Up until now, we have been shielded in our country from many of the usual misfortunes. Now we have begun to experience what hitherto we have only read of in books, like the Cult of the Leader. In the advent of the current president we saw it in its God-Emperor mode; in the advent of another unmentionable person we are seeing it in its Swaggering Thug mode.
Around the same time as the incident I told about in yesterday’s post, the contraceptive mandate came up in another class. I mentioned how strange it seemed to me personally to call artificial contraception, sterilization, and the provision of abortion-inducing drugs “health care,” because pregnancy is not a disease.
A young man responded that pregnancy is a disease.
In The Line Through the Heart you remind your readers that “A truly adequate theory of the natural law will not always be turning into metatheory of the natural law, a theory about theories. It will resist that tendency.”
The real appeal of Bernie Sanders to the young is free tuition. The real appeal of free tuition is not charity, or even the reduction of the debt burden, but the prospect of utter and complete financial independence from parents without having to work for it. The next proposal will be a free living stipend.
You would think the scholars who study the canon of Western literature would agree about what the Great Books say, but disagree about how great they really are. Well, there is a good deal of debate about how great they are, but even more about what they say -- though this is more true of some books than of others.
You’ve been blogging about faculty attitudes toward morality and religion. Let me share an incident from my introduction to anthropology course some years ago. It was a graduate “core” course, but some undergrads took it too; the grads had more work, more reading, and weekly tutorials.