It’s been a busy month! The Dragons have completed writing four of the five Quests in our “Centrism Game” (a.k.a. “ Dunciad 2020 ”). I have been reading in preparation for future videos with OBS and EMJ . And I have been recording new episodes of “ The Forge of Tolkien ” each week. If that isn’t enough gravy (hi, Bears!), have I got some tasty biscuits for you! 1. The Wisdom and Folly of King Solomon and Joe Long Poet and raconteur Joe Long joined me to talk about Wisdom and Folly: A Book of Devotional Doggerel (Covenant Books, 2020). Wisdom and Folly is a book of Scripture-inspired light verse meant to instruct and amuse. These sixty poems draw upon Old Testament verses to reflect upon our contemporary scene. They may make you chuckle, groan, or sigh, but they’ll also make you think. We chuckled! We groaned! We sighed! And in the process we had a great conversation about the importance of poetry for training the soul to shun Folly and pursue Wisdom. 2. T...
Welcome to my Random Laypersons ! Welcome to the VFM, welcome to the Dread Ilk, welcome to the Reprehensibles, welcome to the Unauthorized , and welcome to the Bears! This is the History Course you have been waiting for! Or, rather, it will be, as soon as I get some feedback from you. I was greatly encouraged when Vox asked you the other night about whether you would be interested in such a course and so many of you said, “Yes—as long as it is real history!” As Fencing Bear would put it, “ Three cheers !” We are thinking about having a video a week, starting this summer. The first question that I have is about format. What kind of format would make for a good course online? What I do not want is to have these videos simply be lectures, the canonical professor-talks-while-the-students-doze lectures you get in the movies before the professor starts encouraging the students to stand on their desks. I wan...
Originally sent directly by email Wednesday, January 12, 2022, from Professor Rachel Fulton Brown, Department of History, The University of Chicago Dear Paul and Ka Yee, The mainstream narrative is starting to shift. We are going to lose our brand if it shifts and we are not in front of it. WE are the University of Chicago. WE ask the Big Questions and risk being out on the edge of scientific research. WE are the scholars who do not simply follow the trends, but set them. We have embarrassed ourselves for too long—ever since we fell in step with everyone else over the fear. WE should have been the ones with faculty publishing op-eds calling for transparency in testing, not the ones locking our students in their dorm rooms. WE should have been the ones signing the Great Barrington Declaration and siding with SCIENTISTS and DOCTORS who have been willing to risk their careers rather than let their patients die because they wouldn't treat them except at the government’s direction. NOW...
I knew it, I knew it! I have long been suspicious of the claims that my yoga teachers have made about the great antiquity of the postures that they were teaching us. Okay, so there were sculptures of yogis and Buddhas sitting in Lotus, but where were all the Downward Dogs and Warriors, Headstands and Forward Bends? Why couldn't any of the books show us illustrations or even properly referenced descriptions of these poses in the ancient sources if there were any? Well, as historian Mark Singleton has recently reported in Yoga Journal (November 2010), it's because there aren't.* It gets better (or worse, depending on how important you think antiquity is). Not only aren't these poses--and more or less all of the others which aspiring yogis and yoginis practice so diligently in yoga studios and health clubs the (Westernized) world over--particularly ancient. They aren't even Indian. They are, you guessed it, Western to begin with. To be exact, 19th-century...
Everyone agrees. The West has a problem. For good or for ill, what we used to call “Western civilization” is crumbling. The monuments of its past are being pulled down. Its heroes are being wiped from the public memory. Efforts at stemming the loss are vilified as “racist” and “white supremacist.” Nobody in polite society wants to be associated with its institutions and ideals anymore. Particularly not with Christianity. Even in so-called conservative circles, to call oneself “Christian”—as opposed to “Judeo-Christian”—is something of a faux pas . A bit gauche. Definitely lowbrow. Not particularly intellectual. Certainly not something a rational thinker would wholeheartedly embrace. Well, perhaps it is okay to be Christian in the circles I frequent online, but then I have never been invited to the right cocktail parties. Not that I would have any idea how to behave. Then again, as they say, turnabout is fair play. I’m a Christian, and Christianity has always been a bit embarras...
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F.B.