Mari

“In East Bangor, Pennsylvania (population 800), there’s a little diner named for the trolley that used to take people to the once-bustling steel town of Bethlehem. The proprietors have adorned the walls with photographs of other local things that are no more. There’s one of the East Bangor band, a group of about twenty men and boys, in uniform, in front of a bandstand draped with bunting. There’s also one of the Kaysers, a local baseball club, on the day of an exhibition ballgame against the Philadelphia Athletics. These were Connie Mack’s A’s, which team in those early 1930s featured Hall of Famers Jimmie Foxx, Mickey Cochrane, and Lefty Grove. How did a village of under a thousand people manage to have its own band? How did a cluster of slate-belt villages field a regular baseball club, apparently good enough to stay on the same field for nine innings with the Philadelphia Athletics? What”
― Anthony M. Esolen, Life Under Compulsion: Ten Ways to Destroy the Humanity of Your Child

“It is a mark of a narcissistic age that some Christians have come to interpret these words as suggesting that we make Jesus present by means of our community, when exactly the reverse is the case. The only reason why Christians gather is that Jesus has already united us. We gather not in our names but in His name. It is He who has called us out of the darkness of egoism into His wonderful light.”
― Anthony Esolen, Life Under Compulsion: Ten Ways to Destroy the Humanity of Your Child

“The value of the old liberal education was not that it made men “well-rounded,” like a ball bearing, but that it gave them the freedom of the height and breadth and depth of human experience, including man’s mysterious encounter with his Creator. To”
― Anthony Esolen, Life Under Compulsion: Ten Ways to Destroy the Humanity of Your Child

“What Homer could never have foreseen is the double idiocy into which we now educate our children. We have what look like our equivalent to the Greek “assemblies”; we can watch them on cable television, as long as one can endure them. For they are charades of political action. They concern themselves constantly, insufferably, about every tiniest feature of human existence, but without slow deliberation, without balance, without any commitment to the difficult virtues. We do not have men locked in intellectual battle with other men, worthy opponents both, as Thomas Paine battled with John Dickinson, or Daniel Webster with Robert Hayne. We have men strutting and mugging for women nagging and bickering. We have the sputters of what used to be language, “tweets,” expressions of something less than opinion. It is the urge to join—something, anything—while remaining aloof from the people who live next door, whose names we do not know. Aristotle once wrote that youths should not study politics, because they had not the wealth of human experience to allow for it; all would become for them abstract and theoretical, like mathematics, which the philosopher said was more suitable for them. He concluded that men should begin to study politics at around the age of forty. Whether that wisdom would help us now, I don’t know.”
― Anthony M. Esolen, Life Under Compulsion: Ten Ways to Destroy the Humanity of Your Child