(OK, we’re not actually talking about advocates for actual marriage from France, though maybe we should be!)

Evangelical writer David French has this to say about the relationship between the violence the torch-and-pitchfork crowds do to others (and to the very possibility of just laws) and willful destruction of vital cultural institutions:

It’s important to understand that this wave of coercive intolerance is not mere aberrational excess but the natural and inevitable byproduct of grafting same-sex relationships into an institution that is a key building-block to civilization itself. Even in the face of strong sexual-revolution headwinds, our law and culture continue to not only protect marriage and incentivize marriage, it is still seen by hundreds of millions of Americans as the ideal family relationship. In other words, by grafting same-sex relationships into marriage, activists want their relationships to enjoy all the legal and cultural protections marriage has built up through millennia of human experience. To oppose “marriage” is to oppose civilization.

But marriage did not become an “ideal” or civilizational building-block by simply being the most intense and committed form of adult relationship. In fact, at its core, marriage is not about adults — or adult happiness — at all. It has been at the heart of every enduring world culture not because these cultures share the same faith, or share the same ideals about romantic love and adult happiness, but because life has long taught us cultures thrive when children are raised in stable, two-parent, mother-father homes. Indeed, spouses from many cultures would laugh at the notion that “happiness” or “romance” has anything to do with the nature and familial bond of their marriage.

(source: Like the President and Hillary, My Views on Marriage Have Evolved | National Review Online)

There’s even more to it than that, but still that’s pretty much right.

Trescott University president Kevin Abrams confirmed Monday that the school encourages a lively exchange of one idea. “As an institution of higher learning, we recognize that it’s inevitable that certain contentious topics will come up from time to time, and when they do, we want to create an atmosphere where both students and faculty feel comfortable voicing a single homogeneous opinion,” said Abrams, adding that no matter the subject, anyone on campus is always welcome to add their support to the accepted consensus.

(source:  College Encourages Lively Exchange Of Idea | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source.)

I’m happy to say this is not what my experience at OSU is generally like, but anyone in academia today will tell you that there’s more than a little worry about the “squeeze” from multiple directions.  On the one hand, the torch-and-pitchfork bigots who denounce anyone that doesn’t support their efforts to mandate legal recognition of a lie about marriage; on the other hand, folks who want us to reduce education to cash value and put labels on it.

(Of course, nobody will even consider draining the swamp of Title IV funding to let education be a worthwhile aim among others rather than a political mandate!)

I like to think I’m a pretty fair Bardolater, as these things go, but Ryan Cole has seriously overshot, here:

A new study by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) reveals, depressingly, that only four of the nation’s top colleges and universities require a Shakespeare course, even for English majors. ACTA, a non-profit based in Washington, D.C., that encourages college trustees to act on behalf of academic freedom and excellence, surveyed U.S. News and World Report’s top 25 national universities and top 25 liberal-arts colleges. Of the former, only Harvard (the lone Ivy League institution to make the cut) and the University of California–Los Angeles require English majors to study Shakespeare. Of the latter, only Wellesley College and the United States Naval Academy do.

(source: English Majors sans Shakespeare | National Review Online)

Now, if this showed that students were making it all the way through K-12 and a 4-year college degree without ever reading Shakespeare, I’d be pretty concerned–like I am seriously upset that my students enter my college lit courses unfamiliar with even the names, dates, and most major works of writers like Donne, Milton, or Wordsworth.  It’s hard to enforce on their understanding how important Charlotte Smith is when they don’t even know how big the influence of Wordsworth and Coleridge proved to be!

Simply put, however, Shakespeare is still a go-to in lit courses. Continue reading →

I am especially pleased that Dan Guernsey wrote, and the SF Chronicle printed, a letter which not only correctly explains the entirely proper and admirable actions of the nuns who chose to “walk away from Omelas,” as it were, but actually offers several well-conceived, wholly proper suggestions for further constructive responses:

In the future, Marin Catholic might consider teaching the importance of protecting gays and lesbians from abuse during the worldwide U.N. Anti-Bullying Day May 4, justly supporting the goal of preventing bullying and discrimination while upholding the Catholic understanding of human sexuality.

There is already enough confusion among some of our young Catholics regarding human sexuality. The school might consider using this moment to not only teach the good news about the God-given dignity of all people, both gay and straight, but also about God’s wonderful plan for human sexuality.

Sadly, many people in today’s culture have difficulty viewing Catholic teaching as anything but discrimination. Catholics don’t mean it that way. Our understanding of human sexuality is holistic and anchored in a Christian anthropology of man, with body and soul united. Our sexuality is, in fact, a wonderful, life-giving gift of God meant for the fruitful relationship of a husband and wife. The unity of the person, the integrity of the body and soul working in cooperation with God’s creation is all positive, healthy, good news for our youth.

(source: Why the Marin Catholic nuns walked out – San Francisco Chronicle)

I watched the first episode, and have to agree with pretty much everything that Weigel (among others) has said, here.  My own observation was that the show (and presumably Mantel, though I can’t imagine why I’d read her books) “jumped the shark” early in the first episode, when Cromwell’s domestic life was portrayed in a scene clearly plagiarized from common depictions (not least Bolt’s) of More’s domestic life.  Say what you will, but not even the most pro-Henry Tudor or Reformation apologist views the mercenary, break-eggs-to-make-omelets Cromwell as remotely humane or gentlemanly.  He was a hatchet man, and like most of them he overplayed his hand in the end.  As Weigel says:

[Wolf Hall] proves, yet again, that anti-Catholicism is the last acceptable bigotry in elite circles in the Anglosphere.

The distortions and bias are not surprising, considering the source. Hillary Mantel is a very talented, very bitter ex-Catholic who’s said that the Church today is “not an institution for respectable people” (so much for the English hierarchy’s decades-long wheedling for social acceptance). As she freely concedes, Mantel’s aim in her novel was to take down the Thomas More of A Man for All Seasons—the Thomas More the Catholic Church canonized—and her instrument for doing so is More’s rival in the court of Henry VIII, Thomas Cromwell.

Hillary Mantel does not lack for chutzpah, for Cromwell has long been considered a loathsome character and More a man of singular nobility. In the novel Wolf Hall, however, the More of Robert Bolt’s play is transformed into a heresy-hunting, scrupulous prig, while Cromwell is the sensible, pragmatic man of affairs who gets things done, even if a few heads get cracked (or detached) in the process. All of which is rubbish, as historians with no Catholic interests at stake have made clear.

(source: “Wolf Hall” and Upmarket Anti-Catholicism)