, a tasting that is accomplished not just with the mouth but with the eyes and nose as well. "Full-bodied" is the term we use for a complex wine, and a full-bodied experience such as Wodehouse and Catullus described, well, there is a word for that, too. It is romance, and that is far, far better than mere skyrockets in flight.

*I apologize for the wretched formatting of the poetry, but this is the best I can do on an iPad at the moment.

From Bobby Socks to Thongs

I recently led our school's delegation of students to the 60th Annual Indiana Junior Classical League State Latin Convention.  This two-day event gives students the opportunity to compete in artistic, spoken, and academic contests that relate to the world of ancient Greece and Rome.  Hundreds of students from around the state gather to do what no legislation designed by an educrat could hope to accomplish.

This year the convention was held at Indiana State University in Terre Haute.  My mother obtained her undergraduate degree from the school when it was still Indiana State Teachers' College back in the mid-1950s.  While I was at the convention, I managed to snap a picture of the archway that remains of the Women's Residence Hall where she stayed.  The building has been demolished, but the arch remains over a delightful path through the campus.

 

In the student union where we had most of our activities, I snapped a couple of other pictures.  These, however, I did not share with my mother.  Over the years she has told stories of her campus days, including the curfew for girls that was earlier than that for boys.  There is simply no way a woman whose college experience was what she had in the 1950s could grasp the fully sanctioned degeneracy of the modern university.  What first struck my eye was this advertisement.

 





As Laurence Olivier exclaimed in Spartacus, "Great, merciful, bloodstained gods!"  Such a thing would never have been displayed in my mother's day.  Then, of course, there was this.

 

When Indiana was recently considering a license plate whose proceeds would benefit a gay youth organization, my mother's response was that no one would want such a plate for fear of what people would think of them.  Oh, mom.

 

After our weekend, I shared with her my student's successes and surprised her with a mailing of several pictures from around campus, including the former student union building and the archway of the old Women's Residence Hall.  I just did not have the heart to share what else one could see on the campus of her Sycamores.



I Never Thought I'd Say This

Many know by now that President Obama made a comment that has raised quite a bit of discussion in the MSM and in social media. At a fundraiser he said of California Attorney General Kamala Harris, "She also happens to be, by far, the best looking attorney general in the country." The President offered a swift apology, and, as nearly as I can tell, CNN seems obsessed with both the remark and the apology.

What will likely surprise readers of this blog is that I do not see that the President said anything wrong. Now, before people start demanding a similar apology from me, let me explain. Do we praise people for their wisdom, intelligence, and creativity? Do we praise athletes for their strength and speed? Do we praise artists for their talent? All of these things that we publicly praise in each other are gifts from God. Certainly some of them can be enhanced through hard work, study, and practice, but we praise a great many aspects of each other for which we are not responsible. How, exactly, is this different from praising a person for being physically attractive? I compliment you for being creative or witty, and you say, "Thank you." I say that you are attractive, and you want to slap me.

To be fair, it would be inappropriate to draw attention to particular body parts. If the President had said, "She also happens to have the hottest set of earlobes this side of Van Gogh," that would have been wrong. Why? It draws undue attention to a particular body part, which then becomes a true distraction. Everyone begins staring at the person's earlobes, thinking about earlobes, wondering if their own earlobes match up. A general comment about a person's attractiveness? Not seeing the problem here.

I am one of the few...I am the only male teacher at my large public high school who wears a jacket and tie every day. Our receptionist commented on this one day, saying that she had noticed and that she appreciated that I looked professional. I was not offended, but humbled, and I told her why. My father, who started off as a sixth grade teacher and then became an elementary principal, wore a coat and tie every day. When I entered the profession, I never considered doing otherwise. Since he passed away in 2009, my tie clip of choice is the one he always wore.

So on this particular news story, which is no story at all, I have to say I can't see what the President did wrong. I never thought I'd say that.

Wishing Really Does Make It So

A colleague of mine posted a picture on Facebook that included two columns, one of what gender is, the other of what gender is not. According to it, gender is not male or female, defined by body parts, determined by chromosomes, or sexual orientation. Instead, gender is a spectrum, a range of expression, how you relate to yourself, a personal identity.

This is good news indeed, for according to this post by a college-educated adult teacher, I really am what I want to be. Ah, the possibilities are endless. My mind drifts back to childhood, and I realize that I am, in fact...Batman, Darth Vader, The Lone Ranger, Green Lantern, and The Flash. I am a robot, and I am a giant. Do not be confused by my humanoid appearance that has the outward characteristics of a middle-aged white male married father who earns his living as a high school teacher. Those things are not reality. They are merely the perceptions you have of me, and you had better not dare impose those perceptions on me as if I existed as nothing more than a being to instantiate your perceptions. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. It is my perception that is the definer, nay, the creator of my reality, what is real for me.

You will excuse me, for I must tie a blanket around my neck and jump from the roof of my house. It is time for my nightly flight around the city, for in the spectrum of personal identity, I am, in fact, Superman.

Making Plans or Having Faith

Special Note:  It has been a few weeks since my last post, and friend emailed to ask if I were still alive.  I am, although toxic levels of stress have hindered my blogging of late.  I am, however, deeply grateful to the friend who emailed.  It is proof that the blogosphere can be a place of genuine Christian fellowship.

The title of this post makes for a false dichotomy.  Too many people pit one against the other, yet as with so many things, the truth is not either/or, but both/and.  To begin, consider the words of Christ.  On the one hand He says, "Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them."  (Matthew 6:25-26, NIV)  He concludes with, "Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own."  (Matthew 6:34, NIV)

On the other hand, Jesus gives us this illustration.  "Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Won’t you first sit down and estimate the cost to see if you have enough money to complete it? For if you lay the foundation and are not able to finish it, everyone who sees it will ridicule you, saying, ‘This person began to build and wasn’t able to finish.’ “Or suppose a king is about to go to war against another king. Won’t he first sit down and consider whether he is able with ten thousand men to oppose the one coming against him with twenty thousand?"  (Luke 14:28-31, NIV)

So which is it, live on faith or plan for the future?  If we take these two options as opposing, then Jesus seems to be contradicting Himself.  Consider instead a path between two extremes.  We plan, as much as we are able, but do not trust our plans to be perfect or the only means of achieving a goal.  Our plans must remain flexible to allow for a move of God.

What is to be avoided is the circumstance in which Quintus Titurius Sabinus found himself in 54 B.C.  Stationed with Lucius Aurunculeius Cotta in winter quarters, he and Cotta received intelligence that enemy troops were about to attack.  Cotta urged caution, especially since the source of the information was an enemy, but Sabinus won the day with his argument to break camp and join nearby forces.  On the way, they were ambushed, and Sabinus was at a loss as to how to respond.  Caesar wrote,

Tum demum Titurius, qui nihil ante providisset, trepidare et concursare cohortesque disponere, haec tamen ipsa timide atque ut eum omnia deficere viderentur; quod plerumque eis accidere consuevit, qui in ipso negotio consilium capere coguntur.  (De Bello Gallico V.33)

Then indeed Titurius, who had seen none of this coming ahead of time, was shaken and ran around setting up cohorts here and there.  Even this he did timidly and in such a way that all his faculties seemed to fail him.  This is what usually happens to those who are forced to make a plan in the middle of action.  (Translation mine.)

There is such a thing as reasoned faith.  God has not asked us to take leave of the very senses and rational faculty He have us.  Titurius should have planned for such a situation, which he could very well have done given the information he possessed.  It does no one any good to run around, as my mother used to say, like a chicken with its head cut off.  At the same time, Christians can take great comfort that if something does arise for which their plans are not suited, they can rely on God's guidance.

To finish the story from Caesar, it should be noted that Cotta responded differently.

At Cotta, qui cogitasset haec posse in itinere accidere atque ob eam causam profectionis auctor non fuisset, nulla in re communi saluti deerat et in appellandisque militibus imperatoris et in pugna militis officia praestabat.  (ibid.)

But Cotta, who had thought that this could happen on the journey and therefore and not been the one to suggest setting out, made sure nothing lacked for the general safety of the men and therefore did his duty, as a commander by encouraging the soldiers and as a soldier in the battle itself.  (Translation mine.)

Habemus Papam, Franciscum

It was the last period of the day, and my Latin III students were taking an exam, when my wife texted me, "Habemus papam."  I texted back, "Quis est?", and she replied, "Non scio."  I sat down at my computer and began surfing the news sites, but could find nothing.  Everything was still listing headlines that predicted a long conclave.  I texted her again, "Nihil in CNN aut Google Nuntio.  Quomodo audivisti?"  At that point she switched to English, and told me it had been on NBC.

After that, I kept refreshing New Advent and Dashiell Bennett's piece at The Atlantic Wire.  Slowly the news came in, and along with the rest of the world I learned that Jorge Cardinal Bergoglio had become Pope Francis.  I immediately sought out articles on his theology and was pleased to learn that he was orthodox, although that was no surprise if indeed God was guiding the conclave.

This evening I realized I needed to update the picture of the Pope on my blog, and I must confess, as I did in an earlier post, I was sad to do so.  I felt an affinity with Benedict XVI, and I shall miss him.  That said, I join Kevin Knight at New Advent and pray,

TRADITIONAL PRAYER (LATIN)

V. Oremus pro Pontifice nostro Francisco
R. Dominus conservet eum, et vivificet eum, et beatum faciat eum in terra, et non tradat eum in animam inimicorum eius.

Pater Noster, Ave Maria  Deus, omnium fidelium pastor et rector, famulum tuum Francisco, quem pastorem Ecclesiæ tuæ præesse voluisti, propitius respice: da ei, quæsumus, verbo et exemplo, quibus præest, proficere: ut ad vitam, una cum grege sibi credito, perveniat sempiternam. Per Christum, Dominum nostrum. Amen.

TRADITIONAL PRAYER (ENGLISH)

V. Let us pray for Francis, our Pope.
R. May the Lord preserve him, and give him life, and make him blessed upon the earth, and deliver him not up to the will of his enemies.

Our Father, Hail Mary  O God, Shepherd and Ruler of all Thy faithful people, look mercifully upon Thy servant Francis, whom Thou hast chosen as shepherd to preside over Thy Church. Grant him, we beseech Thee, that by his word and example, he may edify those over whom he hath charge, so that together with the flock committed to him, may he attain everlasting life. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.

3 Educational Videos

I have a student teacher again this semester, and my experience with her, as I have told her, has convinced me completely of something I had long been leaning toward.  Teaching is an art, not a science.  After discussing all the methods, tips, and tricks, truly successful teaching, the kind that transforms lives, is dependent on some x-factor, and "it" quality that cannot be identified in the laboratory of the ed. school or measured by a state-mandated evaluation rubric.

She observed, with the quite normal frustration of a young teacher, that just when she thinks she has one aspect of the job down, she realizes another that she must work on.  It made me think of this scene from Tin Cup.  In it, Kevin Costner complains to Cheech Marin that his golf swing is falling apart and feels like an unfolding lawn chair.

She laughed, and then I loaded this clip from Ocean's Eleven.  In this one, Brad Pitt explains to Matt Damon how to converse with someone while undercover.  As he points out, it requires a number of seemingly contradictory skills.

Still laughing, my student teacher nevertheless expressed how concerned she was over what she perceived as her poor performance.  I concluded with this from Keeping the Faith.  Here Ben Stiller advises a young Jewish boy on how to attack the Hebrew he must memorize and recite for his Bar Mitzvah.

Contrary to what some think, learning does not happen best via computer or through a perfectly memorized set of teacher tricks.  It is an art.  Some are born to teach, and some can be trained to do an acceptable job.  Some cannot teach at all.  Whatever the case, the true teacher, who is both magister, or master of the subject, and paedagogus, or leader of children, while certainly employing learned techniques, moves about in the midst of students, shaping them no less deftly than Michelangelo shaped his marble, and all would agree that the Florentine's art was a gift.

What Do You Get for $42K?

For the bargain price of $42,000 a year, you can have classes for a college degree, room, board, and various activities, including how to masturbate.

Whoops.  Sorry.  Didn't mean to catch you off guard there.  Then again, I imagine that some folks at the Ford Memorial Chapel at Allegheny College would have been caught off guard had they wandered in to find a woman offering options for masturbation other than the awkward, claw-like motion a woman must use to get her fingers inside her vagina.

Friends, you can't make this stuff up.  Read the full story here.

I have to be honest.  I have not been blogging much lately because of an avalanche of other activities, responsibilities, and writing projects.  I am not sure why I am posting on this topic.  I supposed it is because a Christian colleague shared it with me, and I went up in flames.

Forty-two thousand dollars a year!  Even if I were not a Christian, I would yank my child out of that school so fast while demanding a refund it would make the bursar's head spin.  I am all for academic freedom when it comes to research, but give me a break.  Someone who is in the process of obtaining an undergraduate degree needs to spend fees on being taught how to masturbate?  How shall I rant?  Let me count the ways.

And then there is the fact that this event was held in the school's chapel.  In addition to selling inside the chapel hats, t-shirts, and buttons with the program's name, "I Heart the Female Orgasm," the chaplain said that, "she saw nothing wrong with the event, and hoped students would feel comfortable attending a religious service there later."

My question is why keep up any pretense?  What a bunch of wimps.  They should have the courage to say, "F-Christians and the God they worship," dip them in wax, and light their dinner parties with human torches, Nero-style.  That would at least be more honest.

Then again, I am the reactionary.  I am the one making mountains out of mole hills.  I am the conspiracy theorist who says that such a godforsaken, hedonistic, travesty of an academic activity could have been predicted given the ever more open embrace and teaching of perversion in our secondary schools.  I am the nut job to question how a parent could in good conscience bless a child's academic pursuits at such a place.

Yeah, right.

Habuimus Papam

Long-time readers of this blog and those with whom I have developed a friendship know that I am not Catholic. Some will, based on many of my posts, find this surprising. I have long felt myself drawn sentire cum ecclesia and I well remember watching the final days of Pope John Paul II and the exciting news about the election of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger as his successor. If ever there was a pope with whom a passionate and scholarly Christian could have identified, it was Pope Benedict XVI. Although not a Catholic, I found myself drawn to him. I savored his writings. I followed his activities. I thrilled at his efforts to fight heterodoxy and downright heresy. I prayed fervently for him.

And when my wife called me as I drove to work this morning and told me the news, my jaw fell open, and just as I am sure it was with the disciples on the Saturday after the crucifixion, my heart broke...for me. You see, I had always hoped that if I were to swim the Tiber, it would happen in the pontificate of Pope Benedict XVI. Now I know that will not happen.

In the days to come, I shall pray fervently for the wisdom of God through His Holy Spirit to guide the cardinals in conclave. I shall ignore the foolishness of the mainstream media, watching instead EWTN and reading the news on New Advent. I shall try to turn over to God my fears and anticipatory anger over what I know will be hateful comments from liberal branches of the Church. The final days of this pontificate and the days of conclave will, thankfully, force me once again to trust in God's provision. I shall endeavor to put aside anxiety over cardinals who may feel pressured to elect a pope based on ethnicity and, no matter the outcome, I shall trust God that no one will occupy the seat of Peter whom He has not chosen, even as I am mindful that such a one can still, out of his own free will, sin and lead poorly.

And yet tonight there is a sadness in this Evangelical's heart, for I have respected and loved this pope, even being tempted in his early days to purchase one of the many products proclaiming, "I Love My German Shepherd." I can only pray that God will bless us with a man of such faith and intelligence, one who truly saw only Christ and strove to achieve, regardless of any other opinion, what was best for His Church.

Sunday Snippets for 10 February

Contributions to this week's Sunday Snippets include:

• The Cost of Doing Business in the Modern Age...A conversation with my elderly mother reveals just how accustomed we have become to nonsense and foolishness.
• Senatus Consultum Ultimum...Is it legal for the government to kill its own citizens without a trial?  The drone debate, minus the drones, was held in 63 B.C. when the key disputants were Cicero and Caesar.
• Let's Spend the Night Together...The absurdity of certain aspects of the homosexual agenda are exposed with a little bit of common sense.

Thanks to all the readers out there!

Let's Spend the Night Together

I am a man in my mid-forties. I have been happily married more than half my life, have two children, and am a respected high school teacher. I am not a pedophile, and my name does not appear on any sex offender registry. Would you want me spending the night in a campground with your daughter and her girlfriends?

The Boy Scouts of America were expected to vote on Wednesday on their policy of not allowing openly homosexual members and leaders into its ranks. They postponed the vote, but my question remains. Would you want me to spend the night in a campground with your daughter and her girlfriends?

No one is saying that a homosexual leader is by definition a pedophile. But I repeat. Would you want a forty-something heterosexual man camping with your daughters without your presence? Of course not. It is not right, and we all know it. Anyone who says otherwise is being deliberately contrary to stir things up or has lost his/her mind. Period.

But, you say, what about the ban on openly homosexual boys? Surely the Scouts should be open to them. I recast my question. Would you want a heterosexual boy, age 11-17, sharing s tent with your daughter of the same age? I rest my case.

This is not rocket science, and you will notice I have not once mentioned religion. Plain sense, which we used to label as common, should tell anyone what is appropriate here. This has not one thing to do with discrimination. It has to do with what any decent parent should know and being willing to defend with regard to his or her children.

The same goes for the creation of the legal fiction known as gay marriage. Fr. Dwight Longenecker puts it well here with regard to the recent vote by Great Britain's parliament. If you want to have a discussion and vote about hospital visitation rights and legal issues of inheritance relative to singles, married couples, or homosexual partners, go right ahead. You can talk about insurance benefits 'til the cows come and feel free to legislate away. What no legal body can logically do is redefine marriage any more than it can redefine the properties of a triangle.

Neither the marriage issue nor the Boy Scout admissions policy has anything to do with discrimination. The terms of the debate have been hijacked. Nevertheless, that is no reason any person capable of logical thought should accepted the changed terms. Those who wish to skew the debate this way have presented the world with a dilemma. Accept our terms that these issues are about discrimination or leave the table of discussion. Any student of logic knows that one way to deal with the horns of the dilemma is to go right through them. In other words, it is not accept the two options offered, but to argue from a third. With regard at least to the issues of redefining marriage and the Boy Scout admissions policy, going between the horns is the only sensible option.

Senatus Consultum Ultimum

In 121 B.C., the Roman senate passed the senatus consultum ultimum, its so-called ultimate decree. Thousands of rioters under the leadership of Gaius Gracchus were threatening the state, and the consul Opimius used the powers of this decree to attack them with military force. Many died, and in the aftermath, some called into question the legality of the consul's use of deadly force against citizens. His defense was simply that the senate had given him the authority, and he was acquitted.

Approximately sixty years later, Lucius Sergius Catilina (Catiline) hatched a conspiracy to overthrow the state. On October 21 of that year, the senate voted the powers of the S.C.U. to consuls Cicero and Gaius Antonius Hybrida. Cicero, aware of the shaking legality of the S.C.U., delivered four speeches against Catiline, the famous Catilinarian Orations, November and early December. In the final month of 63, five of the conspirators were executed by strangulation in the dread prison called the Tullianum.

Five years after this, in 58 B.C., Cicero's political and personal enemy, Publius Clodius Pulcher, used his actions against him by pushing through a bill that exiled anyone who had put a Roman citizen to death without a trial. Given the tumultuous climate of the time, Cicero did not wait for a legitimate trial and fled into voluntary exile, from which he was recalled by the senate the following year.

So what was this ultimate decree of the senate that caused such confusion and judicial hullabaloo? It was a vaguely worded decree that seemed to give the consuls, the chief executives of the Roman state, unlimited power. It stated, "Consules videant ne quid res publica detrimenti capiat." "Let the consuls see to it that the republic suffer no harm." The problem with this was that, if interpreted to mean the consuls could order the summary execution of citizens, then it seemed to violate a series of laws dating back to the end of the monarchy and the beginning of the republic in 509 B.C., all of which guaranteed a citizen's right to a trial in a capital case.

In the events of 63 and the Catilinarian conspiracy, Cicero tried to get around this by maneuvering the senate into a position to judge Catiline and his followers hostes, or public enemies. A hostis was an enemy outside of Rome who had taken up arms against her. Cicero argued that this was precisely Catiline's state. He had, in fact, stockpiled arms and men in the passes around Etruria and was planning a military strike on Rome. As historians have observed, however, included one Classics graduate student in his Master's thesis, that while it was perfectly legal to kill an enemy combatant, such as Hannibal, the questions still remained as to whether the senate had any judicial authority to pronounce someone as hostis, and even if it did under certain circumstances, whether it could summarily strip a citizen of his rights as a citizen. Could the senate point its finger at a citizen and proclaim, "You are a hostis and as such we can kill you with impunity.

So why the history lesson? A white paper has just been released from the Obama Department of Justice arguing for precisely the same power to be given to the President. Precisely. The difference between President Obama and Cicero (okay, there are vast differences between the two) is that Cicero tried to work within the law. His efforts may be seen as questionable, but he did at least keep up some pretense of democratic process. This is not the case with our President, as Glenn Greenwald's article in The Guardian makes clear. Let's face it. If the ACLU is against President Obama on this one, then you know something is up. The President's efforts to secure this power to himself have been wrapped in secrecy. There is nothing of Cicero's open-floor speeches making the case.

The historian Sallust reports that Julius Caesar was against the summary execution of citizens, even in the case of the Catilinarian conspirators. He observed, "Omnia mala exempla ex rebus bonis orta sunt. Sed ubi imperium ad ignaros eius aut minus bonos pervenit, novum illud exemplum ab dignis et idoneis ad indignos et non idoneos transfertur." "All bad examples have arisen from good ideas. But when the power has passed to those ignorant of those good ideas, or to those who are less good themselves, that new example passes from those who are worthy and suitable to those who are unworthy and ill suited." Caesar's concern is that a good idea at the time, for example giving the power of executing a citizen without a trial to the chief executive, may become something horrible when it passes into the hands of those who are not such good people.

President Obama's desire to kill American citizens without a trial is rooted in his desire to kill terrorist operatives, those who present an imminent threat to our nation. Most hearing this would likely think it a good idea. To see why it is not, read Greenwald's article.

So, once again, history is repeating itself. In what some students of history may find an odd twist, President Obama is our Cicero, if only in this, and those who are ill at ease thinking of such power in the hands of the executive find Caesar their spokesman.

The Cost of Doing Business in the Modern Age

My mother called tonight upset by some mail she had received from the office of her gastroenterologist. I joined her for an appointment with this doctor a couple of weeks ago, and while we were waiting, we had to fill out many pages of patient information. This initially upset her because the receptionist had asked if she had received it in the mail. When she said no, the receptionist handed her the packet and asked her to fill it out. My mother could not get past the idea that she should have received the packet in mail, for this is what the receptionist had implied should have taken place. If it should have taken place and did not, then, to my mother, something was wrong, something requiring an answer. Of course, there is no answer for this, and the lack of answer upset her more.

This weekend she received in the mail the same packet. To be sure, it contained a cover letter stating that if the appointment had already been held, then the patient could disregard the packet. She called me in quite a state of distress. Why had she not received it before her appointment? Why, once it had already been filled out, would she receive it again?

I think I calmed her down, but at the conclusion of the call I turned to my wife in realization of something. There is a cost of doing business in the modern world, and that cost is bullshit. Both of my parents and both of my wife's parents grew up in an age in which if someone said something, he did it. If someone asked you for something, you replied. An official letterhead indicated an important matter, one you to which you were obliged to respond with the seriousness it deserved. I realized how I have come to assume and live by the absolute conviction that none of the above is true.

Not only have I come of age in the last forty years, my profession is education, an environment neck deep in b.s. We are used to countless pieces of mail and endless emails that seem official in their style, but are nothing more than scams or a waste of time. We are used to an onslaught of useless information from even legitimate sources like our bank and creditors. News and politics are awash in b.s., although, admittedly, this may be nothing new. The only way we can navigate the modern world is to insulate ourselves, to operate with the foundational assumption about the world that upwards of ninety percent of it is pure crap, manipulation, and deception and that we will be the ones to determine, on our own time thank you very much, what, if any of it, we will meaningfully engage. Perhaps this is just the necessary survival mechanism in the information age or in an age that drifts ever further from God.

After the conversation with my mother, I have come to realize something else. While I do feel sorry for her, a widow in her mid-70s, I feel more sorry for the rest of us. She and her generation were right. A person should say what he means. A request should have a reasonable expectation of fulfillment. Official-looking documents should actually mean something. I live in a world where the underlying assumption is distrust. Hers was the opposite. In her day, people could trust each other, from neighbors trusting neighbors to citizens trusting their doctors, grocers, insurance agents, and schools. My mother's day is gone. Perhaps she will come to realize this and live a bit more easily in the modern world of bullshit. Then again, a part of me hopes she does not.

Humbled By the Presence of God

I got the call from my department chair Saturday evening, but was unable to take it.  I listened to the voicemail about an hour later and was stunned.  The husband of a dear friend and colleague had suddenly passed away.  Although he had been dealing with the effects of diabetes, he had been improving.  My friend came home from work Friday and found him dead of a heart attack.

This particular woman has worked at the school where I teach Latin for twenty years.  She started off as the lab director in our foreign language department, but has since moved on to computing services.  Her son was a sophomore in my Latin II class the first year I taught at the school after moving back to Indiana from Texas.  He went with us on a trip to Italy, and she has been a stalwart supporter of our program, serving as a chaperone everyone year when we go to the state Latin convention.  She has worked as an unofficial co-sponsor (meaning without pay, after hours, from the goodness of her heart) of Latin Club helping students put together our state scrapbook or coming up with fundraising ideas.  The couple's son, at the dissertation stage of his Ph.D., had just announced his plans to marry.

As soon as I heard the voicemail, I called and asked how she was doing.  It is a stupid question, but there really seems to be no other way to start a conversation in such moments.  We talked about this today in our A.P. class as we read the passage in Aeneid VI.456-458 in which Aeneas, in the underworld, asks the shade of Dido if the report of her death is true.  This, too, is a stupid question.  He is talking to someone in the underworld.  Of course she is dead.  Yet one of Vergil's great achievements is to portray humanity accurately.  None of us knows what to say in these situations.

After listening to the details that she weakly shared, I asked the standard question, "Is  there anything I can do?"  It was to be expected, but I meant it.  I was surprised, though, when she said yes.  She said that her husband had always enjoyed my voice and hearing me read, and that she wanted me to read "Thanatopsis" and "Crossing the Bar" at his funeral.  I told her that I would and expressed the honor I felt in being asked to do so.

And then I collapsed.

I was at our church and wandered down a hallway, eyes filling with tears.  I eked out a few words to a friend with whom I was to meet and made my way to the restroom where I took advantage of the solitude and began to sob.  When I thought I had pulled myself together enough to leave, the sobbing returned.

While I was indeed saddened by the news and grieving for my friend and her son, this was not why I was crying.  I was overwhelmed by the weighty presence of God.  His sheer, awesome majesty bore down upon me and I could not stand up.  That I, a simple high school Latin teacher should have been asked to perform this task at the funeral of a student's family!  Admittedly, the task itself is simple.  Anyone with a command of phonics can perform it.  Yet the honor that transcended the expected role of teacher and student...and then I began to think.  Last summer a student asked me to walk her down the aisle at her wedding in the place of her father who has never been in her life.  Twice within our family I have been asked to lead the funerals of loved ones.  Who am I that God should allow me, call me to such roles of honor?  In the anxious, stress-filled loneliness that touches all of our lives at times, God strode through the fabric of reality and made himself present to me in this calling, and I could not bear it.

I loveHim.  I love God with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength.  He knows me. I cannot comprehend it, but He knows me, and I am grateful beyond words and even thought for the honor He bestows on one so unworthy by his own merits to approach His shadow.  Gloria Patri et Filio et Spiritui Sancto, sicut erat in principio et nunc et semper in saecula saeculorum.  Amen.

Sunday Snippets for 27 January 2013

Contributions to this week's Sunday Snippets include:

• The Sex Talk...A post in which I express my thanks to the President for making the already difficult talk between father and son more challenging thanks to his promotion of the homosexual agenda in his inauguration speech
• Poverty in Antiquity...The discovery of a fragment by the 6th century B.C. poet Theognis sheds light on how the ancients saw poverty.
• The Pope, Public School, and Prayer...Pope Benedict's first Latin tweet prompts a teen in public school to offer witness to the power of a praying parent.

Thanks to all the readers out there!

The Pope, Public School, and Parents

In my A.P. Latin class yesterday, I shared the Pope's first Latin tweet.  I had already told them about his new Latin Twitter handle, @pontifex_ln, but it was an article on Insight Scoop, the Ignatius Press blog, that prompted me to share the tweet itself.  The article talked about the use of a frequentative infinitive, how Latin is incredibly compact, and the need to read pieces in their original language in order to appreciate their full subtlety and nuance.  It was an appropriate lesson to highlight among high school students reading Vergil's Aeneid.  After putting the text of the tweet on the board and having the students translate it, we began discussing the article, and it was then that things took an incredible turn.  The tweet itself runs as follows.

Unitati christifidelium integre studentes quid iubet Dominus? Orare semper, iustitiam factitare, amare probitatem, humiles Secum ambulare.  (What does the Lord command of those eagerly pursuing the unity of the Christian faithful?  To pray always, constantly to do acts of justice, to love uprightness, to walk humbly with Him.)

One of my students observed that this was Micah 6:8.  My jaw fell open, and one of my other students asked what Micah 6:8 was.  I immediately went to the wonderful triglot Bible at New Advent and called up the Latin text.  Micah 6:8 in the Vulgate runs thus.

Indicabo tibi, o homo, quid sit bonum, et quid Dominus requirat a te : utique facere judicium, et diligere misericordiam, et sollicitum ambulare cum Deo tuo.  (I will show you, o man, what is good and what the Lord requires of you:  to do justice and to love mercy and to walk carefully with your God.)

We talked about the differences in the Scripture and the text of the Pope's tweet, but all the while I was amazed at both this young woman's ready recognition of Scripture and her courage to mention it in our public school classroom.  Her peers were admiring of this, too, and her natural humility prompted her to say that her mother had just had her recite the verse that morning, thus the reason it came quickly to her mind.

Her mother had had her recite the verse that morning.  Okay.  Now I simply had to know more.  I am familiar with this family and know them to be Christians, but I went up to her at the end of the period and asked her to say more about this recitation.  It was then that she said, almost shyly, that her mother prays over her before she leaves for school each day.  I told her that I do the same with our children and that I was incredibly proud of her for sharing the verse with us in class.

Later, I called her mother and told her the story.  I wanted her to know what a wonderful thing her daughter had done and to applaud her own efforts in rearing such a fine young woman.

We see the full spectrum in our schools, the abject poor and the fabulously wealthy, the abused and the nurtured, and everything in between.  While it is true that even my student could be a detention hall regular by making her own bad choices, the fact is that she has a much greater chance of success with parents like this behind her.  She is a junior now, and it is clear that detention hall is not likely her destination.  She is on the path to becoming the truly humble, truly beautiful woman of God whose worth is inestimable.

Poverty in Antiquity

I recently ran across a wonderful fragment from the 6th century B.C. Greek poet Theognis.

I know, I know.  How many times have you heard that before?

But seriously.  We were reading the odes of the Roman poet Horace, and one of my African-American girls asked whether the girl in the particular poem we were studying could have been black.  I said I did not know, but immediately remembered a great poem by Asclepiades, who flourished about 270 B.C.  Actually, I remembered the poem, but not that it was by Asclepiades, so I began searching through my copy of Willis Barnstone's Sappho and the Greek Lyric Poets.*  As I searched for the poem I wanted, I discovered one I had never encountered.  The Greek and my translation follow.

A good man suffers most of all from poverty,

My Kyrnos, more than grey old age or fever’s chills.

If you would flee it, you would just as well go hurl

Yourself from off a cliff into the deep, dark sea.

For a man who’s crushed by poverty can neither say

Nor do a thing because his tongue is bound in chains.

Two things struck me about this.  The first was the antiquity of it.  Our sense of the Greco-Roman world is that it did not abound in sensitivity to issues of social justice.  Oh, it is true, for example, that they did not want a deformed infant to suffer.  That is why they killed it by exposure.  On the whole, there were two types of poverty.  One was paupertas, which we might consider situational poverty.  I lose my job and am out of work for a few months.  The second was egestas, a shameful sort of poverty.  Here we are talking about long-term down and out.  Such extended poverty was a sign that you had run afoul of the gods and were likely on that account to shunned, just as lepers were.

Consider now these lines (178-183 of his fragmented extant corpus) from Theognis.  Not what you would expect from a culture that exposes its infants and expels lepers, right?

The second thing that struck me was the poignancy of the lines themselves.  When I look at my students, I can rarely tell who is living in poverty and who in plenty.  Of those living in poverty, I certainly cannot tell whose poverty is the result of stupid decision, laziness, economic down turn, injury/illness, ignorance, sin, or some combination thereof.  What I can say with regard to those whose poverty has become known to me is that Theognis is correct in his description of it.


*Here is Barnstone's translation of the poem by Asclepiades that sparked this whole post.

Didyme plunders me with her beauty.
When I look at her I am wax over fire.
If she’s black, what of it? So are coals.
When kindled, they glow like blooming roses.

The Sex Talk

I am deeply grateful to the Presidents of the United States for giving me more of a challenge. It was not enough for me to contemplate the "sex talk" with our son, who is 12 and will be 13 much later this year. Seriously, the thought of discussing body parts and what comes out of them in a context of a mystical and divine union created by God was not a sufficient challenge for me, and two of our Presidents have raised the bar for me, and I must say thanks.

Now, I really should be fair and thank only one President for this assistance. I mean, our children were not of age for the "sex talk" when President Clinton brought the phrase "oral sex" into the mainstream discourse, and at this point, it has become such a norm that it is hard to credit him for my having to discuss the matter with our son.

I do, however, owe a debt to President Obama for putting homosexual relationships on the fast track to legal status as marriage and thus making this a necessary part of the "sex talk" with our children. To be sure, it was not like we could have avoided it in the sodomy-obsessed culture in which we live, but what is innocuously termed "gay marriage" will become a legal reality in all fifty states within our children's lifetimes, and our President is seeing to it that it happens sooner rather than later.

I will, of course, continue to pray that this does not happen and I am pleased that we serve a God of miracles. Short of divine intervention, however, one would have to be willfully naive to believe that this is not going to happen. It is going to happen, the same as abortion became the law of the land. The battle will then shift, as it has with intra-uterine murder, to teaching our children that even though our country has legalized these sins, they remain sins nonetheless and must be avoided by faithful followers of Christ.

And so it is that in the midst of a discussion that must properly take in the sacrament of marriage, the model of Christ and the Church, various passages of the Bible, nocturnal emissions, kissing, dating, orgasm, pregnancy, testicles, the penis, the vagina, love, vows, and big words like "monogamy," all of which are enough to make a pre-teen's head spin (to say nothing of his father's), I must now be sure to add, "Oh, and if anyone tells you it is okay for any of the stuff I have just told you about to take place between two men or two women, minus the reproductive stuff, they are wrong, no matter what our government, movies and television, and our schools may say.

Yeah, I probably would have had to say that even if President Obama had not given a prominent place to it in his inaugural speech. I just have to thank him for guaranteeing it.

A Year of Reading

In 2012 our family kept a list on the refrigerator of books we had read. Our daughter, age 7, put several on the list, which was quite the accomplishment for her. It was no surprise that our son, age 12, out read all of us, reading nearly a book a week. My wife's column registers no books, but that is inaccurate. It is, however, testament to a busy homeschooling mother who does not have time to keep lists like this. I thought I would take a moment to reflect briefly on the books I read and take a look at the reading menu for 2013.

My non-fiction reading began with Coach Wooden, a look at the seven principles given to the legendary coach by his father. I do not normally go in for books like this, but it was actually quite good. I ended up highlighting large portions and had a pleasant email exchange with the author. It is clear that Indiana University men's basketball coach Tom Crean follows in the footsteps of this remarkable mentor to young men.

I re-read last year Raising a Modern Day Knight as I continued my thoughts about guiding our son into manhood. This is a great book for any father of sons, and has given me many great ideas, especially about ceremonies to mark the key moments on the road to manhood. I have enjoyed discussing it with a dear brother in Christ who has a son about the age of ours.

Continuing the non-fiction list, we come to Ruthless Trust. This was a challenging book for me, for it focuses on the absolute trust we must have in Jesus Christ if we are to follow Him at all. I think this is a challenge for most people in the current age. We are do-it-yourselfers, and trust is all about the other.

Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling was next. This was truly a fascinating read. It revealed much about the technique of frescoing, about which I had no idea. It also revealed that difficult familial relationships were just as common then as now.

Another Christian book was Who Is This Man? It is an intriguing look at the different aspects of Jesus and His profound influence on every area of human endeavor. While we may nod our heads in quick assent to this, the book truly made me stop and think about the extraordinary influence of our Lord.

One of my favorites of the past year was Faust In Copenhagen. I am always drawn to the early decades of the 20th century in the field of physics, and this book introduces readers to the fascinating personalities of luminaries such as Bohr, Heisenberg, Pauli, etc. It also highlighted the literary and musical interests of these men of science.

A final book in the non-fiction category was The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction. I think the true reader enjoys reading just about everything, and that includes reading about reading. I am eternally grateful to this book for prompting me to enter the world of P.G. Wodehouse. Though long aware of Wodehouse, it was only this past year that I discovered for myself his delicious humor.

This takes us to my fiction reading. I read two Wodehouse novels, Right Ho, Jeeves and My Man Jeeves. I read both as e-books on my iPad from Project Gutenberg and howled with laughter on almost every page. This prompted a wonderful Christmas gift from my family, the complete television series Jeeves & Wooster.

I re-read a favorite from my teen years, the sci-fi classic Dune. I am not sure what prompted the re-reading, but it had been thirty years since reading it the first time, so it was fun to get reacquainted with old friends.

Steve Berry has become a favorite author for easy, mind-candy reading. 2012 saw me reading The Charlemagne Pursuit. Like most of his novels, it was a globe-trotting thriller steeped in history.

After seeing it pop up on a list of must-reads on The Art of Manliness, I read for the first time The Great Gatsby. I cannot say it became a cherished book, but I did enjoy it, especially for its descriptions of American life at the time.

Memoirs of Hadrian> came at the suggestion of a friend. It was a novelization of the life of Hadrian written as an imagined autobiography. As a Classicist, I thoroughly enjoyed the intimate picture of the ancient world through the eyes of this emperor.

I have a fondness for film noir and pulp crime novels of a bygone era. Mickey Spillane is a favorite author, and while tempted to read yet another of his Mike Hammer tales, I chose instead the classic The Big Sleep. What can I say? I loved it. I don't what it is that draws me to the gritty, urban scenes of 1940s-1950s America, but this certainly filled the bill.

I must include the children's fiction that made up part of almost every night for for me. I love reading to our children at bedtime and always awake with sadness after any night when I have been unable to read to them. For the most part, I read quick little stories to our daughter, although 2012 saw me reading her a chapter book for the first time. It was The Girl From Binfield and was, in fact, the book I had written her for her 7th birthday telling the fictional story behind Alexander Pope's poem "Upon a Girl of Seven Years Old."

Throughout most of the year I was reading The Action Bible and The Hobbit to our son. The former is the the Bible told in the format of a comic or graphic novel. It was actually quite good. The latter, of course, needs no explanation. I also read to him The Steel Centurion, which was the book I had written for his 12th birthday and told the story of a young, 1st century slave in a blacksmith's workshop going on a grand quest to Mt. Aetna to find the mythical plans of Vulcan for making metal warriors.

I have been reading for some time Ben-Hur and hope to finish it soon. Then it is on to more Wodehouse, perhaps some H.G. Wells, and the Lincoln biography Team of Rivals. Ah, so much to read, so little time!

Contributions to this week's Sunday Snippets include:

• What a Woman Deserves...whether it is the abuse of some Ohio high school football players or something equal to her status as a child of God
• Mary's Boy Child...a '70s disco group's version of a Harry Belafonte song strikes a chord about the Incarnation

Thanks to the readers who are out there!

Mary's Boy Child

A local soft-rock radio station devotes itself to broadcasting only Christmas songs from December 1 through December 25 each year.  This year I discovered a song that I am sorry to say I had not heard before, or at least do not remember.  It is "Mary's Boy Child," and the version I heard was by '70s disco group Boney M, which can be found here.  The original 1956 version was by Harry Belafonte and can be found here.

Now, all of the other songs played in heavy rotation.  I cannot say how many times I heard "Feliz Navidad."  For some reason, though, I heard "Mary's Boy Child" by Boney M only once.  It stayed with me, though, and I wanted to say a few words about it.  If you are unfamiliar with it, or would just like to hear it again, click on one of the links above.

What struck me most was the lyric, "And man will live forever more because of Christmas day."

Now that we are a couple of weeks past the big day, stop and let that sink in.  A fundamental, ontological shift happened because of the birth of Christ.  If on some particular day a visitor from another planet had landed on earth and given us all the ability to fly unaided, we would remember that forever.  We would celebrate it in our schools.  We would sing songs about it.  We would publicize it and talk about it all the time.

Before the Incarnation, which led to the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, human beings had one fate.  It was to die in the flesh and spend eternity separated from God.  Because of the chain of events inaugurated with the birth of Jesus, that changed.  Every single human being now has the opportunity to live forever in true life united with God.

I know this is nothing new for Christians, and perhaps because it is nothing new, it has become stale, but pause and ponder the cosmic consequences.  The very nature of human life changed forever because of visitation from heaven.  It is an extraordinary fact, and for some reason, this song makes me appreciate it more than ever.

What A Woman Deserves

It is not to be urinated on.  Headlines are once again calling attention to the abuse of a sixteen year old girl by high school football players in Ohio.  There is no aspect of this that is not despicable, but what caught my attention in this article was the text message by a high school baseball player with regard to what happened.  You can read the article for all the details, but suffice it to say that this girl, inebriated to the point of incapacity, suffered multiple degradations by her peers.  Said one in a text, "Some people deserve to be peed on."

Why?  Because she was, in the words of another peer, a "sloppy drunk bitch?"  Because she had consumed more of a particular chemical than her biology could process, she deserved to be used as a toilet?

On New Year's Eve, we gathered with friends in Bloomington, Indiana, home of Indiana University, and talk turned to missing I.U. student Lauren Spierer.  As in any high-profile case, everyone has his opinion on what happened.  The consensus among our friends who live in Bloomington was that she and her friends had been partying, something went wrong, and her friends hid the body to avoid trouble for themselves.  This is entirely plausible scenario, given the disposable attitude toward human life these days.

Few men woo women with the intent to marry.  Few even have affairs.  Gone is the term "lover."  Instead, "friends with benefits" "hook up."  Some people deserve to be peed on.  And if a "hook up" results in an unwanted pregnancy, murder the little burden before it (certainly not he or she) leaves the womb.

Consider now General Lew Wallace's depiction of Judah Ben-Hur and the Egyptian who caught his eye.

With her eyes giving light to his, the stars might come out, and he not see them; and so they did.  The night might fall with unrelieved darkness everywhere else; her look would make illumination for him.  And then, as everybody knows, given youth and such companionship, there is no situation in which the fancy takes such complete control as upon tranquil waters under a calm night sky, warm with summer.  It is so easy at such time to glide imperceptibly out of the commonplace into the ideal.

Can you not feel the electric romance in that scene?  It is made all the more keen for the lack of touch or physical exposure.  The tension and the passion rise together.  We feel it.  We know what it means.  Is there any woman who, if she has not lost all sense of her humanity and femininity, would not want to be the woman in that description, a woman whose beauty could illuminate the darkness for her admirer?  Is there any woman who would prefer to be carried from party to party, drunk past the point of movement or comprehensible speech, able to be used only as a receptacle for urine?

The two football players who physically abused this girl are guilty, but so are the other teens who tweeted, posted on Facebook and YouTube, and did nothing about it.  Real men do not do these things.  Yes, it could be argued that a decent girl would not have put herself in such a situation.  Yet Jesus did not play the "you asked for it" card with Samaritan woman at the well or the woman caught in adultery, and He was far more of a man than these athletes could imagine.  Fortunately for them, He did not think similarly about what they deserve.