Greetings from Searcy, to which my wife and I have returned from our five-day getaway to New England. Our whirlwind trip left time for little else this week, so this will be a brief post.
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Way back in 2016, my colleague Robert Woods published a volume of essays titled Dwelling on Delphi: Thinking Christianly about the Liberal Arts. Shortly after its publication, I reviewed the collection for the Imaginative Conservative. Here’s an excerpt:
For the most part, conservatives understand the need for cultural renewal, and they understand that educational reform must be part of whatever form that renewal takes. In Dwelling on Delphi, Robert Woods calls Christians back to the Great Tradition of the liberal arts as a primary means of achieving that reform. Mr. Woods, currently the headmaster of the Covenant School in Dallas and a tutor in Faulkner University’s graduate programs in the Great Books, has effectively promoted this vision for a long time. For the past dozen years and more, I have labored in the academic trenches alongside him, designing and teaching courses and struggling to maintain a beachhead of liberal learning in a broader academic and institutional environment that is too often bogged down by utilitarian concerns. Reading this book is like sitting down for an informal conversation with him, gleaning his insights from the long years of fighting the good fight.
The book’s title is inspired by the question of the relationship between Christian faith and secular learning that Christians have confronted for millennia. Tertullian’s framing of the question—What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?—is the best known, but Mr. Woods in his opening essay poses the question this way: “What does Delphi have to do with Golgotha?” His answer, in a nutshell: “Quite a lot.” Repeating the age-old saying that “all truth is God’s truth,” Mr. Woods reminds us that the Incarnation of Our Lord calls us to the things of this world. Christians are to harness the knowledge and wisdom of the world and redeem as much of it as can be redeemed, bringing “into captivity every thought for Jesus Christ” (2 Cor. 10:5).
For Mr. Woods, this “thinking Christianly about the Liberal Arts” is the only viable way to preserve the Great Tradition in the twenty-first century, a time when the academy is increasingly controlled by people who are either ignorant of or actively hostile to it. He writes, “If the Liberal Arts are to survive in a meaningful manner, or even thrive with new and significant scholarship, it will be among Christians, unique communities, and institutions shaped by Christian conviction. While I know and trust in the presence of those old-school humanists still fighting the good fight, their days are numbered.”
Read the whole thing here. I’m also linking the piece from the My Work Around the Web tab on this Substack’s website.
What I’m Writing
I have in my inbox the copyedits for my review of Brad Wilcox’s Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization. I expect to send the editor the requested items on Monday or Tuesday, and the piece will probably go live within a week or two. As always, I’ll link to it here when it appears.
With my summer travel largely completed at this point, I look forward to moving the ball forward on some writing projects in the coming weeks.
What I’m Reading
While traveling to and from the Academy of Philosophy and Letters conference last week, I read Rusty Reno’s The Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West (2019). I’d had this book on the shelf for more than a year without picking it up, and I wish I had read it sooner.
My early impressions of it had been formed by some polemical rhetoric from classical liberal and “postliberal” voices on the political right who treated it as some sort of salvo in the struggle over political realignment. In fact, it’s a sober critique of the “postwar consensus” that seeks to diminish the risk of authoritarianism by weakening and undermining all traditional loyalties. Reno argues that the consensus came about for good reasons, but that it also contains some real problems that have become manifest. The problem today is that the political elite is so immersed in the postwar consensus that it literally cannot respond to these problems in any way other than doubling down on the approaches that have caused the problems in the first place.
I thought the whole book was stimulating, and a couple of the chapters were outstanding. I’m curious enough about Reno’s discussion of some figures like Martin Heidegger to ask some philosopher colleagues whether they agree with his assessments.
Update
This week our kids were in church camp outside Searcy, so my wife and I took advantage of their absence to get away to New England, a part of the country where neither of us has spent much time, to celebrate our upcoming 25th wedding anniversary. Our schedule looked like this:
Sunday: Fly to Boston, pick up rental car, stay overnight in Braintree
Monday: Visit Plymouth (Plymouth Rock, Mayflower replica), New Bedford (whaling museum), and Newport (the Breakers mansion); stay overnight in Newport
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Tuesday: Newport (Cliff Walk), Concord (Minuteman NHP), Dover, NH (high tea at a local B&B), stay overnight in Portland, ME
Wednesday: Acadia National Park, stay overnight in Bar Harbor
Thursday: Acadia National Park, return to Boston, drop off rental car, stay downtown (Boston Common, Boston Garden)
Friday: Boston (Freedom Trail, assorted historic sites), fly to Little Rock
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We ate a lot of lobster and other seafood along the way (including clam chowder, of course). The two of us had not been able to get away since 2020, and I was very grateful for some time on our own.
One annoying feature of historical sites in New England is the tendency to claim that all that is good and true in the American tradition emanated from Boston and its environs. I am all for giving credit where credit is due, but come on. There’s also a tendency to shoehorn these sites into politically progressive narratives. The most egregious one we came across was a display touting women’s suffrage—women’s suffrage—at the Concord bridge where the American War of Independence began. At least there was no Pride flag there yet.
These are fairly minor quibbles, though. We had a great time on the trip, and I hope to go back to that region before long.