Letters to the Editor: November 2025

Journey Through a Disenchanted Land

As someone who has ventured forth each day into the OUT-THERE for more than 30 years, while living a parallel life in the private IN-HERE homestead of my mind, I appreciate Fr. Robert McTeigue’s critique of modernity’s spiritual anemia and technological obsession (“Is This the ‘Real World’?” Sept.). G.K. Chesterton often warned against the tyranny of the “modern mind” that mistakes distraction for progress. He would likely view the smartphone-glued barbershop patrons and soulless library in Fr. McTeigue’s tale as examples of “modernity without memory,” where people have forgotten the joy of being fully present and the sacredness of ordinary things. He also would caution us (certainly me) against escapism but encourage a “counterworld within the world.” Then he would ask us to go to Mass. As he wrote in The Catholic Church and Conversion (1926), “The Church is the only thing which saves a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age.”

Thomas Merton, the contemplative monk who wrestled with modernity from within a cloister, would certainly find Fr. McTeigue’s yearning for a “vocation of withdrawal” deeply familiar. In fact, Merton would affirm this yearning for silence as essential to spiritual sanity. So many of us today struggle to cultivate a meaningful inner life as a counter to the noise of technology and mass culture. Merton would tell us that true resistance begins not with activism but with contemplation, even as he encouraged us not to despise the world but to embrace a way of life that allows us to love it more effectively than other men do.

Fr. McTeigue understands that the sickness of the modern world is not merely cultural or technological — it is spiritual. Just as Chesterton and Merton before him, he urges us to return to wonder, silence, and community rooted in eternal truths. Fr. McTeigue’s one-day journey — from IN-HERE solitude to the chaotic OUT-THERE and back — is a beautiful contemporary parable of the soul’s pilgrimage through a disenchanted age.

Steven A. Wilburn

Centreville, Virginia

I read with great interest Fr. Robert McTeigue’s article “Is This the ‘Real World’?” I have also found myself in the strange OUT-THERE, where I have asked this very question. At times, the “Real World” can be surreal, especially when dominated by electronic devices.

Whenever this scenario causes me moments of doubt and distress, I take comfort in the knowledge that these scenes are but simulacra. The Real World is composed of those things “visible and invisible.” Wherever we go, we are constantly in the presence of angels and demons that dispute the terrain around us, and where a guardian angel might tell us to “get to a safe place.”

This UP-THERE perspective calls for confidence in the assistance of grace, which is created participation in the uncreated life of God. Grace enlightens the intellect, strengthens the will, and tempers the sensibilities so that we become capable of actions above our human nature.

This grace is acting among us today, with incredible conversion stories, especially among youth — particularly young men. It is extremely powerful, capable of overcoming the most iPhone-addicted, OUT-THERE individual. I myself have experienced the power of grace and know what marvels it works.

If grace can so transform an abandoned and lost individual, it can also transform whole societies. Again, history records such massive conversions that prove that all things can be restored in Christ. The promises of Our Lady of Fatima confirm this possibility.

While our small (and so necessary) efforts can accomplish impressive steps forward, I put my hope in the complete triumph of grace over the neo-pagan OUT-THERE.

John Horvat

Spring Grove, Pennsylvania

Fr. Robert McTeigue’s distinction of what it means to be immersed in the “Real World” versus what he calls the “Realm of Common Experience” provides comfort to those of us who find the latter to be disconcerting at the best of times. The Realm of Common Experience does not provide the groundwork for the cultivation of interiority, which might explain why so many he regards as pitiable for being OUT-THERE cannot stop staring at their phones. On some level, those people are aware of an absence they are unable to fill.

I delight in the suggestion that in building an interior life we might be shielded against the Realm of Common Experience, and that we would be less contributory to it. I am, however, skeptical about the accuracy of this hope. To what degree can we be truly unaffected by those who utter admonitions to “join the gender journey together,” for example? The very fact that we understand such terminology ought to cause introspection, as we reflect on how we are marred by our proximity to unreality.

Contagion is unavoidable, and to be OUT-THERE is to be affected. Yet to not engage the OUT-THERE is a resignation that condemns the souls who cannot escape the Realm of Common Experience and who most need a counterwitness to the Real World.

I am drawn to a question: Might it be the case that the degree to which the Realm of Common Experience differs from the Real World is an exact measure of our dysfunction, such that a healthy, well-ordered society would be in complete alignment? If that can be asserted, then our road to repair is surely lengthy, but understanding the Real World as a paragon might help us to focus our direction — and to know when we have arrived.

Sarah Cain

Winston-Salem, North Carolina

Each time Fr. Robert Mc­Teigue pens an article or hosts a broadcast, I find myself saying, “Why didn’t I think of that?” His article “Is This the ‘Real World’?” was no different. It pulses with his usual irony, wit, and insight. The world, or mundum (“love not the world,” 1 Jn. 2:15), is, for the sensus catholicus, always the playground of the Devil. Mind you, not the creatio, which is the wonderwork of the Creator. The mundum is the OUT-THERE, a wild territory overgrown with the underbrush of Original Sin. It is a metaphysical lie. It is like a funhouse in an amusement park — all is deception, illusion, and tantalizing, albeit disastrous, detours.

The contemptus mundi of Holy Mother Church’s timeless and clearsighted spiritual tradition is one we abandon at our own peril. Tragically, secularism jettisoned it long ago, while secularized Catholics excitedly mock it. Contemptus mundi is the prudent distance a Catholic should adopt between himself and the allurements of the world/mundum. Catholic tradition calls it “detachment.” It is the virtue that permits a sensible enjoyment of the creatio without being devoured by it. The creatio comes from God’s hand, and so it is good (cf. Gen. 1:4), but even good things can be twisted to malign purposes. Thus, St. Thomas says, “Every created good can become a menace to salvation.” A good common Catholic sense understands that God’s creation offers such loveliness that a man may sink so deeply into it that he abandons his God. St. Augustine’s lament comes to mind: “In my unloveliness, I plunged into the lovely things which you created…. Created things kept me from you; yet if they had not been in you they would not have been at all.”

Fr. McTeigue’s Waugh-like account of the barbershop is quintessentially mundum, or rather, the mundum on steroids. Even before Charlie Kirk’s tragic assassination, our young were systematically being smothered by a fetid secularity. That secularity is now more fatally claustrophobic with the help of the Internet. As Jonathan Haidt explains in his book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, video games “put some users into a vicious cycle because they used gaming to distract themselves from feelings of loneliness. Over time they developed a reliance on the games instead of forming long-term friendships…. Video games made it easy for them to retreat to their bedrooms rather than doing the hard work of maturing in the real world.” But Haidt is only skimming the surface.

Fr. McTeigue echoes this is in disturbing detail in his visit to a public library, where “scattered throughout were very young and very old people sitting at low tables. All were hunched over electronic devices. No one was reading a book. No one was writing. There was nary a piece of paper among them.” Then, a description of a typical American mall, where “every chair or couch was occupied. And each of the occupants, from the very young to the very old — every single one of them — was hunched over an electronic device.” Chilling. A group of human beings abhorring human contact. This is a dystopia that dwarfs Huxley’s “daily dose of the feelies.” It is a high-tech version of Solzhenitsyn’s gulag. But worse. These trapped men love their gulag.

Our only escape from the OUT-THERE mundum is the IN-HERE streaming of God’s grace in the Catholic Church. A cloistered Carmelite nun once remarked to me, “Father, we have walls surrounding us, not to keep us in, but to keep the world out.”

Perhaps secular man must begin to learn that the true real world can only be found in a golden tabernacle in every Catholic church where there reigns the only Real Presence. Maybe we should begin by telling Catholics about it first. They might find it an intriguingly novel idea.

Fr. John A. Perricone

Secaucus, New Jersey

FR. ROBERT MCTEIGUE REPLIES:

One of the reasons I enjoy writing for the NOR is the thoughtful exchange between readers and authors. The neglected art of lively (but not impulsive) conversation endures! Sadly, this very exchange might be perceived as an exercise in “proof of concept” — that is, an occasion to acknowledge that something that had never been witnessed or heard before is, in fact, not impossible. For some people, this exchange might seem like a visit to an intellectual zoo where rare and exotic specimens of human behavior are to be found only in captivity, for they can no longer survive in the wild. I fear that someday this exchange might end up as a museum exhibit, as an instance of a form of human interaction no longer practiced, but at least worth preserving, if for no other reason than its apparent strangeness. Yet, would a culture, judging a thoughtful exchange of ideas to be a curiosity, even bother with a museum? But I digress.

Steven A. Wilburn puts me in good company by bringing into the conversation Chesterton and Merton. (I’m assuming his reference is to Early Merton and not to Later Merton.) We cannot have a fully human life if the pace, blur, and cacophony of the contemporary Realm of Common Experience is all we can find. The charm of well-crafted handiwork, the awesomeness of an ancient cathedral, the silence of a contemplative heart at rest — we are lost without these. I want to believe that there is enough of Christendom left for us to equip and console people who must, because of duty or necessity, oscillate between IN-HERE and OUT-THERE.

John Horvat helpfully makes explicit the need to interpret IN-HERE and OUT-THERE in light of UP-THERE. The linear, chronological time of oscillation between IN-HERE and OUT-THERE becomes meaningful and bearable to the degree we place that timeline beneath the overarching point of kairotic time — the transcendent, comprehending viewpoint of the eternal now of God. In other words, we must, in the words of Glenn Tinder, learn to “live lucidly through time.” That can happen only if we accept that we are creatures of a benevolent, wise, good, and provident Creator. Made in the image and likeness of God, we too have a life ad intra and a life ad extra. We reflect God’s care for creation by being good stewards of what He created — including ourselves. This is the only way to avoid being caught up in Henry David Thoreau’s grim observation, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.”

Sarah Cain appears to have boxed me in, forcing me to be a defender of hope — an unfamiliar role for a brooding Irish melancholic like me. But not quite. Real Christian hope is more robust and more demanding than ordinary human optimism. I’m mindful here of Alfred Jay Nock’s 1937 essay “Isaiah’s Job.” On this account, God ordered the prophet Isaiah to go OUT-THERE, not so much to gather up the lost but to let himself be found by the faithful remnant. Even whilst abroad in the Realm of Common Experience, there is something distinctive about those who, as Nicolás Gómez Dávila urged, “maintain a counterworld within the world.” The prophet must speak what he is given, of course, but on this account, perhaps what draws the faithful remnant is not an invitation to “dialogue” (much less to be “synodal” or other “new ways of being Church”). No, perhaps what’s indispensable in our troubled times is a person who is seen to live a true alternative to the Realm of Common Experience.

Fellow curmudgeon Fr. John A. Perricone brings to the table the useful distinction between creatio and mundum. The former is what God intended and made; the latter is what we the fallen have made of what He created. We see a similar distinction between St. John’s rhapsodizing that “the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us” (Jn. 1:14) and St. Paul’s warning us against being “in the flesh” (Rom. 8:8). Human culture apart from grace is not to be trusted. Here we would do well to recall Christ’s warning: “Apart from me you can do nothing” (Jn. 15:15).

There was a time when churchmen seemed less naïve about worldliness than what we have witnessed in my lifetime. I don’t see how we can rescue (perhaps evacuate is a better word) substantial numbers of the faithful remnant from the Realm of Common Experience unless churchmen and laymen together relinquish the cherished trinkets, diversions, and idols they’ve selected from what the fallen mundum offers.

We can maintain the IN-HERE needed to endure the OUT-THERE of the Realm of Common Experience only if we allow ourselves to become Christ-like by means of Word, sacrament, and the cross. I can see no other way.

A Record of What We’ve Lost

Finding ourselves awash in a sea of barbarism, we instinctively look for the nearest island where civility and sanity may be found. In R.V. Young’s article “The Corruption of the Catholic Imagination” (Sept.), we are reassured to learn that, for all the surrounding idiocy and madness, here at least the lights are kept on lest the darkness engulf us all. Indeed, to read anything of his, even if it were a cookbook, is to discover yet again that elegance and erudition in the service of truth can always be counted on.

I have long admired Prof. Young’s work and am freshly enriched each time I pick up an article of his, most especially this latest, which is a kind of pathology report on the loss of a sense of reality among Catholics. “How,” he asks, “did things go so wrong so quickly?” The answer is not long in coming. “We can only be properly oriented within reality,” he says, “if we are properly in tune with the divine Logos,” who became concretely incarnate in the human being Jesus, without whom we remain hopelessly “lost in the endless labyrinth of an alien world, vainly trying to impose our own design, our own ‘logos’ upon it.” Manifestly it will not work, Young tells us, citing the example of the two Longford ladies, Elizabeth and Antonia, ornaments of a former Catholic aristocracy whose grip on reality — hence the Church’s faith — appears to have been permanently lost. It is a sad tale, and it needs telling, which Young does brilliantly.

Regis Martin

Professor of Theology, Franciscan University

Steubenville, Ohio

Everything R.V. Young says is true, and he says it as powerfully as it can be said. His brave example induces me to follow suit and speak of my own inadequacies as a lifelong Catholic.

I am probably the youngest Catholic you will ever meet who has some memories still of Latin in the Mass, before the great liquidation. That is because I could read at age three, in 1962, and I went to daily Mass sometimes with my mother, looking at her colorful, mind-opening, and enriching missal, with the Latin on the left and the English on the right. I was fascinated by the parts of the Mass, duly identified and named: the Introit, the Secret, the Fraction. I could make good guesses as to what the Latin words might mean, if I saw them repeated and regularly translated in certain ways. So, I knew that Dominus, Domine, Domini, Domino, and Dominum all meant Lord, but why they were sometimes one rather than the other, I had no idea.

My boyhood church was then a world of symbols, which, alas, no one taught me to read. I know now that some Irish pastor, I am not sure which one it was, commissioned the stained-glass windows to appeal specifically to Irish-American Catholics. So, there is a window with St. Patrick, whom the shamrock made easy to identify. But nobody ever told me that the man speaking to a disgruntled king was St. Thomas More, with the words, “Ever the king’s servant, but God’s first.” I did not know that the two men in Renaissance garb were St. Ignatius and St. Francis Xavier, with the words, quite applicable to the missionary saint who would leave the world to win the world, “What doth it profit a man?”

The revolution that struck the Church did great harm to that sanctuary which Irish miners had raised to God, but the pastors had at least enough good sense to leave almost all the paintings alone, particularly those on the open vaulted ceiling. The altar was destroyed, as was the Communion rail, and with it went the symbols of the Eucharist I looked on every Sunday. We who attended the school just across the street still went to Benediction every first Friday of the month, to Mass on Ash Wednesday, and to the Stations of the Cross. But those things began to vanish, and my religious instruction in high school was scattershot at best, never steeped in Catholic learning, and at worst a poor attempt to get with the times.

When I went to Princeton in 1977, I was easy pickings for bad ideas and dangerously bad deeds. How I came to sanity again is a long story, with many unlikely heroes, but I will say with absolute assurance that some of the habits I was developing when I was a small boy I never regained, and in some regards, my practice of the faith has, shall we say, been a matter of rediscovery, by fits and starts, never as consistent as it should be. I am like a man still mulling about the half-ruins of his own heritage. I do not feel, I am embarrassed to say, the urgency of preaching Christ and Him crucified; the lazy trust that all decent people will be saved, one part trust and nine parts thoughtlessness, I breathed in like the air for 20 years, and my lungs still wheeze with it.

Young is correct in warning us against looking to the hierarchy or to Church officialdom for assistance in these matters. We do not need a pope or a bishop to tell us to bring a prie-dieu into our homes. We can do that ourselves, or any of a hundred comparable things. Maybe we can vow to perform one such act of new recovery, of new immersion in reality, every week. Often it will require but the opening of a book. Let us open it, then.

Anthony Esolen

Distinguished Professor of Humanities, Thales College

Wake Forest, North Carolina

R.V. YOUNG REPLIES:

To have my work noticed and commended by two such distinguished scholars as Regis Martin and Anthony Esolen is most gratifying. But I am especially grateful to these gentlemen because their comments call attention to important elements in the article, thereby enhancing my argument.

Prof. Martin points out the necessity of orienting ourselves in the reality of creation by maintaining a living relationship with the divine Logos; that is, we must constantly be aware that God has shaped our world according to a rational plan, which in the unfolding of Providence assumes a palpable and effective presence in our lives. When we cease to be aware of and heed this sacramental presence of Our Lord, we lose track of the world God has provided for us and become lost in a wilderness of worldliness.

Prof. Esolen adds concrete detail to my account of how we can be distracted from this Presence, which ought to be the most pressing reality in our experience. He is extremely helpful in stressing that, although we can point out malfeasance on the part of the men in the Church hierarchy and other positions of ecclesiastical authority, the final responsibility still lies with each of us laymen. We cannot “outsource” our spiritual lives or those of our children to the parish school or the religious education program. If the Second Vatican Council did nothing else of value, it at least indicated that laymen ought to be more active in the affairs of the Church. We ought to seize this opportunity.

More, Please!

I am a young but longtime reader of the NOR. I initially came across it when, out of curiosity, I happened to pick up one of my parents’ copies. I was intrigued during that first read by The News You May Have Missed. I find the rather amusing short anecdotes and stories quite literally news I’ve never heard of. However, I have one small quibble with it, and that’s its length. It’s rather short. I’m pretty sure I’m not the only reader who thinks so. Would you please consider extending it by a page? I’d much appreciate that. Otherwise, keep up the great work. I greatly value the thoughtful articles and insights.

Paul Traud

Barboursville, Virginia

THE EDITOR REPLIES:

Well now, this is a first! Occasionally we receive letters of complaint about The News You May Have Missed, saying it has no place in a “serious” publication. We’ve also heard from readers who say it’s one of their favorite features in the NOR. But never before has anyone suggested we expand the column.

This is an apt opportunity to remind readers why we continue to publish The News You May Have Missed. It first appeared in our May 2005 issue as a short, two-page column. The brainchild of Michael S. Rose, our then-web editor and current contributing editor, its initial purpose was to promote our (at the time) newly launched, full-service website, which featured (and still features) a “daily news” section. In 2016 we decided to expand the column, and since our May issue that year, it runs four pages. Why did we lengthen it? For one basic reason: We’d received considerable feedback from readers who love the column. So, we reasoned, why not give them more of what they want?

We did this despite the aforementioned occasional complaints about the column, which were essentially the same then as they are now. Yes, the NOR is, for the most part, a serious magazine. But a little levity can lighten the intellectual load. As G.K. Chesterton wrote, “You can be a great deal too solemn about Christianity to be a good Christian…. You must have mirth.” Mirth is good for the spirit.

The News You May Have Missed isn’t, however, merely an exercise in frivolity. Its present purpose is to provide a series of snapshots that capture the folly of a fallen world that’s forgotten God, a world where real religion and right reason are fading from sight. It is meant to adumbrate the absurdity of modern man alienated from his true self. And though we laugh at the sicknesses of society, we laugh, as the old cliché goes, to keep from crying.

The entries aren’t, however, always lighthearted or amusing. Observant readers may have noticed an increase of late in “hard-hitting” news items, those that highlight various aspects of the ongoing culture war. Why the slight change in tone? That, too, is due to reader feedback — from those who find the column out of place. We agreed that the column could use a little balance in that regard. However, it is still, for the most part, intended to amuse (or at least elicit eyerolls). Whether serious or silly, each entry is offered without editorial comment. And — sorry to disappoint Paul Traud — we think the column is the right length as is, not too short and not too long.

Not My Savior

I don’t like Donald Trump.

Having lived in the eastern United States for over 40 years and been married to my wife and into her family, all of whom were born and raised some 50 miles outside New York City, I have, since the early 1980s, been aware of the many local stories regarding Trump: his arrogance, his reneging on workers’ pay after they worked on his properties, his being sued several times for nonpayment, his frauds, his bankruptcies, and his sole love: acquiring and “improving” real estate.

Trump is not a man of “integrity,” as Tim Petit calls him (“It’s Rump Time!” The News You May Have Missed, Jul.-Aug.). Most people know of Trump’s public adultery (he’s been married three times and cheated on his first wife with his soon-to-be second wife), his civil court case for sexual abuse and defamation, and his criminal conviction for hush-money payments. Yet, despite all this, many people believe he embodies integrity and Christian values. These people have been duped. I do not recall him ever publicly promoting, voicing, or living such values when he was a wealthy real-estate developer in New York City. Rather, he has used Christian values like the wolf in sheep’s clothing or like “the wicked…who speak peace” (Ps. 28:3). He is a 21st-century Herod the Great, Herod Antipas, Henry IV of Germany, or Renaissance pope — all of whom were interested only in self-aggrandizement, wealth, and power. In my opinion, Trump is a deplorable man. Nevertheless, some people, even some NOR writers, view him as some sort of temporal savior.

In light of my long history of voting Republican, I feel abandoned by my party — and possibly my country — due to their support for Trump. By God’s grace, I now realize that I am not actually a citizen of but a foreigner in this world. My real home is in Heaven. I love reading the NOR and would hope I could continue receiving it in print overseas, but I plead with you: See Trump for who he is — an adulterer, liar, and seditionist.

Robert J. Rolfes Jr., M.D.

Dover, Delaware

THE EDITOR REPLIES:

It seems Robert J. Rolfes Jr. missed the irony in and misinterpreted the authorship of that News You May Have Missed entry. It was sourced from a New York Post report, which revealed that Tim Petit of Rhode Island — not an NOR writer! — was disappointed when he received a $640 “limited-edition” Trump-themed watch he had purchased for his wife because it was missing the letter T, leaving a prominent RUMP on the watch’s face. Mr. Petit said he “expected it would have the integrity of the president of the United States.” Sorry, Charlie! Or maybe the watch is more accurate than Petit believes, and his adulation of Trump has made a rump out of him. You know what they say about a fool and his money. (Though, to be fair, as the entry notes, the watch in question was not designed, manufactured, distributed, or sold by Trump, the Trump Organization, or any affiliates.) As always, this news item was offered without editorial comment; readers may glean from it what they wish. Unfortunately, Dr. Rolfes somehow gleaned support for Trump by “some NOR writers.”

Let it be known that no NOR writer sees Trump as a “temporal savior” — not that we know of, at least. And you can rest assured that if any NOR writer does see Trump this way, that view would never grace our pages. That goes not only for the current president but all past and any future presidents as well. We do not put our trust in “princes,” in whom “there is no salvation” (Ps. 146:3).

Opinions on Trump abound, and everyone’s entitled to theirs, no matter how extreme. But whatever can be said about him — he seems to be the sword that’s currently dividing America, American families, and even American hearts — he is no messiah, temporal or otherwise.

To allay the concerns of any NOR reader who’s considering fleeing the United States: Yes, we do ship to foreign countries. We service subscribers on every continent (save the Arctics). But be forewarned: non-U.S. subscriptions are expensive. How expensive? Go to newoxfordreview.org/subscription for details.

On the Vocations of Catholic Universities

John M. Kainer has written a superb review — organized, clear, and charitable — of Anne Hendershott’s book A Lamp in the Darkness: How Faithful Catholic Colleges Are Helping to Save the Church (Sept.). His framing of the decisive “we” — what we mean when we call an institution Catholic — cuts through the postmodern haze and restores the term to its ecclesial and moral substance. I especially appreciate how he weaves Pope St. John Paul II’s Ex Corde Ecclesiae and St. John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University into a living vocation for every Catholic university and then tests mission statements and practices against that standard.

The portraits of the “faithful few” Catholic universities are concrete and instructive, and the Prodigal Son motif is both honest and hopeful. Dr. Kainer’s account of academic freedom as the freedom to search for truth is spot-on, and his attention to liturgical life and liberal arts shows what a Catholic education actually requires. Finally, his sober account of external pressures and the role of the Newman Guide provide readers both context and a compass.

This is the kind of review that serves trustees, faculty, parents, and students alike. Well done!

Ines Angeli Murzaku

Director of Catholic Studies, Seton Hall University

South Orange, New Jersey

While many students’ summer wages were sufficient to pay college tuition from the 1950s through the 1980s, the economic trajectory that followed, with the ballooning of university administrative staff and salaries; the expansions of mammoth, ugly buildings; and the normalization of obsessions with expensive athletics, has saddled graduates with disproportionate debt. With the current expectation that parents assume some or all of the financial burden of a college education, especially after the appearance in 2006 of the PLUS Loan for parents, we are in the middle of an “economic disorder,” to borrow Michael S. Rose’s phrase from his article “The Church’s Civilizational Task Under Leo XIV” (Sept.). Rose’s reminder of “medieval principles such as a just price and the prohibition of usury” could well be applied to the situation John M. Kainer describes in his review of A Lamp in the Darkness.

Parents are grateful for the Newman Guide and the colleges described in Anne Hendershott’s book. Students can attend these schools with much less risk of enduring the heartbreaking social pathologies endemic in other colleges, while some matriculants arrive already fatigued from self-censorship in high school. Nevertheless, many of these Catholic colleges are still silently beholden to the dysfunctional economic pattern Rose describes. If recent graduates can’t afford to buy a house and start a family in their 20s, like they generally could before colleges had dozens of sports programs and dozens of Vice Deans of Corporate Popcorn Affairs, then it is unfortunate that there is no chapter in Hendershott’s book on financial honesty and the opportunities for Catholic universities to take an imaginative, Thomistic direction to prevent excessive family debt.

Thaddeus Whiting

Portage, Wisconsin

JOHN M. KAINER REPLIES:

I thank Ines Angeli Murzaku for her kind words. I also thank Thaddeus Whiting for his response. I share his view that academic institutions have prioritized the wrongs things for the past 40 or so years, leading to administrative bloat, endless construction projects (depleting university funds), and the normalization of college athletics as big business. He is also right that many of the social pathologies that run rampant on college campuses across the nation are either absent or much more constrained at the faithful few Catholic institutions.

That being said, limited opportunities for recent graduates to start families and buy their first homes stem from factors outside a university’s purview, such as the amount of affordable housing being built and the absence of “creative financing” options that were more common in earlier generations, to say nothing of the cultural rot that has pitted women and men against each other. These problems impact graduates from all universities, not just the Catholic ones. Yes, Catholic universities should be mindful of the financial burden they place on students due to their business decisions; but their primary aim must be to educate students in such a way that they leave school on the road to sainthood, which is what Hendershott’s book is all about.

Recovering the Center: Will It Hold?

In his excellent guest column “What Today’s Academics Have Forgotten About Education” (Sept.), Cicero Bruce casts light on the educational follies of our time, while also reminding us of education’s true purpose. Bruce advocates the pursuit of the “timeless center of being,” which the teacher and the student, seeking to transcend the ephemeral, may reach together. A genuine education should, first, make students conscious that a center exists and, second, show them what they stand to gain by apprehending and affirming it. How might we come nearer to that “center which commands all things,” as Richard Weaver puts it (Visions of Order: The Cultural Crisis of Our Time)?

If an educator wants to guide his students to the center, he must have the desire and ability to impart what Bruce calls “the wisdom of the noble dead.” The problem, of course, is that contemporary education no longer requires the teacher to be a good steward of a priceless inheritance that must be safely and lovingly handed down to posterity. Instead, the teacher is little more than a propagandist for that tripartite meter of mediocrity: diversity, equity, and inclusion. And what of Western civilization’s artistic and intellectual heritage? Why, it’s just another “construct” to be “dismantled” or “decolonized” by the various — and increasingly nefarious — schools of resentment that reign in the humanities and social sciences.

We should heed the late Kenneth Minogue who, writing of his own education, said he found it easy to understand himself as “a link in a chain [of tradition]. I was inheriting marvelous things from the past — so much that no lifetime suffices for their enjoyment — and my duty was clearly to transmit them to the young: not merely, indeed, to transmit but also to spark enthusiasm, to shape their tastes so that they might share my pleasure in an elegant sentence, a profound thought, a beautiful image, or a passage of events from the past” (“Can Scholarship Survive the Scholars?” On Liberty and Its Enemies: Essays of Kenneth Minogue). Minogue’s words, which amount to a pedagogical credo, are worth more than all today’s trendy educational theories combined.

Unless we teachers reclaim our proper office as custodians of a cultural inheritance, the center cannot hold, cannot even be acknowledged, and things will indeed fall apart. Only by recognizing that the dead have entrusted us with an immeasurably vast and rich estate can we begin to recover, and thereby help our students discover, the center. Only then can teacher and student alike apprehend what Bruce rightly sees as “an enduring moral order defined by the true and the good.”

Oliver Spivey

Professor of English, Sandhills Classical Christian School

Pinehurst, North Carolina

Cicero Bruce’s well-conceptualized, well-written, and timely guest column touches on a serious problem in American education and, indeed, Western education as a whole: the absence of a moral framework for teaching.

Nearly a century and a half ago, Friedrich Nietzsche’s bold phrase “God is dead” forcefully declared that if belief in God was to be renounced by an increasingly secularized West, then the entire moral order of the West, which had been built on Christianity, would collapse, necessitating a new belief system. This loss of a foundational moral authority led inexorably to nihilism. Nietzsche correctly saw this philosophy as dangerous in that it results in despair and an aimless existence. However, in endeavoring to overcome the loss of meaning and purpose, man could shoulder the responsibility of providing that purpose for himself. Nietzsche proposed a new kind of man, the Übermensch, or Overman/Superman, who would create his own values. This was as far as Nietzsche ventured into the philosophy of existentialism, or the belief that in the absence of the divine we must set our own moral values and provide meaning and purpose to our own existence.

Though many philosophers, especially those in Europe, saw this philosophy as empowering in that it offered individuals the ability to be their own guiding force and moral authority (in essence, their own god), it was and is still fraught with danger. How can billions of people across the world set their individual moral standards and decide the true meaning of existence without ensuing chaos? In short, they cannot.

Our current world is the product of the “death of God,” and Nietzsche’s belief that mankind could replace the idea of the divine by essentially making man the sum total of all things has proven to be a disaster. We live in a world of dark nihilism, narcissistic existentialism, and, as Prof. Bruce correctly points out, a failing educational system that will not — or perhaps cannot — teach morality. Nietzsche was correct: If mankind wants to replace a divine order, it must have a strong replacement. As of yet, none has presented itself.

John D. Fowler

Professor of History, Dalton State College

Dalton, Georgia

Cicero Bruce’s charge to return education to its central Logos reminded me that the Book of Isaiah says virtue is a learned trait (cf. 1:17), not inherent or a quality that comes from membership in a particular group. Isaiah speaks, as well, of the ways we grow even less tolerant of the labor of reading, thinking, and comprehending, regressing even to the point of becoming infants in our understanding of the Logos when it is not our center (cf. 28:9-13). Once we cannot tolerate the labor and have abandoned the unified vision, we tend to take onto our lips the language of oppression and revolt (a Marxian fixation and rumination), and “truth stumbles in the public square,” as imagination is employed toward conceits, and “he who departs from evil makes himself a prey” whenever he tries centering the Logos (59:13-15).

If anything, perhaps all of us who see and speak to the decentering of the Logos have not done a good enough job of preparing the public mind for the reality that he who stands with the good “makes himself a prey.” But the reality of that disincentivization doesn’t detract from the importance of the Good. Rather, resistance to the Logos, and the fact that such tradition follows us even from 740 B.C., is sound evidence that centering the Logos is all the more vital. Educators would be wise to relearn these virtues.

Matthew Gunn

Dalton, Georgia

Cicero Bruce calls us to think about the center that no longer holds, and to peer longer at the West’s failure to provide a humane education. With alternating resignation and fear, we feel in our marrow the loss of the student as a sophisticated reader. What will occur when young minds no longer encounter the moving image of eternity, or experience in their beings the way the past moves in and out of the present but remains the still and enduring form, “the sempiternal intellection of Logos”? I am reminded of T.E. Hulme in Speculations:

We place Perfection where it should not be — on this human plane. As we are painfully aware that nothing actual can be perfect, we imagine the perfection to be not where we are, but some distance along one of the roads. This is the essence of all Romanticism. Most frequently, in literature, at any rate, we imagine an impossible perfection along the road of sex; but anyone can name the other roads for himself. The abolition of some discipline and restriction would enable us, we imagine, to progress along one of these roads. The fundamental error is that of placing Perfection in humanity, thus giving rise to that bastard thing Personality, and all the bunkum that follows from it.

Prof. Bruce’s words are carillon bells calling us to the altar of universal Truth, and to the many particulars that have their raison d’être only in reference to that eternal fecundity.

Caitlin Smith Gilson

Boynton Beach, Florida

Cicero Bruce aptly describes the current conundrum of contemporary education. However, those of us with young children in grade school know more intimately the obscenity that has contaminated the education system. To be clear, many gifted and decent people work in schools today, but the atmosphere is generally one of drudgery and something else that is new and more sinister.

It seems that the purpose of schools is no longer to educate; they are no longer completing the challenging work of forming young minds with an awareness of the cumulative wisdom of the people who came before us and an anticipation of the people coming after us. The new goal is to inculcate contempt for, and a violent reaction to, reality.

Bruce alludes to the poison of the “us vs. them” mentality that is being bored into the skulls of so many students. This indoctrination now begins in grade school. We can see the outcome of this hateful ideation in a historical example.

During the time of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Soviet Union initiated a divorce from reality. The Communist Party mandated goals and quotas that sounded good but didn’t make sense. When its policies and methods proved erroneous by real and miserable experiences, instead of reevaluating its actions, it blamed others. The charade was as absurd as it was brutal. The game went something like this: The government would demand a certain output from an electrical plant. If the engineers at the plant protested and proved that the plant couldn’t give out that much power with the amount of coal that was being rationed to them, the government would say the reason for the shortage of power was not a miscalculation on the part of the government but sabotage by this “rebellious” group of engineers. Indeed, the propaganda plot would thicken: The government stated that it was not that the engineers could not produce that much power but that they refused to do so and obstructed others from making that quota of power as well. Then there would be a show of force and punishment, and the game would go on in a sickening cycle of kaleidoscopic viciousness.

Powerful cultural forces are at play in our country today. It is most evident in the turbulent political sphere. But the political antics are fueled by something else. At its innermost core, this conflict is between those who submit to reality and live by its dictates and those who scream “I will not serve!” and would burn down the world so as not to have to submit to reality.

Joanna Verellen

Davison, Michigan

Recently, while driving my sons home from their very long day at a classical public charter school, they began to chant, “Jonathan and Margarita sitting on a bridge k-i-s-s-i-n-g. First comes love, then comes a kiss, then comes a baby in a stroller.”

Normally, any talk of romance at the ages of six and eight launches me into a diatribe about the basic requirements for dating, such as the attainment of adulthood, while simultaneously addressing the purpose of dating: marriage. However, in this circumstance it was imperative to address the lyrics. “‘Bridge’?” I interrupted. “That is not how the song goes!” I continued disgustedly: “It’s ‘tree.’ Jonathan and Margarita sitting in a TREE. And I don’t want to hear anything about babies coming after sitting on a bridge. You need to get married, and then you have babies.” I chanted the ancient playground tune, summoning a peel of uncontrollable laughter and giggles: “Jonathan and Margarita sitting in a TREE k-i-s-s-i-n-g. First comes love, then comes MARRIAGE, then comes the baby in the baby carriage.” I delivered my ultimatum: “If you are going to sing it, sing it right!”

Regarding Cicero Bruce’s assertion that education was better a century ago, I will only add that the change was already there in the same way a boulder hovers over the edge of a mountain. It is not always a cataclysmic event that makes the boulder begin its deadly descent; sometimes it’s simply that the grains of tiny rock and dirt that hold it in place are loosened, allowing the boulder to begin its fall, and great destruction becomes possible. The boulder of modern education gains speed with every second it comes tumbling down, “mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,” as W.B. Yeats wrote, and even an innocent childhood ditty is destroyed.

The “center” of this childhood rhyme has been ripped out, and in its place is complete dysfunction, not just in its moral message but in its very literary structure — even its intent is changed. Yet, much like the quietness of potential energy contained in the lifeless boulder, the change within the ditty is subtle enough that even at a classical school with a strict “no pop-culture policy” and hours of academia focused on the “good, true, and beautiful,” it slid into the daily play of children.

The drive home from school was not the end of Jonathan and Margarita. Summoned by another innocuous recitation at bedtime, I explained to my sons that the modern version they learned at school is not only morally depraved but lacks rhyme and rhythm. To their delight, I chanted the ancient teasing rhyme once again, parsing the elements to emphasize the superiority of the original in contrast to the modern butchering. The original emanates innocence: We have a sense of “discovering” the couple in a tree. While a tree speaks a sense of privacy, it also evokes a sense of modesty: They are in the tree, not under it. For everyone but the most acrobatic, not much else but a kiss could be accomplished in a tree. The ditty furthers this notion of modesty by indicating a sense of growth: the baby comes later, after marriage, thus separating the objects of teasing from their current childhood circumstances; the love that started in the tree fully blossoms with the passage of many years. Thus, the teasing carries not only an innocence but an affection, pointing the children toward the fulfilment of romantic love: starting a family.

As for the “modern” rendering, the sense of modesty and discretion is lost with the breaking of the tree bow. Now the couple is sitting on a bridge. Even the most remote bridge is a public place, intended for people to cross over; it is a place of transition. So, the young couple is now shamelessly kissing for everyone to see. Not only is there no mention of marriage in the new version, there is no sense of the passage of time to separate the arrival of the baby from the kiss on the bridge. There is no sense of the development of a relationship, of growth or commitment. The tone of the ditty changes from innocent teasing to insinuation of inappropriate behavior, which is immediate and not projected into the future.

Who changed the ditty and why? Children love repetition and rhyme and hate change to what they consider tradition. Any parent knows that a simple change to routine can elicit volcanic tantrums. Has marriage itself become so obsolete that children have relinquished their love for stability in exchange for relatability? Has the ditty been changed to reflect what children now see as the “norm” for bringing children into the world? I do not have an answer, but Yeats’s words apply: “the centre cannot hold…the ceremony of innocence is drowned.” Perhaps the change is another example of the “turning and turning in the widening gyre,” the seemingly inescapable cycle of chaos, or, as Dr. Bruce reflects, the “flux of contemporary life” that so often results from modern education.

Elisa Huacuja

Dallas, Texas

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