Ryan Ahlenius

“Many a boy languishes in school because he finds no arrow there. Things are staid, routine. Perhaps there are arrows to pick up now and again, if you are the sort of boy who will look for them and not be too discouraged, and if the arrows available are fit for the kind of shooting you want to do. But the failure of boys in school—not this boy or that boy, but boys by the millions, despite the fact, attested by empirical investigation and the evidence of history, that they are at least the equals of their sisters in intelligence—suggests that the schools are quite simply bad for them. They stunt their growth. Intellectually and practically, the boys are like pale and spindly plants that have been kept indoors all the days of their lives. And yet, obviously, we need these boys; it is criminally negligent to deny it. Consider how many young black men, in particular, are languishing, because their schools are—at their best—no great shakes, and because they lack the fathers in the home who would train them up in skill and strength. Everywhere you turn your eye in the United States, you will find ugliness, disrepair, vandalism, buildings left to rot—and unemployed or underemployed young men, disheartened, not worth marrying, and ready to cause trouble, since they can cause so little else.”
― Anthony Esolen, No Apologies: Why Civilization Depends on the Strength of Men

“want to support this contention by certain other statements. Here for instance is one, which, to me, has an almost amusing aspect to it. These proposals that we should preach less, and do various other things more, are of course not new at all. People seem to think that all this is quite new, and that it is the hallmark of modernity to decry or to depreciate preaching, and to put your emphasis on these other things. The simple answer to that is that there is nothing new about it. The actual form may be new, but the principle is certainly not a new one at all; indeed it has been the particular emphasis of this present century. Take all this new interest in the social application of the Gospel, and the idea of going to live amongst the people and to talk politics and to enter into their social affairs and so on. The simple answer to that is that until the First World War in this present century that was the real vogue in most Western countries. It was then called the ‘social gospel’, but it was precisely the same thing. The argument was that the old evangelical preaching of the Gospel was too personal, too simple, that it did not deal with the social problems and conditions. It was a part, of course, of the liberal, modernist, higher-critical view of the Scriptures and of our Lord. He was just a perfect man and a great teacher, a political agitator and reformer, and the great exemplar. He had come to do good, and the Sermon on the Mount was something that you could put into Acts of Parliament and turn into legislation. So you were going to make a perfect world. That was the old liberalism of the pre–1914 period. The very thing that is regarded as so new today, and what is regarded as the primary task of the Church, is something that has already been tried, and tried with great thoroughness in the early part of this century.”
― D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Preaching and Preachers

“How can an unexamined piety differ from the blind gropings of the fool? What is the hallmark of wisdom in this fallen world? The answer is joy at the end of the tether. But before we can learn joy at the end of the tether, we must learn the strength of that tether. The Lord is God and we are not.”
― Douglas Wilson, Joy at the End of the Tether: The Inscrutable Wisdom of Ecclesiastes