Reforming education. Ali & Dawkins Debate.
Reforming education. Ali & Dawkins Debate.
Plus, a lecture on C.S. Lewis and War and a Holy Cross hike.
Coffee this Friday, May 17, at 6:30 am at Loyal North. This will be our last coffee before a summer hiatus. Come join us if you can. But summer doesn’t mean nothing is happening. Read on for two events in June—a lecture+dinner and a holy hike.
Don’t forget: our guided tour of Grace & St. Stephens Episcopal Church is tomorrow, May 16, at 1:00 pm. We have a group of about ten thus far. Let me know if you’re planning to make it. Would love to see you there.
(1) University Reformation
We follow a few trends in this newsletter. One is the steep decline—call it a hollowing out, a nosedive, a moral bankrupting—of the American university, or at least of the “mainstream” American university. Solveig Lucia Gold at First Things points the finger at the DEI regime, which “splinters communities” by design, drains esprit de corps, and kills any sense of a larger institutional identity:
The keffiyeh-clad students who run around campuses shouting “Intifada!” while celebrating the cancellation of in-person classes are activists first and students a very distant second. Those who have occupied Beinecke Plaza, right outside Yale’s Civil War Memorial, do not see pro-Israel students as their fellow Yalies—they scarcely see them as their fellow humans….
As the protests continue and university presidents cling to their jobs, they keep trying to appeal to common values and community—to (in the words of Columbia’s Minouche Shafik) “rebuild the ties that bind us together.” But after decades of deliberate balkanization, the rhetoric rings hollow. To the left-wing majority in academia, institutional loyalty is meaningless, if not deplorable. And the conservatives who do value the role of institutional loyalty in civic life have nevertheless deservedly lost trust in these particular institutions.
And so, unfortunately, our universities are getting the commencement season they deserve. Columbia’s being forced to cancel its university-wide graduation ceremony is the logical outcome of DEI’s ongoing attack on institutional spirit, tradition, and camaraderie. Instead of caps and gowns, keffiyehs. Instead of silly inflatable lions, inflatable tents. Instead of “Stand, Columbia,” “From the river to the sea.”
Over the weekend, Tikvah’s CEO Eric Cohen called for an “Exodus Project”—a renewal of the American covenant, a return to the nation’s biblical roots, with Jews and Christians rebuilding together, starting with the university:
American Jews will need a paradigm shift in our political, moral, and civilizational imagination. We will need to build deeper friendships and alliances with patriotic Americans—especially Christian Americans—who love Israel, share our Hebraic values, and seek our guidance in renewing the moral center of American culture. We will need to relocate in large numbers to new and more welcoming parts of the country—including the Southeast, the Southwest, and other more conservative regions of the country that protect religious freedom and promote religious education.
And bigger changes are already afoot—there are reasons to hope. The University of Austin will welcome its first undergraduate class this fall. Hildegard College is wrapping up its first academic year. Other Christian and classically-oriented institutions are popping up, like Trinity College of Louisville and New Aberdeen College. And Hillsdale College, Southern Methodist University, University of Florida, Colorado Christian University continue to exhibit strength, civic vitality, institutional promise.
The genius of what Irving Kristol once called the “Protestant impulse” of America is its ability to self-correct. When the mainstream becomes polluted, reformers dig new canals, reroute flows, refresh the waters of civic and institutional life. Perhaps what we’re seeing in education is a new reformation—itself perhaps the headwaters of a larger cultural revival. One dares hope.
(2) “I think you are a Christian.”
Recent Christian convert Ayaan Hirsi Ali and self-proclaimed “cultural Christian” Richard Dawkins sat down for a debate earlier this month at the inaugural Dissident Dialogues conference in New York. UnHerd reports on the conversation. Dawkins admits he “came here prepared to persuade you, Ayaan, that you’re not a Christian.” Yet he is the one who left persuaded: “I think you are a Christian,” he told her. Dawkins still thinks “Christianity is nonsense,” though he considers himself on “Team Christianity.”
For her part, Ali offered “a more personal glimpse into her conversion experience. Her belief in Christ, she said, is separate from the belief she shares with Dawkins — that Christianity is a useful, pro-civilisational force.” Yet “good for civilization” is neither a criterion of truth nor a durable ethical principle:
“What you value in Christianity is something that really is absolutely necessary to pass on to the next generation,” [Ali] told Dawkins. “And we have failed the next generation by taking away from them that moral framework and telling them it’s nonsense and false. We have also not protected them from the external forces that come for their hearts, minds and souls.”
Other Things — Summer Haps
June 18: Lewis & War Lecture: My friend Marc LiVecche, scholar of war, ethics, and public life, will be in Colorado Springs June 18. I’m hosting him for a lecture and dinner on C.S. Lewis and war. Please mark your calendar. I’ll send details soon.
June 22: Holy Cross Hike: On Saturday, June 22, please join me for a hike along Fall Creek to the top of Notch Mountain to glimpse Colorado’s famous Mount of the Holy Cross. We’ll trek out and back about 10 miles, gain and then lose about 2,800 feet, and marvel at the cruciform geology. The hike will be strenuous, and the cross of snow is not as distinct today as when Thomas Moran rendered it in watercolor over a century ago. But the payoff will be divine! Mark you calendar. I’ll share details with those who express interest.
‘But the new rebel is a skeptic, and will not entirely trust anything. He has no loyalty; therefore he can never be really a revolutionist. And the fact that he doubts everything really gets in his way when he wants to denounce anything. For all denunciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind; and the modern revolutionist doubts not only the institution he denounces, but the doctrine by which he denounces it. Thus he writes one book complaining that imperial oppression insults the purity of women, and then he writes another book in which he insults it himself. He curses the Sultan because Christian girls lose their virginity, and then curses Mrs. Grundy because they keep it. As a politician, he will cry out that war is a waste of life, and then, as a philosopher, that all life is waste of time. A Russian pessimist will denounce a policeman for killing a peasant, and then prove by the highest philosophical principles that the peasant ought to have killed himself. A man denounces marriage as a lie, and then denounces aristocratic profligates for treating it as a lie. He calls a flag a bauble, and then blames the oppressors of Poland or Ireland because they take away that bauble. The man of this school goes first to a political meeting, where he complains that savages are treated as if they were beasts; then he takes his hat and umbrella and goes on to a scientific meeting, where he proves that they practically are beasts. In short, the modern revolutionist, being an infinite skeptic, is always engaged in undermining his own mines. In his book on politics he attacks men for trampling on morality; in his book on ethics he attacks morality for trampling on men. Therefore the modern man in revolt has become practically useless for all purposes of revolt. By rebelling against everything he has lost his right to rebel against anything.' (G.K. Chesterton Orthodoxy, 1909)