Light from Christmas

The Pope reflected on the obstacles to faith in the modern world in his homily for Christmas Eve. There was 'no room at the inn'. Truth 'came to his own home, and his own people received him not' (Jn 1:11).

   'The faster we can move, the more efficient our time-saving appliances become, the less time we have. And God? The question of God never seems urgent. Our time is already completely full. But matters go deeper still. Does God actually have a place in our thinking? Our process of thinking is structured in such a way that he simply ought not to exist. Even if he seems to knock at the door of our thinking, he has to be explained away. If thinking is to be taken seriously, it must be structured in such a way that the "God hypothesis" becomes superfluous. There is no room for him.
   'Not even in our feelings and desires is there any room for him. We want ourselves. We want what we can seize hold of, we want happiness that is within our reach, we want our plans and purposes to succeed. We are so "full" of ourselves that there is no room left for God. And that means there is no room for others either, for children, for the poor, for the stranger.
   'By reflecting on that one simple saying about the lack of room at the inn, we have come to see how much we need to listen to Saint Paul’s exhortation: "Be transformed by the renewal of your mind" (Rom 12:2). Paul speaks of renewal, the opening up of our intellect (nous), of the whole way we view the world and ourselves. The conversion that we need must truly reach into the depths of our relationship with reality.
   'Let us ask the Lord that we may become vigilant for his presence, that we may hear how softly yet insistently he knocks at the door of our being and willing. Let us ask that we may make room for him within ourselves, that we may recognize him also in those through whom he speaks to us: children, the suffering, the abandoned, those who are excluded and the poor of this world.'

Sandy Hook: Celebrating Lives in the Midst of Death

As my husband and I were reading about and processing the news from Newtown, Connecticut my husband pointed me to Dawn Hochsprung’s twitter feed. “People should read that,” he said. I kind of shrugged. I am quite an active user but after reading this 2011 New York Times article I have mixed feelings about social media and what happens with it when we die. Even though twitter feeds are (mostly) public, I feel as if I am vaguely invading someone’s privacy when I look at the feeds of the living, let alone the deceased. But still, I looked.

This was the tweet that really got to me:

Sandy Hook students enjoy the rehearsal for our 4th grade winter concert - a talented group led by Maryrose Kristopik! twitter.com/DHochsprung/st…
— Dawn Hochsprung (@DHochsprung) December 12, 2012

Just that Thursday night, my sons had performed in their 4th grade winter concert at the public elementary school that serves our community, also a small town in a rural area, also wearing white tops and black pants. The theme was "December Around the World." I was expecting it to be Christmas- and Santa-carol centric, but it wasn't at all. It was actually, well, international, and the Hannukah story wasn't the usual sanitized version.

While his siblings do, one of my sons doesn't like music class that much. He enjoys listening to music and playing instruments but he doesn't like singing, dancing and performing--he's much more of a visual artist. As he complained more and more about “play practice,” my husband and I empathized with him, but kept telling him what a great experience it was to practice a group of songs and put together a show and to perform it. We reminded him that being exposed to many subjects and experiences was part of elementary school and part of being a well-educated individual. These are the moments when my husband and I tell our children that it's important to do things they don't enjoy all that much, that they serve a greater educational purpose (versus doing test prep worksheets). As he got older, we explained he could dedicate more time to his specific interests, but that all of these broader, more various earlier exposures would help him to figure out what those interests might be. As I watched him the night of the performance, I knew he wasn’t enjoying himself, but I was so proud of him singing and dancing and doing his best all the same.

My husband, like me an education blogger and critic of Obama and Bush administration education policies, felt that people should look at these pictures, at her tweets, to see what Dawn Hochsprung actually did besides giving her life in attempts to stop Adam Lanza, and what it is to be an educator in an elementary school. Her life and the lives of the educators who died alongside her may have been epitomized by their last minutes, but that’s not all they comprised. So I felt like, yes, he's right, it does (unfortunately via a terrible tragedy) shine a light on what schools are to communities and on what many educators do every single day.

And just as the all of the educators who died that day behaved heroically, many of the "small" things that educators do are heroic, too. There is heroism in staying late in the evening to put on the 4th grade winter concert, so that a group of kids, some belting it out happy as can be and some more reluctant can feel what it is to rehearse and perform a body of songs. There is heroism in getting a reluctant and stage frightened kid to sing and dance for an audience as if he weren't. There is heroism in sharing the joy of music as your parents and community watch and maybe sing along together at the end. 

The Sandy Hook  teachers may be heroes to the nation in their deaths, but they were also heroes in their community in life.

Evangelizing an anti-intellectual culture

The recent Census revealed that in England and Wales the number of professed Christians in 2011 fell to 33.2 million, or 59% of the overall population, from 37.3 million (72%) in 2001. People who said they had “no religion” rose by more than six million to 14.1 million, almost double what it was ten years earlier. We have of course been aware of the decline for some time, and it has provoked much discussion both of the root causes and of
possible responses. The call to a New Evangelization has focused our thoughts on what it is in our culture that is turning people away from faith and towards materialism. The obvious culprit is something often called “secularism”, and many of us have come to the conclusion that faith cut adrift from reason tends to perish – it turns into fundamentalism and appeals only to a minority of pathetic extremists. A faithless reason, a secular rationality that takes no account of the supernatural, is therefore regarded as our number one enemy.

Some go further, and say that we are now living not just in a post-Christian society, but in a post-secular one. We inhabit a political and technological order that does not require us to believe, or even to think, anything at all. It makes no assumptions except pragmatic ones. It cares not about what is true or false, but what will work. Not what is good or bad, but what a majority will accept. Not what is beautiful or ugly, but what price someone will pay for it. This is the kingdom of will and of desire, the “dictatorship of relativism”. Words like “true” and “good” may still be used when convenient, but they have been evacuated of content.

If this is true, the real problem in our culture is not just the rise of reason and the decline of faith; it is the decline of reason. The Enlightenment, the cult of universal reason, with all its high hopes, has failed. This has become a stupid culture, a culture without intelligence, a culture that does not respect reason. It is a culture that is based not on thought but on feeling and instinct, on gut reactions and base desires. It isn’t interested in ideas, or consistency, let alone truth. (And without an interest in truth, it won’t be interested in goodness or beauty either. The three live or die together.)

Evangelization, many of us have thought, is easiest through art and literature – the Way of Beauty. But beauty is not enough. While it can stir the emotions and even awaken interest, beauty can only prepare the ground. To be effective, evangelization in the modern world has to address the root cause of faithlessness, which is not lack of art, but lack of philosophy.

This is a much more serious problem. How do you get a whole culture to think again? How do you even get a whole generation even reading again, after they have stopped? Reading is the essential prelude to thinking, because it slows things down and puts things in order. The kind of reading and writing we do now is reactive, instantaneous, prejudiced, colloquial. It is an extension of the chat room.

The only answer I can find is to begin with education. We need to build a thinking, literate, intellectual culture. Only then will a New Evangelization become possible. The foundations for the New Evangelization can be laid by re-booting the educational process. We might call this a process of “re-enchantment”, because enchantment conveys a sense of wonder and mystery – precisely the elements that are lacking in an education designed to fragment our sense of ourselves and the world. Wonder and mystery, amazement and appreciation, are the beginnings of curiosity and thought.

The essence of the ancient idea of the “liberal arts” was to prepare the mind for philosophical thought and thus for real human freedom. This could be done by studying the world as an inter-related whole reflected in man as the image of the Logos. It can be begun at any age, and indeed the foundations must be laid early, when the child is already awakening to the wonder that is the dawn of philosophy.

Sex, Shit 'n Standardized Testing!

First, there was this:

"You get this rage up that we're wasting time testing, and you're making testing shorter and shittier," Coleman said at a Brookings panel Thursday.

That's David Coleman, one of the architects of the Common Core English & Language Arts Standards, and president of the College Board. This isn't the first time Coleman has cursed when speaking publicly about education. Several months ago, he reportedly said in another public speaking engagement, “as you grow up in this world, you realize people really don’t give a shit about what you feel or what you think.”

But people do give a shit about what language you use. As I always tell my students, cursing is not wrong, but there's a time and a place for it and an art to it, and school and academic work (making exceptions for creative writing, but you still have to have a justification for it there) are not some of them. Furthermore, I tell them, when you curse instead of using other words, people think you're not smart, that you're not articulate. And, it lets me, as a teacher, know that you need more vocabulary enrichment.

How are we take one of the lead advocates of the more "rigorous" and intellectual ELA Common Core Standards seriously when he doesn't see fit to use appropriate, professional, and specific language when advocating for the standards and for their accompanying tests. Coleman may be thinking I'm brash, but all I can think is, No, you're full of disdain. Disdain for teachers, disdain for students, and disdain for engaging in any process of education reform.

It also epitomizes a chasm in status and experience between reformers like Coleman and the students they are trying to help. What would happen if a student were to use the word "shit" or "shittier" in a Common Core aligned essay exam? How about on the writing section of the SAT? How about on the College Board's AP English exam? What happens when students curse in school, especially at a "no excuses" school with a rigid, zero-tolerance code of conduct? A white elite like Coleman can curse without consequence in public academic or professional settings, while a poor black kid using the same profanity publicly in a KIPP-esque school would likely face severe consequences.

In the same article, there's this other pro-longer and -better testing statement quoted:

Such changes can bring anxiety for the test takers. Gerard Robinson, the former education chief of Florida and Virginia, put it this way: "I won't pretend that tests don't matter and there's no anxiety -- but I also tell people there's anxiety with sex. There's anxiety with sex, but there isn't any talk about getting rid of that."

Standardized testing is just like sex? What? This, from a former state education chief? Are you kidding me?!?! This guy is in charge of people who educate children? First of all, unlike Coleman's statement, this statement is not in any way logical. Second of all, and more gravely, it's indecent. 

Is that what I am supposed to say to my test-stressed children--that their anxiety surrounding high-stakes testing is just like anxiety surrounding sex? Is that supposed to help? What if a K-12 student asked critical questions about standardized testing and their teacher responded in the same fashion that Robinson answered? How would that go over? Wouldn't Campbell Brown come after him with a pitchfork? Finally, this statement indicates that Robinson, too, is disdainful of criticisms of high-stakes testing and that he refuses to engage with the substance of those criticisms. For teachers, for parents, and for students, this anxiety, this stress, is not a joke, and it's not like sex.

If people like Coleman and Robinson expect parents and teachers like me to take seriously what they say, they need show these topics some respect. Save that other kind of talk for the StudentsFirst locker room.

Tolkien book - new expanded edition

Some years ago I wrote a book about Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings. It was called Secret Fire by the publisher DLT, and The Power of the Ring in the USA (Crossroad didn't like the UK title). This year, with financial troubles at DLT, it went out of print (in both versions) and I was asked by Crossroad to revise and expand the book for a new edition to be published on both sides of the Atlantic. Here is the cover (and the contents list – see below). I would not want people to go out and buy it thinking it is a brand new book, but it has been expanded and improved throughout, with an additional chapter about The Hobbit, and is nicely redesigned. It incorporates, among other things, the corrections and revisions I made for the Russian and Italian translations. The new edition of The Power of the Ring received an honorable mention in the 2013 Hoffer Awards under the category of culture. Please order from Sylvia Scott, Sales & Marketing, Crossroad, 831 Chestnut Ridge Road, Chestnut Ridge, NY 10977, 001-845-517-0180, ext. 115. Or email sales@crossroadpublishing.com. The book can also be ordered via UK Amazon or US Amazon.

There is always more to say about Tolkien and his writing – which is why I was so pleased to have a chance to add to my book. He never claimed to be anything more than a philologist, but he knew his faith well, and was an
instinctive theologian. Take for example Frodo's advice to Sam at the end of the novel when he is trying to decide what to do with Galadriel's gift – a little box of earth from Lothlorien. If we remember that in a sense the gifts represent grace, and the Lady is a Marian "type", then we can read Frodo's comment on several levels. "Use all the wits and knowledge you have of your own, Sam, and then use the gift to help your work and better it." Sam places a grain of the dust next to each of the trees he plants around the Shire, and the following spring "surpassed his wildest hopes." Grace is given not to replace nature but to heal and improve, and not to overpower our own nature but to help bring it to fruition.

See also (the post on homeschooling is included in the new edition):
Interview with author by Tolkien Library

Discussion of Tolkien with Greg Glazov

Lord of the Rings for Homeschoolers

Music of Creation in Tolkien
The Knight of Middle-earth

On Tolkien Studies

CONTENTS OF NEW EDITION OF POWER OF THE RING:

Acknowledgments
Preface to the Revised Edition
Introduction 

Part One THE SECRET FIRE

1. The Tree of Tales
2. The Hobbit: There and Back Again
3. A Very Great Story
4. A Hidden Presence: Tolkien’s Catholicism
5. Let These Things Be
6. Behind the Stars
7. Tolkien’s Achievement
Part Two APPENDICES

1. An Archetypal Journey: Tolkien and Jung
2. Tolkien’s Social Philosophy
3. The Shadow of King Arthur
4. Friendship in The Lord of the Rings
5. Tolkien for Homeschoolers
6. Tolkien and Paganism

7. The Beginning of Days

8. Myths Transformed

9. The Film of the Rings
Notes

Bibliography

Index

REVIEWS of previous edition:

“This book contains profound insights into the theology and spirituality in Tolkien's books. Caldecott gives the background of Tolkien's personality, letters, excerpts from other writings in order to provide a clear picture of what's at work in the Lord of the Rings.. The chapter ‘Behind the Stars’ is among the deepest commentaries on JRRT's work as a whole. Very fine. Definitely worth owning.” -- Dr Peter A. Kwasniewski

"Professor Tolkien, the academic philologist, was said to have travelled 'inside language'. Under Caldecott's guidance, here we travel inside the language of Tolkien. One sees at last what he was up to. It is a revelatory book." -- Church Times

Every Catholic school will want a copy as will anyone interested in Tolkien as a serious writer." -- Eric Hester, The Catholic Times

"As a general principle, the more worthwhile the primary source, the less worthwhile the secondary. Books about the most readable writers (Plato, Pascal, C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, and the Bible come to mind) are usually the least worth reading. The same, alas, is true for most of the plethora of books about Tolkien. Fortunately, there are a few exceptions. And this book, to my mind, is the most notable of all. There is no padding, no clichés, no belaboring the obvious. If anyone asks me what one book about Tolkien is the most worth reading, Secret Fire is my reply." -- Peter Kreeft, St Austin Review

"Caldecott's familiarity with Tolkien's writings and his clear analysis provide fascinating insights that enrich The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion in ways far different from previous studies. Some interesting appendixes offer additional observations. This book will be welcomed by those interested in the deep theological underpinnings of Tolkien's works, and is recommended to academic libraries supporting upper level coursework on Tolkien or religion and literature" -- Daniel Boice, Catholic Library World, September 2005

"Secret Fire elegantly unpacks the deeper meanings of the text, drawing not only on the classic works but on writings by Tolkien unpublished during his lifetime. Stratford Caldecott shows how Tolkien was one of a small group of writers who have succeeded in re-opening the world of the imagination for theological exploration." -- Church HouseBookshop , UK

"In this perceptive and well-reasoned book, Stratford Caldecott explores the roots of J.R.R. Tolkien's appeal 'to people of all ages and beliefs, in a broad spectrum from Christian to neo-pagan' ... Tolkien is portrayed in this book, fairly I think, as an explorer for whom the stories he carefully and diligently crafted over a long lifetime 'are notes of his expeditions in search of an older and "inner" world.'" -- Colin Duriez, Theology

"Essential reading for those who would like to understand the spiritual background to Lord of the Rings." -- Scientific and Medical Network

"Caldecott's work is a delight to read, with fascinating insights on nearly every page as he discusses the riches of Tolkien's work." -- The Sower

"A superb book that blends academic rigour with a clear passion for the subject." -- Christian Marketplace

“The book is truly outstanding and deserves the widest possible exposure. It is profound yet very readable.  I plan to use it with my adult CCD program soon, and I'd like to incorporate it into a university class as soon as I can.  I've even thought about offering a city-wide Lenten retreat using it.” --  Dr Henry (Hank) T. Edmondson III, Ph.D.,College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Georgia College & State University

“A literally wonderful - wonder-full - book. It will open the eyes of any reader who considers The Lord of the Rings just a gripping yarn in a fantasy world. Tolkien's ‘vision’ - Caldecott makes it clear the word is just right - draws on deep springs of philosophy and mysticism - and, not least, the orthodoxy of the church.” -- Aidan Nichols OP

A project-based loving billionaire with no education expertise is still a billionaire with no education expertise.

Another billionaire is out to reform education. George Lucas has sold Lucasfilm to Disney for $4 billion in cash and stock and plans to spend most of his fortune on education. Lucas is already involved in education with an educational foundation that includes the website Edutopia.

Lucas's announcement has led to calls for him to take a different, more enlightened and humane road than the standardized test-based approach to education championed by Bill Gates, the Waltons, and Eli Broad. And rightly so. It has also led to some public hand-wringing from edu-thinkers who feel that Edutopia's approach to education is too nebulous and sparky but bland and will accomplish a bunch of "visionary" nothing.

Look, when people like George Lucas say things like:

"It's scary to think of our education system as little better than an assembly line with producing diplomas as its only goal."

I brace myself for the descent into pseudo-scientific, new-age hokiness. The school-as-factory metaphor doesn't work for me. I don't know what it means. I may have various negative reactions to some of the things that are done in public schools today, but I never think of them as factory-like, partly because I haven't spent much time in factories, and I bet George Lucas hasn't, either.

I also feel the same way about terms like "21st Century learning." Did people's brains work so differently in past centuries than they do today? I don't think so. When you comb through information on the internet, you are relying on the same skills and knowledge-base that you did when you were searching reference books in the library. It's just the tools (books vs. computers) that have changed.

On the other hand, I am just as averse to the term "progressive education," not to mention "ultra-progressive education." Again, I don't know what those terms mean. While policies and the content of some curricula certainly can be so, education and teaching methods are not progressive or conservative any more than a computer or computer software is progressive or conservative. They are tools and ways of doing things.

Edutopia is not some project-based boogeyman that is coming after my children. It's not some cult that has brainwashed teachers. While I may have reservations about some of the ideas they promote, I and most people recognize that Edutopia is a clearing house, a resource. That's all. Also, at this point I'd be happy to see my children spend a little more time on projects and much less on awful high-stakes testing.

I, for one, am glad that George Lucas seems to be staying out of policy, but mostly I think that George Lucas's foray into education is a symptom of a bigger problem. The money in our country is concentrated too much at the top: a few uber-wealthy individuals have out-sized power and influence and the rest of us have too little. There is no more expertise, just wealth and celebrity. This is not the way a democratic, educated society functions.

Whether or not I am sympathetic to George Lucas's ideas, his money will ultimately disrupt and corrupt public education the same way Gates, Broad, and the Walton's money has. The best he could do would be to just give grants for underfunded and unglamorous staples. Your school has no library? Here's a grant to make a library. Your school has no nurse? Here's a grant to hire a registered nurse. The kids at your school have no supervision after school? Here's a grant for sports and extracurricular activities.

A plutocrat is a plutocrat is a plutocrat. And I've had quite enough of the lot of them.

Faith, analogy, and modern science

In his 8 November address to the Plenary Session of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Pope Benedict spoke of the "urgent need for continued dialogue and cooperation between the worlds of science and of faith in the building of a culture of respect for man, for human dignity and freedom, for the future of our human family and for the long-term sustainable development of our planet." He explained that

the sciences are not intellectual worlds disconnected from one another and from reality but rather that they are interconnected and directed to the study of nature as a unified, intelligible and harmonious reality in its undoubted complexity. Such a vision has fruitful points of contact with the view of the universe taken by Christian philosophy and theology, with its notion of participated being, in which each individual creature, possessed of its proper perfection, also shares in a specific nature and this within an ordered cosmos originating in God’s creative Word. It is precisely this inbuilt “logical” and “analogical” organization of nature that encourages scientific research and draws the human mind to discover the horizontal co-participation between beings and the transcendental participation by the First Being.

This is a point that is explored in my book Beauty for Truth's Sake, but has rarely been stated so clearly or succinctly. The Pope went on, in terms that echo the book by Barry R. Pearlman, A Certain Faith:

It is within this broader context that I would note how fruitful the use of analogy has proved for philosophy and theology, not simply as a tool of horizontal analysis of nature’s realities, but also as a stimulus to creative thinking on a higher transcendental plane. Precisely because of the notion of creation, Christian thought has employed analogy not only for the investigation of worldly realities, but also as a means of rising from the created order to the contemplation of its Creator, with due regard for the principle that God’s transcendence implies that every similarity with his creatures necessarily entails a greater dissimilarity: whereas the structure of the creature is that of being a being by participation, that of God is that of being a being by essence, or Esse subsistens.

Dear Reformies: Please stop speaking for my children.

(Updated with quotes: 11/4/2012)

“I love teachers – effective teachers," she told a smaller group of lawmakers and educators that day. "No one has a harder job than an inner-city teacher. There is nothing more noble than working as a teacher.
But if you raise some of these issues you are labeled 'anti-teacher' or a 'union-buster.' I'm not a union buster. But teachers have a very effective organization lobbying on their behalf. I want to be effective representing the other side, our children.”

-Michelle Rhee 

"In the 21st century, public schools need the kind of innovation that private firms like Google, Twitter, and Apple exemplify (just as there's room for innovation from non-profits like CK12 or Khan Academy). For the sake of our children, it's time to open our minds, move past ideology, roll up our sleeves together, and get to work."

-Joel Klein 

@anthonycody "I grew up in a liberal family. Certain values were upheld as sacred...You stood with the underdog." Kids are the underdogs.
— Chris Arnold (@chrisarnold) November 2, 2012

To all of the Chris Arnolds, Michelle Rhees, and Joel Kleins  out there:

How many kids do you have? How many are in the public schools? How many kids have you taught? I ask because I am a teacher and am a parent with actual children in public schools and I haven't seen any evidence that the policies you endorse are helping students or helping my children. In fact, I see that the policies you support are harmful: harmful to public schools, harmful to quality education, harmful to students, harmful to my children.

I understand that you don't agree. That you probably believe in the mission of the industry you work for (though not, apparently, enough to tell anyone that you work in said industry). That's fine (though I'd love to know how many kids you have actually, verifiably, and concretely helped by touting the the policies you do). I think your beliefs are misinformed, but everyone has beliefs and, for better or worse, many of them aren't the same as mine.

I understand that you and your superiors and fellow education reform industry leaders  have a living to make. Peddle your gadgets and your software. Be an education consultant or a professional development vendor. Run your "education reform" organization. Add to the ranks of the over-sized lobbying industry. Be a PR flack. Continue the proliferation of "failing" schools, but make a tidy profit at it, too. Raise your money. Make your living. Help politicians to make a living. I could never look at myself in the mirror doing what you do, but that's just me. Everyone needs to make a living, especially writers. After all, who gives "crap" about creativity when the kiddies can't read, right?

But there is a role you seem confused about. See, you represent an ideology. You work for a company or an organization or contributors. You represent them. You don't represent kids and you certainly don't represent my kids. So stop acting as if you speak for my children. Stop ruining their education in their name. You don't know my children. You don't live in my community. You don't work or volunteer in the schools my children go to. You're not helping my children, their peers, or their teachers (not even the excellent ones). You don't know what's best for them and their education. I represent my children. I speak for them. My children speak for themselves. I know them and their teachers know them. And from what I can tell and what they experience, your ideology is all wrong for them and their education. If you have them, you can speak for your own children. If you don't, well, promote your ideology and your business in your name.

Don't you dare promote it in the name of my children or in the name of their education.


Yours truly,

Rachel Levy

On Tolkien

The field of "Tolkien studies" continues to evolve. The book based on the Exeter College conference, Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings: Sources of Inspiration, is still available and remains one of the most interesting collections of academic essays on this topic. The journal of the Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College, VII or Seven, has for thirty years been publishing excellent articles about Tolkien and the other authors in his circle. In Oxford we also now have an excellent Journal of Inklings Studies. West Virginia University Press has a journal of Tolkien Studies. Meanwhile the online Tolkien Library remains a useful resource for finding lots of wonderful books by and about Tolkien. My own book on Tolkien has been launched in a new edition (details elsewhere on this site).

The main site for Tolkien fans is of course the Tolkien Society, and that has links to many others. The Encyclopedia of Arda explores Tolkien's imaginary world in great detail, with maps, timelines, illustrations, etc. There are numerous sites devoted to the languages of Middle-earth, and even to Elvish heraldry. Another impressive online resource for studying the books is the Lord of the Rings Project. And there are a number of blogs that offer fascinating insights into the thinking and spirituality of this profoundly Christian writer: I recommend particularly The Flame Imperishable by Jonathan McIntosh, and Bruce Charlton's Tolkien's Notion Club Papers. Raymond Edwards has recently written a superb pocket biography of Tolkien for the CTS. Finally, an excellent two-part article on Tolkien's Catholicism by the American writer Drew Bowling can be found here and here. There is a TOLKIEN SPRING SCHOOL on 21-23 March 2013 at the Oxford English Faculty with many excellent speakers.

Ethos of a Catholic School

On 30 October the Anscombe Centre is organizing an "ETHOS" conference in Oxford on the role of ethics, science, and religion in Catholic schools. The poster is here. I will not be able to attend, but it seems a good opportunity to reflect on the theme that is under debate.

The ethos of a school refers to its moral environment, the sense of belonging to a community of shared values and ideals. The word ethos originally meant “custom”, or “habit”, or “character”; the ethos is determined by the way we treat each other and behave towards each other. It depends on the quality of our attention and respect for one another. It supports and stimulates both imagination and intellectual inquiry but is distinct from both. It may be
expressed in a mission statement, but that can be no more than a point of reference. Ethos requires us actually to behave, not just to speak, in accordance with the faith and intelligence we profess. It is a matter of the “spirit”, rather than the “letter”. 

In an article for the Catholic Herald on 5 October 2012, Tim Gardner OP chooses these words from the Declaration on Christian Education by the Second Vatican Council to express the ethos of a Catholic school:

“a special atmosphere animated by the Gospel spirit of freedom and charity, to help youth grow according to the new creatures they were made through baptism as they develop their own personalities, and finally to order the whole of human culture to the news of salvation so that the knowledge the students gradually acquire of the world, life and man is illumined by faith” (n. 8).

How can we tell if a school has this “Catholic ethos”? It comes from the presence of a certain spirit within the community, which shows itself in different ways, from an almost tangible mood or atmosphere through to various concrete signs, such as the close integration of liturgy, prayer, and religious instruction with the rest of school life, the moral example set by teachers, encouragement given to charitable activity, interest in the life of each pupil, care for those with special needs, and so on.

The Catholic ethos radiates from the liturgy and the sacraments but extends throughout the community and the work of the school. This even affects what is taught and the way it is taught. The Incarnation is not some piece of historical information that, once communicated, can be forgotten while we turn our minds to geography or biology or mathematics. If true, it changes everything, even the way we view the cosmos. It alters the way every subject is taught as well as the relationships between them. It connects them severally and together to our destiny, to the desire of our hearts for union with infinite truth – what used to be called, and perhaps still should be, the saving of our souls. Once that lesson is learned, there are no “boring” subjects. Nothing can be ugly or pointless unless we make it so.  

To some it may sound excessively pious to say so, but a Catholic ethos is essentially Marian, and the “atmosphere” of a Catholic school will tend to be redolent of the Holy Family, since this is the educational environment in which Our Lord himself grew to maturity. It is the work of the Catholic school to help bring Christ to birth and to maturity in each member of the community, and to that extent to help extend the ethos of the Holy Family throughout the world. This is only possible with the grace of the sacraments, making possible the living presence of Christ himself.

Details of the conference follow:

A conference on the role of ethics, science and religion in Catholic schools: The Anscombe Centre is delighted to announce a conference for teachers and school leaders on Tuesday 30th October (10am - 4pm), at St Gregory's Catholic School, Oxford OX4 3DR. This presents an excellent opportunity to encourage an authentic, reasoned, and persuasive account of faith in education, supporting teachers and, ultimately, students.

Three speakers from national centres of excellence in the worlds of education, Catholic bioethics and science and religion will deliver presentations. Fr Tim Gardner OP, Prof David Albert Jones, and Rev Dr Andrew Pinsent will focus on the educational worldview involved in Catholic schools, relating this to practice and the formation of a schoolwide ethos. There will be opportunities for discussion, and for involvement in our follow-on project: consulting with us on a book we are publishing on these themes.

The conference could be used as an INSET day, for those who organise INSET days, or more generally as a day for all who are interested in what it means in practice and theory for an educational institution to have a religious ethos.

Online bookings can be made here: http://goo.gl/X29dW. The cost of the event is £80, which includes refreshments and lunch. Places are limited. Free parking is available at St Gregory's. Please book asap. For more information contact the Anscombe Centre at admin@bioethics.org.uk or on 01865 610 212.

Classical Conversations

A wide community of home-centred educators based at Classical Conversations combine the classical methods of learning with a biblical worldview. In this connection I was due to participate in a radio show called Leigh at Lunch hosted by Leigh Bortins, talking about the two books advertised on the left. Technical difficulties prevented it happening as originally scheduled, and it will now take place in the New Year. Details will be announced. I am looking forward to it.

What's wrong with higher education

An impressive American analysis, along with proposals for radical reform, all grounded in the classical humanistic tradition, by Robert C. Coons – "Dark Satanic Mills".

In Virginia, the Bigotry of Crude Expectations

Recently (or not so recently by the time I'm posting this), the state of Virginia was granted a waiver from NCLB requirements. This has been a relief for many, but it's also caused further stress, in that it exchanges one yoke for another. Fairfax County, for example, had no plans to evaluate their teachers according to the standardized test scores of their students, but now is being required to due to conditions of the waiver.

However, because the goals in the waiver application for some children are lower than for others, there have also been cries of low expectations and racism. Virginia has since re-written their goals. Certainly, we should not have one set of expectations for one set of children and a lower one for another set simply based on their socio-economic status or race--the outcry is understandable. 

But, to me, those folks have got their eyes on the wrong prize. If boosting scores on low-quality multiple choice tests is their greatest educational goal for Virginia's children, then they've got very low and crude expectations in the first place, and our schools and our children will only rise so high as the low and crude expectation that have been set.

This past summer, I finally read Linda Darling-Hammond's great work, The Flat World and Education. From that, it's clear that Virginia schools also need "adequate funding and equitable opportunities to learn" and "intelligent, reciprocal accountability:"

In the current prevailing paradigm in the United States, accountability has been defined primarily as the administration of tests and the attachment of sanctions to low scores. Yet, from the perspective of children and parents, this approach does not ensure high-quality teaching each year, nor does it ensure that students have the courses, books, materials, supports services, and other resources they need to learn. In this paradigm, two-way accountability does not exist: Although the child and the school are accountable to the state for test performance, the state is not accountable to the child or school for providing adequate educational resources.

Furthermore, test-based accountability schemes have sometimes undermined education for the most vulnerable students, by narrowing curriculum and by creating incentives to exclude low-achieving students in order to boost test scores. Indeed, although tests can provide some of the information needed for an accountability system, they are not the system itself. Genuine accountability should heighten the probability of good practices occurring for all students, reduce the probability of harmful practice, and ensure that there are self-corrective mechanisms in the system--feedback, assessments, , and incentives--that support continual improvement. 

If education is to actually improve and the system is to be accountable  to students, accountability should be focused on ensuring the competence of teachers and leaders, the quality of instruction, and the adequacy of resources, as well as the capacity of the system to trigger improvements. In addition to standards of learning for students, which focus on the system's efforts on meaningful goals, this will require standards of practice that can guide professional training, development, teaching, and management at the classroom, school, and system levels, and opportunity to learn standards that ensure appropriate re sources to achieve desired outcomes. (p. 301)

In Virginia, many make the mistake of using "achievement" and "test scores" interchangeably, as if that's all achievement is. What about research papers, essays, and creative and analytic writing? What about works of art and musical performances? What about science projects, spelling bees, reading olympics, robotics contests, debate clubs, student government, conflict resolution, and mini-UN? What about vocational education? What about teacher-generated assessments and tests? What about looking at the education of ALL of Virginia's children like this Virginia superintendent does? Oh right, subjects beyond reading and math are not important, especially not for low-income children and children of color who need to get their math and reading test scores up before they can engage in rich and meaningful learning. For sub group students, it's "test scores" as "achievement" first and only. 

As long as policy makers and pundits continue to conflate "achievement" with "test scores," and as long as the public accepts that, the achievement gap will remain. As long as opportunity and equity gaps remain, so will the achievement gap. Excluding students who struggle to score high enough on low-quality standardized tests from participating in rich and meaningful learning and making test scores the currency of our public education system is the lowest expectation of all.

Reality

Particle collisions: CERN

I love it when New Scientist tackles the big questions. This week it is "What is Reality?" There is a new humility in science, it seems. Many scientists will now admit that we just don't know the answer to the question. Reductionism is no longer convincing. You can examine ever smaller components of the material world (so far we have boiled it down to quarks, leptons, and bosons), only to discover that there may be no bottom level, or that if there is, it is well beyond the reach of observation (minute vibrating strings in several extra dimensions).

More importantly, since everything from the most elementary particles to the objects we see around us with the naked eye can be described in terms of "wave functions" or waves of probability, existing in a "superposition" of contradictory states until the function is "collapsed" by the act of observation, it seems that the consciousness of an observer has re-emerged as a determining factor in reality itself. Max Planck, the founder of quantum theory, said in 1931, "I regard matter as derivative from consciousness." The
only way to avoid this is to think in terms not of conscious observation but of "measurement", or the interaction of the subatomic processes with a measuring instrument of some kind – which means that the subatomic realm is no longer "more fundamental" than the world we see with our naked eyes.

The most interesting form of reductionism reduces subatomic particles to collections of space-time points, these in turn to sets of numbers, and the numbers themselves to pure logical sets. But what are sets? Like numbers themselves they exist either as shared mental constructions, or as entities outside both materiality and subjectivity in a Platonic "third realm". Either way, materialism is refuted. At least this would help to explain why the world conforms to the rules of mathematics, which as the physicist Eugene Wigner pointed out in 1960 would otherwise look very like a miracle.

Concurrently I am reading a series of SF novels by Stephen Baxter (the Xeelee sequence) that build on these discoveries and speculations of modern physics. For Baxter, life can emerge and thrive wherever there is the right combination of complexity and stability – even in the heart of a star, or in the first few nanoseconds after the Big Bang, when the universe was no bigger than an orange. Whole civilizations rise and fall before the formation of stars, or even atoms. Baxter's wildly imaginative stories feature creatures composed of dark matter, quarks, flaws in spacetime, and even convection currents in planetary oceans.

The idea that consciousness emerges wherever there is ordered complexity reminds me of Christopher Alexander's intuition in The Luminous Ground that degrees of beauty, of ordered complexity, are degrees of life, of connectedness with the ground of reality which he calls the Self, but which might as well be called Being. But this does not lead to a merging of all things into a supreme Oneness. “This is, perhaps, the central mystery of the universe: that as things become more unified, less separate, so also they become more individual and most precious.” (p. 309)

Beauty won't save the world alone

The title of Gregory Wolfe’s excellent collection of essays, Beauty Will Save the World, is based on a much-quoted line from Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. In its context it appears only in indirect speech, being attributed by one of the other characters to the “Idiot” of the title, Prince Myshkin. Thus in its original context its meaning is ambiguous, or at least ill-defined. That makes it doubly appropriate for Greg’s title, since he is arguing against the “ideologues” of today’s culture wars in favour of a literary and imaginative approach to the truth. Conservatives have succumbed to philistinism, and fail to appreciate modern art, he argues. Great literature, and art in general, explores the world – and today that means the modern world – from
the inside. It is not preachy or moralistic; as a result, conservatives of a Puritan or pragmatic bent often find it unedifying, or even profane. But it is legitimate, Greg believes, for art to shock, to revolt against established conventions, to make explicit what others may hesitate to look upon. In many cases this may the only way for the artist to discover a “redemptive path toward order”.

A particular target of the book seems to be those conservatives who can see nothing good coming out of modernity except the Inklings. I suspect Greg numbers me among them, although in reality my tastes are much broader than the things I tend to write about. But it is the case that my interest is less in literature and the arts, important though these are in posing the right questions and exploring the ambiguities of our time, than in philosophy and theology, where we legitimately search for answers to those very questions. This is not the same as seeking an ideology, though of course a theology can be rendered ideological easily enough. Theology at its most authentic is not a fortress of ideas, but more like a path across a landscape, a route map, or a system of signposts. It is intrinsically mystical, it is of the spirit not the letter.

Greg has developed a strong aversion to the kind of conservatism that rejects the modern world and gives up on modern culture, pretending to saw off the branch on which it sits. The importance of “Beauty” is that she is the only one of the ancient “transcendentals” that still speaks to us through modern culture. She is our way back to the vision of the whole, to a meaningful universe. But she has become separated from her sisters, Truth and Goodness, and thus relativized and subjectivized. Lacking a sense of transcendent Truth and Goodness, our culture is easily dominated by purely political and economic forces – power and money are the new transcendentals. He has a good account of how this happened, beginning with the Nominalists. But through it all, Beauty remains eloquent, calling us back to an awareness of Being and therefore of the reality our ideologies have squeezed out of the picture. The artist is the one who keeps us hearing this call to meaning, which is the breath of life.

The artist awakens the question of meaning, and takes us to the threshold of understanding. He speaks to the imagination, which is far more important than the rationalist in us admits. Imagination is our faculty for comparing and connecting the various parts of the world to make some kind of whole, a narrative in which we have a part to play, or an icon of the self we have lost. The imagination, Greg says, “works through empathy”. It is by empathy that the artist passes over from his or her own experience to that of another, and through that transcendence of self attains a glimpse of common or universal humanity beyond the reach of solipsistic individualism.

This is all very well, but will Beauty, will the imagination, “save the world” on its own? I doubt it very much. Beauty may prepare the world to be saved; it may crack the walls of our prison. But to pass through that crack we need something more. To step out of the cave and into the light we need the will to do so, and that can only be engaged if Beauty is reconnected with Truth and Goodness. Greg himself sees this. He is more than familiar with Balthasar's warning of the consequences of separating Beauty from her "two sisters", and he writes of artistic creativity as a "call" or "invitation" to virtue. It is a point that is hard to develop further without falling into moralism. The arts and literature are preparatory, even essential in some ways, to the life of the spirit, but nevertheless some more radical engagement with the world is necessary, and that is found in spirituality, in the inner life, in mysticism, in metaphysical intuition. That is not to say we must all become "intellectuals", because that word now refers to a kind of book-learning and cleverness that is very far from what I have in mind. We must become more open to a light that we only half remember, which comes from a horizon beyond the achievements of human culture however noble, and which answers the cries of the human spirit to which the artist gives a voice.*

I see this as one possible meaning of another work by Dostoevsky, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man. In this short story, a man intending to commit suicide dreams of an unfallen world of human beings living in peace with each other, with nature, and with God. But he also dreams of how he introduces sin and corruption into this world, until it becomes as bad as his own world, so that in a desperate desire to atone and heal he teaches them to make a cross and implores them to crucify him.

Awake again, his love of life is restored. “For I have seen the truth,” he writes; “I have seen and I know that people can be beautiful and happy without losing the power of living on earth. I will not and cannot believe that evil is the normal condition of mankind. And it is just this faith of mine that they laugh at. But how can I help believing it? I have seen the truth – it is not as though I had invented it with my mind, I have seen it, seen it, and the living image of it has filled my soul for ever.”

Here we see the role of the imagination, of the arts, which is ultimately to show us an image that our soul will recognize as true. But then we must act, we must become apostles, we must become “ridiculous”.

“The chief thing is to love others like yourself, that's the chief thing, and that's everything; nothing else is wanted – you will find out at once how to arrange it all. And yet it’s an old truth which has been told and retold a billion times – but it has not formed part of our lives! The consciousness of life is higher than life, the knowledge of the laws of happiness is higher than happiness – that is what one must contend against. And I shall. If only everyone wants it, it can be arranged at once.”

* This paragraph has been revised since first publication to express my meaning more clearly. – SC 

What is beauty?

An article I recommend by Trent Beattie featuring an interview with Margaret Laracy on the nature, objectivity, and effects of beauty.

What's with many Democratic Party leaders supporting people who support people who support destroying the Democratic Party?

I'm going to steal a page out of Diane Ravitch's blogging book (stylistically).

I'm still having a hard time understanding education reform politics.

I do not understand how Democrats and progressives put up with self-proclaimed liberals and liberal groups such as Michelle Rhee, Joel Klein, StudentsFirst, Stand for Children, and Democrats for Education Reform.

I wrote about this before, although not as directly as I am going to here.

All of the afore-mentioned groups and individuals either give money to or make money for or support Republican politicians and organizations. See here, here, here, here,  here, here, and here.

These candidates are anti-women's rights, anti-gay, and anti-immigrant.

So Campbell Brown wants to help protect students from teachers who are sexual predators and who are protected by unions (just for the record, I believe that is anti-union propaganda). Okay. But what if a teacher has sexual intercourse with a student (which I agree is a fireable if not criminal offense) or if a student is raped by a teacher and then gets pregnant? Campbell Brown's husband (Romney adviser Dan Senor) and Michelle Rhee (who Scott supports) give money to or want to elect some people who belong to the party that would force the targeted/raped student who got pregnant to have the teacher offender's baby.

Also, they are working to elect people who don't accept homosexuality and don't want to protect homosexual students from bullying.

And, they are endorsing anti-immigrant candidates.

And what about the threats that GOP-endorsed legislation poses to voting rights?

On what planet does it make sense for the DNC and high-profile Democrats, such as Barack Obama, to support these groups and people? How is it that they get to call themselves Democratic allies and liberals when they are actively supporting people who want to destroy the Democratic Party and dis-empower their supporters?

UPDATE (2:30 pm): Also, don't Democratic donors to and supporters of SFC, SF, and DFER realize that when they support and give money to these organizations, they are helping GOP candidates who are part of an anti-woman, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBT, anti-reproductive rights platform. Why would they want to work to elect people with those views?

I am not asking these questions facetiously; I really don't get it. What is it that I am missing? Someone please explain it to me.

Companions for the Year of Faith

The coming Year of Faith (11 October 2012 to 24 November 2013) is a great opportunity to refresh our understanding of the Catholic faith, and strengthen our confidence in it. There are plenty of books I could recommend, beginning obviously with The Magnificat Year of Faith Companion. This is a superb pocket-sized compendium of wonderful spiritual reading for the whole year. Timothy Radcliffe's Why Go to Mass? is still an encouraging (and amusing) read. Henri de Lubac's The Discovery of God could melt the heart of the most decided atheist. CTS have some great booklets for the Year of Faith and more on the way. And for a rich and robust apologetics taking you all the way from natural reason via sound scriptural analysis to the heights of mystical experience get hold of Barry R. Pearlman's A Certain Faith, on behalf of which I am waging something of a one-man campaign (do join me!). I will be reviewing this in the upcoming Second Spring.

A view of British children

An article by Anthony Daniels in the Telegraph newspaper (7 Sept. 2012) presented a rather sad view of the situation of many children in modern Britain. Here is a section of the piece:

British children are by far the fattest in Europe (three times as many of them as in France are truly obese), and even among the fattest in the world. A very high percentage of them never, or only very rarely, eat a meal at a table with other members of
their family – or perhaps I should say household. Indeed, there is often no table at which they could eat such a meal if it ever occurred to anyone to provide them with one.
   When I entered such a home – as I often did as a doctor – I discovered no evidence that cooking had ever taken place in it, beyond reheating of prepared food in the microwave. The children did not so much eat meals as forage or graze, more or less ad libitum. One of the most elementary forms of civilised social intercourse was therefore alien to them.
   Meanwhile, down the road, there were Indian shops selling fresh vegetables so cheap that you could hardly carry away all you could buy for £10 – the cost of 30 cigarettes. It goes without saying that the homes of which I speak were plentifully supplied with flat television screens, some of them as wide as the sky, and almost always illuminated.
   The pattern of child-rearing in Britain is all too often that of a toxic combination of overindulgence and neglect. First a child is bribed into silence, or at least minimal compliance, by being given what it wants; then, when it is old enough to demand rather than request, it does so. A higher proportion of parents in Britain end up frightened of their own children than anywhere else known to me – I never saw it in Africa, where I lived for several years. And it is not only their parents who are frightened of them: who these days dares to tell children to behave themselves in a public place? Old people shrink away from them in fear; I have not seen this in other countries.
   About a fifth of our children leave school unable to read or write fluently. This is not the consequence of poverty: on average, at least £50,000 will have been spent on their education. No doubt bad schools, bad teachers, and bad teaching methods have a part to play. But it cannot be easy to be a teacher of children whose parents, or parent and latest lover, will take the child’s part in any disciplinary dispute because of their egotistical belief that anything that emerges from them must be above reproach....
   By the end of his childhood, a youngster is considerably more likely to have a television in his bedroom than a father living at home. The combination of family instability and a vulgar, celebrity-obsessed, low-IQ and all but inescapable popular culture (of which, incidentally, the BBC’s website for home consumption is clearly a manifestation), means that British children lead the western world in many forms of self-destructive as well as unattractive behaviour.
   But none of this is poverty, properly so-called: it is squalor, mental, emotional, moral, psychological, cultural and often, as a result, physical too. But to call it poverty is actually to make it worse, in so far as it misidentifies the problem and fosters the very culture of dependency that brings so much of it about in the first place.

The point that material "poverty" is less the problem here than a kind of cultural degeneration is well made and rings true. But that is a problem that runs deeper than the "culture of dependency" to which Daniels makes reference, and the solution is not as simple as reducing benefit payments.

Beauty of Numbers

Michael S. Schneider's wonderful work A Beginner's Guide to Constructing the Universe, which I recommended in Beauty for Truth's Sake, is linked to a lot of classroom teaching that Michael has done over the years. This has now been captured in his superb DVD called Constructing the Universe, which could be an important resource for teachers and parents seeking to get their children and pupils interested in the properties and transformations of numbers and shapes, and the way these patterns underlie the forms and processes of the natural world. Modestly he says, "This DVD wasn’t made directly for youngsters but for adults who might enjoy seeing a philosophical approach to numbers, culture and the universe. It's a modern take on traditional mathematical cosmology weaving numbers, shapes, proportions, nature, art, mythology and symbolism into a whole united by mathematics. I think it would be a bit much for most youngsters, although there are some sections they might enjoy seeing. Perhaps high schoolers with an interest in math and these ideas might appreciate it." That is surely an understatement. Well worth trying out!

Effects of the Reformation

Part of our recent Summer School was about the effects of the English Reformation and the dissolution of the monasteries – not just the effects on Roman Catholics, who now entered into a period of savage repression and iconoclasm, but the effects on the economy and society of England as a whole. The destruction of much of the fabric of civil society, on which the working classes and the poor depended, created a new kind of poverty and a new society, simultaneously laying the foundations of modern international finance and the wages system. A useful summary of all this can be read in a recent issue of The Social Crediter (read Parts 3 and 3).

Revival and Romanticism

In order to understand the English Catholic Revival that we studied at our Summer School in Oxford recently, we need to appreciate that it originates not only as a counter-reaction to the English Reformation, but as a development of the Romantic movement. Like the Pre-Raphaelites, the Gothic Revival, and the Arts and Crafts movement in the nineteenth century, Revival writers found inspiration in the medieval past, and in England’s traditional devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary (as Léonie Caldecott’s seminar showed). They sought to restore the human dignity of the poor that had been shorn away by the factory system and big business.

They shared with the Romantic poets a belief in the importance of the imagination. For Coleridge, imagination was “the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception... a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM”, and Keats wrote: “I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart’s affections and the truth of the imagination”. William Blake said: “Jesus is the Imagination.”

But Revival writers (from Newman to Tolkien) emphasized imagination as a way of apprehending truth; and strove to overcome the dichotomy between reason and feeling, or thought and emotion, which remained a legacy of the battles between Romanticism and Rationalism in the period after the French Revolution. They defended a sacramental faith in which God as the author of nature uses natural symbols not only to raise our spirits or reveal himself in some vague sense, but to communicate grace to mankind, assuming human nature and history through the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Christ.

Thus the Revival separated itself from Romanticism as that movement turned increasingly against Christianity and traditional morality and belief.
Though like Romanticism it was a literature of protest against the mechanization of life and the “bourgeois” mentality of Victorian England, it was, as Chesterton noted in The Victorian Age, “a rational movement; almost a rationalist movement”. It was a “protest of the rationality of religion as against the increasing irrationality of mere Victorian comfort and compromise.”

The Romantics were right to question the intellectual order of the Enlightenment, because this was a false order and the rejection of the true Logos. The mistake lay further back, in the rejection of Scholastic wisdom by Nominalism and Voluntarism a couple of centuries before the Renaissance. Thus the move from medievalist or pre-Raphaelite nostalgia to the recovery of a religious, indeed a Catholic, perspective was perfectly legitimate. And to the extent that today’s culture is largely shaped by Rationalsim and Romanticism, it is legitimate for us to follow the path trodden by the Catholic Literary Revival in our own time, searching for a balance of truth and feeling, of life and intelligence, of imagination and wisdom, in a “return to religion”.

Some of the questions we leave our students thinking about:
What can we still learn from these writers?
Why did the movement decline after the Second World War?
How is the human imagination a way of apprehending (or helping to apprehend) truth?
What is the mission of the Christian writer, playwright, poet, artist, or film-maker today?
How can we ourselves best portray, represent, and defend the Christian doctrine in the face of modern atheism or indifference?

Prayer for a new Catholic Literary Revival (from Idylls Press)
O, Jesus, who said, “heaven and earth shall pass away, but my Word shall not pass,” you are the Living and Eternal Word through whom all that exists was made and is sustained. You delighted in proclaiming the Good News of the Kingdom by means of stories. Through the intercession of Mary Most Holy, St Joseph (your guardian, Mary’s chaste spouse, and protector of Christ’s faithful), St Francis de Sales (patron of Catholic writers), Blessed John Henry Newman (patron of Catholic essayists and novelists), Blessed John Paul II the Great (patron of Catholic poets, artists, playwrights, and personalists), and all the holy men and women throughout the ages who have spread the Kingdom of Goodness, Truth, and Beauty by means of words and images, we ask you humbly but confidently for the graces we need to contribute to a renewed culture of beauty (in service of love and life), including a Catholic literary revival, for our times.
Our Father, Hail Mary, Glory Be.
Jesus, Eternal Beauty, we trust in you. Most Holy Trinity, have mercy on us and on the whole world.
Amen.

Illustrations: the rolling English road at Uffington; Blake's Angel of Revelation; St Barnabas Church in Oxford's Jericho, a home of the Pre-Raphelites.