The Narthex

My grandson started attending Regents School of Charlottesville [Virginia], a classical Christian school, for his seventh grade. The other day I saw one of the books he was reading: Antigone by the Greek playwright Sophocles. I am a proud grandpa. Seeing this brought back fine memories. When I was in…

Do you remember being nine? As it happens, I don’t much remember being nine. But ten was a big year for me. Golly, I had a Schwinn bike. I weighed 76 pounds. We put up a basketball hoop. The downside of that year was coming down, precociously, with “mono.” Cuidado,…

Bentley is a private university in Waltham, just outside Boston, Massachusetts. It started life as a business school but a cursory look at its webpage suggests it has graduated to woke. It’s “more than business” because it creates “leaders for positive change” by “redefining success” (check with your employer whether…

Twenty years ago, as rector of Sydney University's St. John's College, I interviewed a young woman for admission. In those days it was still acceptable for a Catholic educational body to expect in its students a certain sympathy, at least, for the Christian faith, so I asked her about her…

My parish owes heartfelt thanks to visiting priests from Africa. Not long ago, my pastor visited two of them in their home diocese in Uganda. While he was there, a controversy flared up. From what I could tell by parsing the news report, a government official there was levying a…

Last week I had an epistolary exchange with Thomas Aquinas College. It was instructive. It was not, however, inspiring. First came a phone call. I chatted with Mary Block, the Executive Assistant to the Dean, John Goyette. I explained that Peter Sonski, the American Solidarity Party’s presidential candidate, would like…

Marinette, Wisconsin, is a small town and a county seat north of Green Bay. As reported by National Review (July 5; a link to the story is below), there’s a K-12 Catholic school in town that’s been around more than a century. Also, the local school board, with declining enrollments,…

Classical Education is a fast-growing movement. Its emphasis has shifted from a close attention to linguistics to a broad focus on those subjects that particularly distinguish humanity from the beasts: grammar, logic, and rhetoric. The ancients called these the Trivium. The fact that our word trivial comes from that says…

The Blaine Amendment of 1875 sought to add the following language to the federal Constitution: “No money raised by taxation in any State for the support of public schools, or derived from any public fund therefor, nor any public lands devoted thereto, shall ever be under the control of any…

On April 16, the Wall Street Journal reported that five large book publishers have joined the case filed by a sixth large publisher to prevent the State of Iowa from restricting the purchase or use of certain books for school libraries and classrooms (Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg, “Major Publishers Join Iowa…

In his classic How to Read a Book, Mortimer Adler, citing Francis Bacon, tells us that “some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.” Yes, but which books and in what order? Of the making of books there is --…

Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, became its ex-president through the confluence of two factors, neither one of which seemed sufficient to remove her from office but, together, generated sufficient public (and, apparently, internal private donor) criticism to render her continued incumbency untenable. As you may remember, Gay was criticized for her…

February is observed as Black History Month. This year was also the 95th birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. Both events are relevant to renewing our commitment to a colorblind society, especially after last summer’s Supreme Court decisions on discrimination in college admissions. The man who spoke at the Lincoln…

“Celebrate Catholic Schools Week,” an initiative of the National Catholic Educational Association, is observed January 28-February 3. Parishes with schools traditionally have a special student Mass on Sunday and at least one open house during the week. In that sense, “Celebrate Catholic Schools Week” seems a kind of recruitment tool…

I recently argued that “National School Choice Week” should be renamed “National Parental Choice Week” (link below). I did so because I want to recast the educational debate. School choice is not primarily about schools but about students. Schools are secondary. They are the tools by which students are educated.…