JMat

@TheGreatB00ks Do you recommend working through your Iliad study first, if we’ve yet to read that?

TOMORROW. 📚We start our 12-week study of the Odyssey! We are discussing Book One of the Odyssey tomorrow. Not too late to pick up a copy and join us! We finish just in time for the new Christopher Nolan movie.🔥

@Andrewnsnyder Shaw is a must—100% non-negotiable.

When I read The Silmarillion, I hear the voice of Martin Shaw. Andy Serkis does a great job, but Shaw really nails the intonation.

@BeilinsonOrel “students no longer want” This is how you identify the parts of higher ed that lack an understanding of its purpose, value, and responsibility.

A history professor here: students no longer want the classical "place in period" surveys. Harvard's course catalog is expansive and covers virtually all the content covered in the 1949-1950 catalog.

@JoshPhillipsPhD calledtocommunion.com

Christian mutuals, I need some resources. Specifically, debates or arguments about (videos or articles) 1. Best Bible translations 2. Protestant v Catholic (intellectual ones w respectful ppl) 3. Protestant denomination differences Post links below. Thank you in advance

@GigaBasedDad Obviously, this is not something C.S. Lewis would say.

@JoshPhillipsPhD The Brothers Karamazov for the first time. Had no idea it’s part novel part Platonic dialogue.

What books are you all reading?

@SaysAristotle ThatI doesn’t sound like Aristotle.

“The aim of the wise is not to secure pleasure, but to avoid pain.”

@LibertyCappy They’ve inherited a broken culture and a bankrupt view of the human person, making it exceptionally hard to recognize the Good and for those who do, pursuing it often comes at significant (perceived) cost.

@JeremyTate41 Incredible art. All but the hobbits.

The Lord of the Rings art by Ted Nasmith 🧵 1. Shelob

@nickitruesdell Education is an integral part of a life-well lived and human flourishing—not reducible to grade attainment and career preparation. Modern education is not aligned with an integral view of the human person.

Why do you homeschool?

@greg_ashman Well said, but I’d argue that 4 would be better expressed as fundamentally rooted in the enlightenment.

Why does educational progressivism survive when it has been failing for over a hundred years? 1. Teachers and the education sector tend towards political progressivism and they conflate the two, despite educational progressivism having a history of entanglement with fascism, eugenics and so on. They are not the same. 2. Holding Romantic views about children makes you feel virtuous. You can tell yourself you are a good person who simply cares more than those mean old traditional educators. This is why you see so much emotion over reason in progressivist arguments. 3. Education is structured so that those in charge of the sector often don’t have to confront the practical realities of applying their ideology. Instead, they are hidden away in air conditioned offices in a university or bureaucracy somewhere, far away from failed kids. 4. This one may be harder to accept: It fits an American model of robust individualism and America is the cultural hegemon. This view says that every child is different. They all learn in different ways. They are all intelligent in their own way. They all need an individual plan. Teachers need to find out what individual needs are not being met for each child. Obviously, the workload implications for teachers are immense but, again, these don’t affect non-teachers in offices. Educational progressivism is the ideology of those with power in most education systems. To resist it requires us to subvert traditional power structures.

@SteveStuWill Which half you teaming with in a survival situation? There’s a clear choice.

The 15 professions with highest average IQs and the 15 professions with the lowest. [Link below.]

@prof_tom_ward Any thoughts on a helpful writing/media that values stoicism but highlights where it falls short? Other than your remarkable book of course.

I really enjoyed this event. Smart questions, great discussion.

@TFMulliganEsq @FeserEdward Where do you get that you shouldn’t help people in need from what Pro Feser articulated? Having a prioritized hierarchy of concern is consistent with helping others. I am not even sure why it’s not obvious.

The view that one has the same duties to all human beings, rather than special duties to those closest, in no way reflects a conception of human beings as social animals. On the contrary, it is a product of liberalism’s radical individualism, which takes us to have no obligations to anyone at all other than those we choose to have, in a social contract. Only given this background assumption (made either explicitly or implicitly) does it seem arbitrary to favor one’s own family or countrymen. For the “contract” liberalism says we ought to agree to is one made with human beings in general rather than with any specific individuals. Socialism, which absorbs all into one gigantic social blob, is thus the offspring of liberalism, not its opposite. It is a grotesque distortion of man’s social nature, an opposite extreme error from the error of individualism. The correct view (common to Confucius, Aristotle, Aquinas, and the common sense of mankind in general) is that our social nature and its consequent obligations manifest themselves first and foremost in the family, then in local communities, then in the nation as a whole, and only after that in our relationship to mankind in general. A genuine post-liberalism must also be post-socialist.

Surprisingly Catholic film: pro-life,lion lying with the lamb motif, constant talk about death…. g.co/kgs/qP2DXuZ

@prof_tom_ward Fantastic book.

Great news! After Stoicism is now back in stock at Word on Fire. It costs less at their website than on Amazon. Link below!

@Andrewnsnyder Well said. It speaks to what I tell someone who asks what I like so much about LotR. I can never quite articulate it, but I always say something about it not really having much to do with elves, or swords, or dwarves...

All three of the LotR credits songs are incredibly strong. May it Be is an excellent song of courage and faith. Gollum’s Song offers devastating insight into despair. Into the West confronts us with mortality and longing for the true Undying Lands.

@pegobry_en It’s puzzling on the surface, but college sports are just as entertaining if not more so than professional. Not much difference between supporting a college vs professional team.

The fact that people are fans of college football teams that didn’t actually go to the college is one of the few remaining puzzling facts about America but there ya go

@jgustin @JamesAFurey @213Room It’s rather uncontroversial to suggest competence drives motivation and enjoyment along with a range of other positive outcomes.

@JamesAFurey @213Room Source please?

A lot of good practice in English teaching has been completely replaced by efforts to "spark a love of reading." Which is a shame because there are undoubtedly more important goals to accomplish as an educator. And, ironically, accomplishing those goals will more consistently result in students who love to read than the wishy-washy style of teaching ascendant right now.

@rd_whitley @bradleybirzer He didn’t write LOTR rings for his grandchildren. You’re thinking of the Hobbit, and it was his children, not grandchildren. I mention this only because you seemed to use that as part of your counterclaim.

@bradleybirzer I like Tolkein and recognize his expertise and scholarship But i dont think his literary work is vaguely comparable with any great work of any Epoch, forget about Homer I think Tolkein would agree He wrote LOTR for his grandchildren I think You are exaggerating its greatness imo