My priority is forming a moral imagination, not cramming knowledge or memory drills or making sure boxes get checked. The way I see it, most of the raw facts that they learn at this age, unless used repeatedly, will be forgotten. The stories, art, music, and experiences, however, leave an impression that could last a lifetime.

I’m playing the long game.

These are some of the books that I feel have contributed to forming a moral imagination, to imparting a taste for beauty and truth, and to giving a sense of reality. A few are real gems that were published recently, something that tells me we really are seeing a Christian cultural revival.

I also include a few “lowlights,” which seem to be popular in classical/Charlotte Mason circles but I found lacking.

Again, this isn’t exhaustive of every book we’ve read, and I’ve no doubt forgotten some good ones, but these are, in my estimation, books that cultivate a child’s relationship with reality, forming a sense of what is good and true and beautiful while resisting false, romantic interpretations of the world.

Many conservatives and Christians seem to be catching on to the fact that the imagination is central to forming a person, including a religious sensibility. The catechism and apologetics can only reinforce what is already there at an imaginative level. Reason plays a supporting role. It is not the leading light.

Children must learn in a concrete, immediate, and experiential way what the good life is. They must live it, which means living it in the imagination. Good fiction, stories, song, play, liturgical experiences, ceremony, and ritual are what actually form our understanding of reality. These are not mere layers on top of a rational experience of the world. Quite the opposite is the case. Reason merely articulates what the imagination already believes. Which is why a person can make a logical, internally coherent argument that is nonetheless in service of the diabolical.

The imagination is the actual structure for living and interpreting reality. It forms it. And this is something that I think Christians have been slow to appreciate. It seems that the imagination adds a certain veneer or “enchantment” to reality; that, when it accords with right reasoning, can support a moral view of the world. But the imagination is much more than this. It is our reality. Whatever goes into its making shapes its very fiber and constitution and therefore our entire worldview and sense of what life is like.

We do not receive “sense impressions” that are then processed and calculated. Before any reasoning or interpretation can take place, the imagination is already creating meaning. It happens instantaneously, and is based on what kind of imagination is being formed or has been formed. This is why people react differently to different movies or books or political events.

One’s imagination may or may not be in accord with truth and reality. The delusional, romantic imagination that is guided by wishful thinking will not be able to make sense of reality. An imagination warped by romanticism rebels against the actual nature of existence and life’s limits. I go into this a bit below when I review Stuart Little, sadly one of the lowlights of the past year.

Much of our focus at home in the younger years is on limits. This forms a sense of reality and is the first lesson in history, which is nothing if not a tale of people coming up against limits. How different people deal with that confrontation is what makes history interesting. The heroes of history seem to be those who are able to work deftly and tirelessly within given constraints, and despite difficulties still manage. While those who have tried to resist limits and to overcome them, to make the world anew as it were, are those figures responsible for great death and destruction.

A theme can be discerned from the groups of books I’ve pictured below and it is this: in the most local, humble, and concrete circumstances (think, Ox-Cart Man) is to be found beauty, goodness, and truth—possibly in that order.

Read more

[Spoiler Alert]

The story can be compelling. It has its moments. The protagonist, the letter-writer Sybil Van Antwerp, at least, was a compelling character. And the story is well-written. Still, the further along I got, the more the cracks formed, and the harder I had to work to suspend my disbelief.

Sybil Van Antwerp is in her 70s and has always enjoyed writing letters. The novel is told entirely through her various correspondence with family, friends, and strangers. Right off the bat we learn that Sybil is a mother, grandmother, divorced, and living alone in her water-view home in Annapolis. She had a successful career as a lawyer and later clerk for her former colleague, friend, and well-respected judge. She had three children but one died in an accident at the age of 8. This tragedy, for which she blames herself, reverberated in her relationships with her husband and children, finally resulting in divorce and a near-lifelong distance between her and her only daughter.

Before I summarize what is, for me, the core meaning of the story, let me first bring to mind Aristotle’s insight from the Poetics. What makes a good tragedy, Aristotle said, is one that obeys the law of probability. The story must be one that unfolds in a likely way, based on the preceding events. Characters must react to their circumstances in a way that is probable. This should be the starting point for all story-tellers, whether ancient tragedians or modern novelists. Otherwise, what we have is something that is not universal, which is the standard of all poetry, Aristotle said. Art fails to attain universal significance if it is unreal, if it defies the law of probability and cause-and-effect. Characters and events must not defy the bounds that have been set for human nature and politics (in the broad sense). The masters of this defiance were, of course, the Romantics (and all romantics, past and present), who are guided by wishful thinking.

When considering the artistic quality of fiction we must consider the probability of the story. This sounds paradoxical, for fictional stories are untrue. Yet they are still telling us something about ourselves, or, at least, that’s their claim. So we must ask, is this story telling me something true about myself, my fellow human beings, and the world I live in? Or is this the product of a delusional or unbalanced imagination with merely a pretense to universality? Art is never just one thing, never simply one-dimension. But, on balance, it will point in one direction or another. Where does the final emphasis lie?

The following is not a rounded picture of The Correspondent with all of its strengths and weaknesses and literary qualities. Rather, it highlights what I take to be the final direction in which the author’s vision points and what this says about our culture.

I doubt that most readers of The Christian Imagination will have read this novel or intend to read it, so I’ll summarize some of Sybil’s various epistolary relationships that we learn about. There is:

1. Basam, the Syrian immigrant (or migrant) with an engineering degree who is a customer service agent for the DNA testing service that Sybil uses. He’s intelligent, eloquent, a family man, and so invested in his personal correspondence with Sybil as a customer service agent that he ends up losing his job over it. In the end, Sybil finds him an engineering job where he can put his skills to use.

2. Melissa Genet, the “Dean of the English department” at the University of Maryland who has, rather vindictively, denied Sybil permission to audit English classes, as Sybil had done under previous deans. Sybil mentioned her dislike of poetry, which Ms. Genet happens to teach. After two years of being stonewalled, Sybil marches onto campus and waits for Ms. Genet after a faculty meeting. Sybil sees a lovely black woman (who did you expect?) being talked down to “literally and figuratively” by a large and imposing white man. The two see each other and immediately start laughing, forget their differences, and so blossoms a beautiful friendship. This character later gives Sybil the opportunity for a feminist rant that laments what Ms. Genet must deal with “as a black woman.”

4. Mick Watts, who seeks out Sybil at the funeral of the well-known judge she had clerked for all those years. Fascinated and enamored with her, Mick blunders his way through a letter to her, calling her habit of communication “quaint and impractical.” After a curt and rude letter back, Mick sends flowers and an apology note to Sybil, imploring her to go to dinner with him. After some time, Sybil gives in and enjoys an evening out with him, laughing and enjoying herself but not without criticizing Mick’s boisterous and silly personality and taking a dig at the state he hails from—Texas (what’d you expect?). At the end of their courtship Watts presents a ring and pops the question to Sybil.

3. Theodore Lübeck, the most sympathetic and Christian character in the book turns out to be Jewish and a refugee of Nazi Germany, where his father and brother were killed in a concentration camp. Sybil’s neighbor, Mr. Lübeck is always eager, in his kind and gentle way, to help Sybil whenever she is in need, and she becomes increasingly dependent on his neighborliness as her eyesight deteriorates and she herself begins to love him.

5. “D. M.,” a stalker leaving ominous, threatening notes who has some connection to Sybil from her past as a law clerk. Sybil figures out that this is Dezi Martinelli, the son of a man whom she helped to sentence unjustly in the 1970s. She invites Dezi to write to her and air his grievances. He does, and a correspondence follows that ends in Dezi’s forgiveness of Sybil. She names him in her will.

6. Felix, Sybil’s adoptive brother who lives in France with his partner Stewart. The two give us perhaps the only example of domestic tranquility in the novel until Felix discovers that Stewart cheated on him. It turns out that Stewart merely flirted with another man and was immediately repentent for it. The two get back together and all ends well.

7. Henrietta Gleason (Hattie), Sybil’s biological sister living in Scotland whom she meets thanks to Basam’s friendliness and the DNA testing service. They connect almost immediately, and Sybil lives with Hattie for months, listening to stories of their mother and getting to know her half-brothers who live in the same town. They enjoy the warmest friendship and openness just before Sybil’s unexpected death.

8. Daan Van Antwerp, Sybil’s ex-husband. From his deathbed, Daan, despite being remarried, writes Sybil a letter confessing how much he always loved her, what a wonderful woman and mother she was, how intelligent, successful, etc. He expressed his hope that she would write him a letter in response, but Sybil never did.

9. Fiona, Sybil’s daughter, has never been close to her mother, and we can sense the tension between them from the start. They interact little throughout the story, but in the end Sybil realizes, thanks to her good and honest friend Rosalie, that Fiona has been hurting all these years and that it is her responsibility to apologize and heal their broken relationship.

It is difficult to overstate how entirely improbable this story is. At almost every turn, it is divorced from reality and the sequence of cause-and-effect as known throughout human history. It’s almost as if it were written by a naive liberal woman someone who hasn’t the foggiest idea of what human beings and human life is really like—as if purely wishful thinking guided the entire narrative.

And yet the story is not so simple. It reveals a great deal about the modern longing for the promises of Christ. The Correspondent is, in the end, a story about our human longing for forgiveness and for redemption. Sybil Van Antwerp’s life represents the lives of so many modern Western Boomers people: divorced, distanced from her one or two children, living alone and dating, and full of regrets about the past while also trying to live her best life in the present.

The Sybil whom we get to know in the earlier part of the novel is not a particularly kind, charitable, or warm woman. She is somewhat self-centered, highly intelligent, driven, pensive, yet does take some interest in those around her, as evidenced by her unfailing ability to always send a thank-you note. We do not get the impression of a Christian woman who practices the virtues of charity, forgiveness, or humility. She is quick to take offense and never holds her tongue, “virtues” which somehow have enamored her to quite a few men in her life, from her ex-husband to her suitors when she is in her 70s. I was left wondering what these men found so attractive about her. It was another source of my suspicion that this narrative was more of a liberal woman’s wish-fulfillment than a realistic playing out of human nature on the page.

Having gotten to know this type of person—probably someone we are all familiar with, common as this personality in women is today—the story then takes a dramatic turn in the final third or so. Sybil is given a dressing down from her best friend, Rosalie, who tells Sybil what she needs to hear, namely about her failings toward her daughter. This single, honest letter has a seemingly miraculous effect on Sybil, driving her to confess and fully repent of her past sins to her daughter. She asks for forgiveness and heals the deep wound in their relationship. It is the dream of anyone with a strained mother-daughter relationship. This has a domino effect in Sybil’s life, causing her to travel abroad to visit friends and family she had refused to see because of her fear or block against travel. And it reverberates positively in other ways as well.

Sybil opens herself up to finding her sister. She asks forgiveness of Dezi Martinelli, which miraculously comes about through a few letters. She forgives herself for the death of her son, asking his forgiveness in a letter to him. And she recognizes the gem that is Theodore Lübeck, finally opening herself up to his love and friendship.

In a sense, it is a beautiful story—the redemption of a formerly lonely, self-loathing woman who had wrecked her marriage after the tragic death of her son. Her final years were spent in peace, having healed brokenness and found forgiveness. This is no doubt part of the reason that the book became a bestseller. It is the dream. But therein lies its failing. It is just that, a dream. It is all of the rewards of the Christian life without any of the effort.

Sybil’s actions in the end—all of the neat and tidy endings, the repentance, the forgiveness—do not actually come from Sybil’s character. They are not a part of the natural cause-and-effect that would begin with the character we first get to know. Instead, they are a sort of deus ex machina, artificial plot turns. It becomes clear that the author has little to draw upon in her imagination to animate the characters in an organic way. The natural and probable outcome of Sybil’s life, sadly, is for her to have gone to her grave without a proper reconciliation with her daughter. She would not have traveled. And the many other fantastical parts of the story would have unfolded differently, too, if it weren’t so un-PC.

For the novel to have ended the way that it did—foremost for Sybil to have done the morally heroic deed of healing the deep and painful wound between her and her daughter that began a lifetime ago—would have required a great deal more of Sybil’s character. What she did in the end was something that does not often occur in this earthly life, especially not in this unforgiving, unchristian age in which family members are estranged and old wounds simply fester. What would have been required of Sybil for events actually to unfold this way would have been a sense of humility and a perceived need for grace. These are things for which Sybil never showed a desire or felt a lack.

Sybil even had her cross to bear. The tragic death of her son and her impending blindness were sorrows that probably contributed to her desire for forgiveness from her daughter. But this is not a thread that the author really takes up. It is as if she knows that there is some connection between suffering and redemption but doesn’t quite see the relationship, which can only truly be illuminated by Christ.

This is a post-Christian novel, one that wants all of the benefits and beauties of Christianity—the suffering redeemed, the forgiveness, the inner peace—without all of that prayer, humility, charity, and recognition of our dependence upon God.

This is the opposite of Hannah Coulter, about which I recently offered some thoughts. Where Hannah Coulter was able to reflect honestly on her life, failings, sufferings, and joys, Sybil Van Antwerp showed a spiritual impoverishment yet heroic moral courage. It is an incongruence that reveals something about the two different qualities of imagination behind the stories. Wendell Berry is sensitive to human nature’s tendencies and to the modern cultural wasteland that we are creating. Virginia Evans seems blissfully unaware, yet nonetheless longs for the wholeness and redemption that is a part only of the Christian story.

I am in the business of cultural renewal, not drafting homeschool curricula. But sometimes the two overlap, and since quite a few readers have asked me what curriculum I use and what books I recommend, I’ll offer my own humble contribution to this saturated conversation.

Before I get to that, though, I want to offer my thoughts on something that I believe is more important than curriculum specifics, and that is the overarching goal of home education. My thoughts on this came together, oddly enough, after reading Wendell Berry’s fictional novel Hannah Coulter (2005). This is a book that will sit with you. I highly recommend it to anyone, but especially to homeschooling mothers and fathers and to those who are hoping to forge a new path outside of industrial time.

This novel may have been a revelation to me because it synthesized and summarized something that I’ve long intuited, and that is that peace and love at home are enough.

Let me elaborate.

Hannah Coulter meditates on a question that should be central to Christian homeschoolers: how to pass on what you have built? The novel’s titular character, although trying to build something that will last, discovers that some serious missteps paved a road away from her home—and away from the Christian life. Berry doesn’t really touch on matters of faith, but the novel is nonetheless imbued with Christian themes.

After her children are grown and have left, not to return, Hannah reflects on her and her husband Nathan’s past and what could have led to the same outcome for all three children—for them all to have left the farm. She wonders, with the weight of the years that have passed, whether she shouldn’t have drawn their attention more to the beauty of their life on the farm—if she shouldn’t have allowed them to be content with the life they had.

“I was mourning over them to Nathan. I said, ‘I just wanted them to have a better chance than I had.’

Nathan said, ‘Don’t complain about the chance you had,’ in the same way exactly that he used to tell the boys, ‘Don’t cuss the weather.’ Sometimes you can say dreadful things without knowing it. Nathan understood this better than I did.

Like several of his one-sentence conversations, this one stuck in my mind and finally changed it.”

Hannah had been wondering, like many people of her generation, what might have been had she had the opportunity to go to college. Now, after watching three children graduate, Hannah wonders if their university education really was a good thing. They left and never returned, and each child’s life represented a different aspect of the modern tragedy: childlessness, divorce, a career instead of a family, a child lost to drugs because of a broken home.

How could these be the fruits of parents who remained married until death and who loved their children and raised them in a wholesome community? Hannah seems to find the answer to this question in the way she presented their life to their children. In a memorable passage toward the end of the book, Hannah recalls,

The stories they wanted most to be told were the stories of Nathan’s childhood at Port William and mine at Shagbark.

‘Tell us what you did when you were little.’

‘Tell us about the old days.’

Well, the days before the war were ‘the old days,’ sure enough. The war changed the world. The days when Nathan and I were little, before we had electricity and plumbing and tractors and blacktopped roads and nuclear bombs, must have seemed almost legendary to the children, and so they were fascinated.

But did we tell the stories right? It was lovely, the telling and the listening, usually the last thing before bedtime. But did we tell the stories in such a way as to suggest that we had needed a better chance or a better life or a better place than we had?

Now, things are cutting in the other direction. Those of us who were raised on Reading Rainbow, Martin Luther King Jr. speeches, and Eli Wiesel novels are probably similarly longing for a “better chance” for our children—one involving less indoctrination and more connection with the things that matter—i.e. their family, ancestry, and Western cultural heritage.

Hannah’s actual chance—her real life as she lived it—was a rich one, connected with the land and her community and experienced in union with her husband. The life that she and Nathan had made for themselves on their farm was enough.

This novel considers the fundamental question of our purpose as families. Is the home a launching pad to something bigger and better? Or is the home meant to be a place of unconditional love and contentedness in this Christian life on earth? A proving ground for our own sanctification and, as Hannah observes at one point in the novel, even a little slice of heaven on earth.

Hannah Coulter taught me the unexpected lesson that the primary goal of homeschooling is not academic achievement. That is secondary. The goal is the kingdom of Heaven, which, as Berry shows us, is not purely otherworldly. It can be experienced here and now too.

During my four short years homeschooling, I have discovered that with peace and contentment comes the love, learning, and love of learning that ought to be the hallmarks of homeschooling. I was eager—over eager—to teach my poor first-born Latin, math, reading, and so much else besides before he was ready for academic pursuits. Now, I take Charlotte Mason’s advice that children shouldn’t learn to read until age 6 (and I extended this to all academic subjects). I sensed that I was feeling pressure to “keep up” and check boxes, but the price was peace. Things came to a head and I considered sending my eldest to school. For various reasons, that wasn’t an option, and it turned out to be a great blessing because I was forced to adapt. I had to discover how to lead my son toward a love of learning. I couldn’t do the learning for him; he had to want to do it. And oddly enough, the desire had been there all along, I just hadn’t harnessed it.

The phrase “Heaven over Harvard” had been bantered about in our Catholic homeschooling community, and it started to sink in. Was my goal a top-notch academic education? Or was it solid spiritual formation with academics playing a supportive role? I decided that it was the latter, and I began slowly to replace our time doing academic subjects with more scripture reading and discussion, saint stories, singing hymns, learning the parts of the Latin Mass (and through this, learning some Latin in an organic way), learning salvation history (which obviously entwines with secular history), and experiencing the created world directly and naming it (identifying plants and birds and drawing them in our nature notebooks). This became our bedrock, and it turns out that the kids are doing just fine academically because of it.

Our Routine

We start homeschool after we have finished breakfast, chores, and the release of some wiggles through play, which sometimes is not until 9 or, gasp, even 10 am depending on the morning and the season of life we’re in—and I should also mention that three of our children are feral boys. Convening at the homeschool table peacefully, I decided, was more important than forcing everyone to show up at gunpoint and then starting our prayers in anger (kind of defeats the purpose).

I never look at social media or internet forums on homeschooling. It feels like a way to compare what we are all doing, which can provide benefits, but causes in me temporary feelings of panic that I’m “not doing enough” or not doing it right. I then have to step back and re-realize that we’re just fine, and what we are doing is working for us. When I need additional resources or have specific inquiries, I look into different curricula for recommendations or I ask other homeschool moms. Having a few moms that you trust is worth ten thousand internet forums.

We make the best use of our time in the car. Since we live in the country now, it takes about 25 minutes to get into town, meaning that I have almost a solid hour of time in which my children are strapped to their seats and must listen to whatever I put on! And it turns out, that the children love my propaganda educational materials. I rotate Phillip Campbell’s CDs of the Story of Civilization, the Story of Mary (also Campbell), the Story of the Bible (TAN Books), Holy Heroes saint stories, just about any Jim Weiss-narrated CD (I find these on Ebay; many are great for the youngest listeners), folk songs, hymns, and the Chant School Podcast. It all depends on the vibes in the car and the decibel level of the baby/toddler din. This time of learning in the car has been precious, and it can easily be replicated at the dining room table during lunch or after breakfast (with the added benefit that bickering brothers generally cease their antics to listen). We have an old fashioned boom box (are they still called this?) and a little bluetooth speaker that we use all the time.

We spend a good deal of time outside. Some days include formal nature-study. I have the Merlin Bird ID to identify bird songs and the PictureThis app to identify plants—see I’m no luddite! We pack our watercolors (or some other medium) and notebooks, and I have found that I must have my own notebook. When they see mom taking seriously the painting of the Siberian Squill, well, they can’t resist joining in and giving it a stab. Other days are just leisurely expeditions or time in the tree house or at the creek. When we lived in the city, we drove somewhere for half a day to enjoy nature, and it was a day “off” well spent.

This pretty well summarizes the core learning that we do in the early years. I should add that we subscribe to the CMEC (Charlotte Mason Education Center), and I have enjoyed it, but I am not a purist. I find some of the readings are not suitable for our family and our objectives. That being said, it does offer quite a bit and it could be a good way to get to know the Charlotte Mason philosophy, which, if applied judiciously and flexibly, provides a great foundation.

I also have respect for what Faus is doing with The Children’s Tradition, a curriculum based on John Senior’s 1000 Good Books List. If you’ve been reading The Christian Imagination, then you’ll know that I “amended” the Nursery Years of Senior’s list to adjust for what I see as a child’s imaginative capacity in the early years (and also crossed a couple out altogether). Faus has a thorough, philosophical introduction to Senior and to the Charlotte Mason method (without being a strict devotee) that would be helpful to new or veteran homeschooling parents who would like to see a systematic account of what we’re doing here anyway with all of this good, true, and beautiful talk. Her curriculum (last I checked) was $300 total which covers up through year 7. So that means that you only have to buy it once and you get a curriculum through middle school. It’s simpler than the CMEC, which means fewer resources but also fewer distractions.

I could add here some of the books that we enjoy such as the Burgess Bird Book (I read while the children draw one of the birds; having color prints is essential. This is a great bad weather day activity); various illustrated poetry books from which we memorize poems; Greek myths and illustrated versions of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey; French that we do orally; and various history living books, picture books and novels that I read aloud. I’ll include these details in the next post.

We are done with our formal school day by noon, and if we started at 10, that meant only two hours of formal instruction, which ends up being just fine. Afternoons still include learning in the form of audiobooks, musical practice, online math, or simply restful, leisurely activity. I steer them, but they ultimately choose what they do with this time. My boys enjoy whittling, making treasure maps, building legos, painting or drawing, playing knights and castles, scouting out in the forest, etc. etc. And while they are enjoying their freedom, I spend time on my own intellectual pursuits and writing, so that I am refreshed, nourished and eager to pass on our Western heritage.

I hope that this post helps prospective homeschool parents to see that there are a variety of ways to educate children at home, and they needn’t be stressful or painful or complicated or require expensive materials or curricula. There are no prerequisites for being able to pick up the Bible and picture books and walk outside with your children. And as they progress in their learning, so will you. I didn’t know French or the names of birds or all of the explorers of the New World, but now I am learning that. I learn alongside the children, which is why I have never questioned my decision to leave academic life behind and start a whole new educational (and spiritual) journey homeschooling. Far from feeling like I “need something more stimulating,” I have never felt more engaged or nourished in my life. I am constantly learning new things alongside my children, finding spiritual graces I didn’t expect, filling in the gaps in my own education, and pursuing my own philosophical and literary interests in the afternoons—which dovetail with what we’re doing anyway.

I don’t want to downplay the stresses and difficulties of home-education, of which there are many and which ebb and flow each week and month and season of life. But I recently saw a study that outsourcing childcare doesn’t actually make life easier. Turns out that all those difficulties simply need to be addressed when the kids are reunited with you, which might mean less time to hit your stride and enjoy leisurely activity together and more time figuring out behavioral issues. So as tough as things can be here in the homeschool, I don’t think they’re any more difficult than if I sent the kids to a brick-and-mortar school, and the rewards of homeschooling are immense.

As for when the children are older, all I can say is to trust in the Lord and give no thought for the morrow. The Lord provides the grace we need. Each year provides new opportunities, and the homeschooling mother that you are in the younger years will not be the same one as in the older years. The veteran home educators around me have demonstrated that everything works out. All that is needed is prayer and will, and the grace will follow.

Be not afraid!

In the nest post I will provide a reflection on my method and a list of resources with links for our daily liturgical catechesis and some of our favorite and most used homeschool books and materials for pre-k to 3^rd grade (as well as some materials I would caution against).

Subscribe now

At first, I was intrigued by this essay. It sees Rousseau and his band of romantic followers for what they are; it knocks Dorothy Sayers down a peg and questions the value of “her” trivium and its implementation in just about every school that calls itself classical; it stresses the inherent value of an authentically classical education; and even touches the third rail of “the nation” and its necessary ethnic component.

And at times it is uproariously funny! Look at this:

Utilitarianism is an invisible prison. These days, one can hardly enter an argument—on any topic—without finding oneself in a walled garden of utilitarian premises. If you try to escape, you will first have to pry open padlocked doors overgrown with hundreds of years of Enlightenment kudzu. If you persist on breaking out, people will look at you with consternation and bewilderment. “But there’s nothing out there,” they insist. “Everything real is inside these walls.”

In spite of all of these virtues, there are some major problems.

One is that this author, in one fell swoop, reduces all homeschoolers to three “types” that, together, she says are motivated by the singular goal of reducing the “effort-to-reward” ratio. It is difficult to understand how such cynicism could be leveled at a movement that is, on the whole, a much-needed corrective to the modern, industrial school system (private schools included) and is the best source for transmitting the Christian faith—but oddly enough, the author seems entirely unaware of the huge traditional Christian homeschool movement and all of the good it is accomplishing toward the very end that she sets out for education: “the transmission of heritage.” And even the “normies” and “libertarians” that she excoriates at least have the good sense to keep their children out of the public schools.

Another major problem is that the author takes a strict classical education (learning Ancient Greek and Latin and also the history, philosophy, literature and art of Classical Greece and Rome) to be the metric against which all education must be measured yet fails to understand what a classical education is for.

Together, these two problems form the main body of the wrecking ball that Katakion drops on the homeschool movement. Lest current or prospective homeschool parents should read her essay (and there are a whopping 6 future installments) and walk away with the feeling that they are failures or shouldn’t bother with homeschooling, I’m here to state otherwise.

There is a growing trend on the conservative Internet to burn it all down, ironically, in the name of Western civilization (“Katakaion,” if you aren’t a Greek scholar, is from kata (“down”; also an intensifier) and kaio (to burn). Paul Kingsnorth is another name who, probably with good intentions, also believes we ought to begin demolition work on our civilization—as if the “machine” hadn’t done enough of that already (see his many iterations of “Let the West Die” around the internet; or his book, which I review here.). And over Christmas, I was disheartened to see the pen of one “trad Catholic” who had previously written some good things aimed against some very good traditional Catholics in a spoof of “The Night Before Christmas.” It was a very funny poem, but like “The Homeschool-Industrial Complex,” the author turned his wit and intelligence against a movement that, overall, is doing very good work.

I don’t think that such devastating criticisms are, ultimately, working to repair and build up what we’ve already got. Rather, they are demoralizing blackpills that leave one with a sense of futility in the face of “the machine” or “the homeschool-industrial complex” or “the trad movement” or whatever projection we put onto a much more complex reality—which always includes hope.

And this blackpilling is from those who would, as far as I can tell, consider themselves conservative. But there is something inherently revolutionary in the desire to raze it all to the ground and start fresh—even if lip service is paid to the need to “save Western civilization.”

But let’s turn to the essay.

First, the Three Types of Homeschoolers:

1) The Normie-in-Exile (a.k.a. I’m just here so my kid doesn’t have to salute a rainbow flag)

2) The Blue-Pilled Homeschooler (a.k.a. The Rebel with a Poorly-Articulated Cause)—or, “the spiritual offspring of Jean-Jacques Rousseau” (obviously I’m sympathetic to this diagnosis, as someone whose profession is to bring down Rousseau)

3) The Red-Pilled Homeschooler (“Based-er Than Thou!”)

They each have their failings but all are motivated by the simple desire to do the least amount of work for the greatest reward. Parents want to do as little as possible for their children’s education, and children, similarly, want to avoid difficulty at all costs. All sorts of problems follow from this, the author says, from “edutainment” consumerism that attempts to pass off fun as learning to the fake education of “unschooling.”

This is a very mechanical and reductionistic view of human nature. It is not at all—ironically—classical. The classical view of human nature is that man’s telos or purpose is eudaimonia, or living well and in accordance with reason and virtue. According to Plato and Aristotle, we all strive, more or less imperfectly, to attain this ideal. Presumably the author believes that she (or, he) is motivated by such a goal, so why does she conclude that the rest of the homeschooling world is motivated by hedonism?

I needn’t recount how much work goes into homeschooling, even for the “unmotivated” parent. I have yet to meet a homeschooling family that did it because it was “easier” than sending the kids off on the free bus that picks up and drops off for 7 hours of free babysitting, 5 days a week. But I’ll accept that perhaps these folks do exist.

And then there are the Five Pitfalls:

1. Consumerism

2. Utilitarianism

3. Egalitarianism

4. Pedagogical Ignorance (a.k.a. Rousseau’s Disease)

and

5. Also, Women

I wish that I could elaborate on #5, but the author says that we must wait for a later installment. I’m entirely open to the thesis that the West has been thoroughly feminized, ruining workplace cultures, and wreaking all sorts of havoc on society, but to level the charge that women are a problem for homeschooling is something that, for obvious reasons, I’m less open to.

The five pitfalls, the author says, stem from modernity itself, but homeschoolers are more susceptible to them than institutional schools. I can’t address each of these charges other than saying what is the alternative? But before I get to the author’s own Rousseauistic fallacy, let’s take a look at what she believes an education is for:

“Education,” the author writes, “is the transmission of heritage. The purpose of education is to transmit the knowledge, practices, and values of a particular people from one generation to the next. (And by “a particular people,” I generally mean those who share a common language, locality, religious heritage, and ethnic background.)”

I completely agree.

But then the author adds,

[E]ducation should serve as an institution that assists in the production and transmission of culture. The word culture is used here not in the value-neutral, anthropological sense. Rather—per [Tracy Lee] Simmons—“Culture is that which climbs high on the scale of human achievement, and is not easily apprehensible to all, and requires patient thought and sympathy.” T.S. Eliot’s invaluable Notes Toward the Definition of Culture posits culture as a synthesis of manners (civility), learning (love of knowledge), and a “sensibility to the arts.”

If this were not the case, then homeschooling—at least when undertaken by responsible and capable parents—might be taken as a worthy endpoint of education. Kids would learn fundamental academic skills and develop a modest cultural body of knowledge with their parents, all while being afforded ample time to do wholesome things like play outside, do their chores, and learn practical skills like sewing, small engine repair, and animal husbandry.

My contention is that, in order for our civilization to be worth preserving, it must provide some higher aspect of culture.

In case you missed it, the author is claiming that learning important academic skills, gaining modest cultural fluency, enjoying leisurely activity, and undertaking vocational training is not a worthy education and not the mark of a civilization “worth preserving.”

Let’s take a closer look at this definition of culture, since, as the author says, education should help to transmit culture. Well, what culture is being transmitted?

With all due respect to Simmons and Eliot—men who have made great contributions to culture—the definitions above are weak. In fact, Simmons’s definition is “value-neutral.” It is so vague that it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly what Simmons is referring to other than that only the few can attain it. Eliot’s definition is more specific and includes the important component of “manners,” but even Eliot does not here give us a particularly rich definition (elsewhere he develops much fuller definitions).

Culture is a complex concept and it resists strict categorization, but any definition that is to be of value must stress its moral function and its creation of standards of conduct.

Edmund Burke gives us a rich description of the role of our Western heritage when he discusses “ancient chivalry”:

It is this which has given its character to modern Europe. It is this which has distinguished it under all its forms of government, and distinguished it to its advantage, from the states of Asia, and possibly from those states which flourished in the most brilliant periods of the antique world.

That’s right—Christian Europe is superior to Classical antiquity. Burke goes on:

It was this, which, without confounding ranks, had produced a noble equality, and handed it down through all the gradations of social life. It was this opinion which mitigated kings into companions, and raised private men to be fellows with kings. Without force, or opposition, it subdued the fierceness of pride and power; it obliged sovereigns to submit to the soft collar of social esteem, compelled stern authority to submit to elegance . . .

According to Burke, Western culture, as it had developed until the time of the French Revolution—that great leveling event of the eighteenth century—produced a “system of opinion and sentiment” that “made power gentle, and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life.”

In other words, the ancient custom of chivalry and manners which reached its apex in medieval Christendom, humanized society. Classical Greece and Rome provided a rich soil within which Christianity and chivalry could take root and flourish, but it is not the high water mark of Western civilization (remember the common practice of infant exposure, for example?).

Irving Babbitt, an early twentieth-century Harvard literary critic, drew heavily on Burke for his development of the idea of the moral imagination and its antithesis, the romantic imagination. The Western world is divided between these two different qualities of imagination. Babbitt believed in the immense value of the Classics for cultivating the moral imagination, which he saw as synonymous with the higher will. Still, Babbitt did not see the Classics as the singular source for developing the moral imagination.

Which brings me to T. S. Eliot, a student of Babbitt’s at Harvard. Eliot stressed the indispensable role of religion in society and culture, and Eliot says in Notes Toward the Definition of Culture—the essay that the author quotes above—that European culture is Christian culture. Christianity “has made Europe what it is.”

“It is in Christianity that our arts have developed; it is in Christianity that the laws of Europe have—until recently—been rooted. It is against a background of Christianity that all our thought has significance.”

Eliot understood the value of the Classics in light of later Christian developments. The knowledge, practices, and values of this particular Western people is Classical but it is also thoroughly Christian. Eliot, again:

To our Christian heritage we owe many things beside religious faith. Through it we trace the evolution of our arts, through it we have our conception of Roman Law which has done so much to shape the Western World, through it we have our conceptions of private and public morality. And through it we have our common standards of literature, in the literatures of Greece and Rome. The Western world has its unity in this heritage, in Christianity and in the ancient civilisations of Greece, Rome and Israel, from which, owing to two thousand years of Christianity, we trace our descent.

Passing on the culture and heritage of the West means passing on our Classical-Christian culture.

This brings us to an important distinction that needs to be made, and it is not between the Ancients and the Moderns (à la Leo Strauss and his followers) or between the humanities and the sciences but between two different qualities of imagination: moral and romantic. The Classics are such a rich source of learning, wisdom, truth, and beauty because they exemplify the moral imagination. The classical world is one that is sensitive to beauty, to the limits of life, to the danger of hubris to the human soul, and to the overall complexity of existence. It has much to offer us, especially today.

The ultimate purpose of studying the Classics, therefore, is to become more fully human, but this is not the exclusive domain of the Classics. Insofar as we are able to imbibe and understand the imaginative sensibility of the Classical world, we will benefit from a classical education. But there is no guarantee that from it, the student will appreciate the heritage he’s been handed. There has been many a diabolical mind educated classically.

Karl Marx was fluent in Ancient Greek and Latin and had studied the Classics. So had Rousseau—whom, to her credit, the author despises. In fact, most eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European elites had been educated classically, and yet these very elites despised their Western heritage and instead cried vive la Révolution!

But it was the Enlightenment that tainted their classical education! Don’t you remember the padlocked doors overgrown with that Enlightenment kudzu?! Indeed, the Enlightenment has been our prison, but there is a way out—I’m sorry to say, however, it’s not in everyone learning Ancient Greek and Latin.

The real problem for Rousseau and Marx was the absence of traditional Christianity, which would have provided the humanizing element needed for the real meaning of the classics to penetrate their imaginations. It is possible to learn Ancient Greek and Latin and many other languages besides and also to know well the philosophy and history of antiquity without actually understanding the deeper meaning.

I know this because I studied in a classics department at a thoroughly liberal, secular school and was educated by professors who were, on the one hand, brilliant, but on the other hand, entirely missed the point of the great works that they taught. It is why I decided to pursue my PhD in Politics and not in Classics, despite my love of the classical world. I simply could not, in that field, ask the eternal questions that pressed me so intensely.

The field of Classics is almost thoroughly corrupted. Irving Babbitt complained over a century ago that the Classics departments had reduced themselves to debating philological minutiae rather than pursuing broader questions about the philosophical and metaphysical meaning of the texts. And today, a genuine classical education prior to university is hard to find.

The author dismisses the “fake classical” movement that has spread of late in homeschooling and in private schools. I actually agree with her that what we’ve got is mostly neoclassical, à la Memoria Press and Classical Conversations (both of which the author despises—are you seeing a pattern?). These are not actually classical.

But the question remains, is a strict classical education, including the mastery of languages, the key to “saving civilization”? Not if it can’t be acquired outside of a few elite boarding schools in Europe. The author already told us that we mothers can’t teach Latin (I would beg to differ, by the way; and not just because I studied classics. I’ve been a part of several homeschooling communities in which almost all students learned Latin either from a parent, a fellow student who would teach classes at their home for a small fee, or online), and then there is the charge that “teaching is a skill, and not everyone is good at it.”

If the “true” Classical education taught by qualified teachers to students who are motivated and eager to learn is a dream that is out of reach of most students in k-12, then it isn’t something we should be lamenting over or wistfully desiring. We must work with what we have, unless we should fall prey to a dangerous romanticism that would make the perfect the enemy of the good.

I’ll borrow the “Building Pyramids” infographic that the author uses:

The author uses this to illustrate why “edutainment” (learning is fun! youtube videos, oversimplified but “funny” “learning,” etc. etc.) is ineffective. Actual learning, which works through the memory, is difficult, takes time and effort, and can’t be acquired through Youtube videos (although, I must say, my children and I have learned quite a bit in the mechanical arts from Youtube). I don’t think that this is very controversial, especially in the homeschool world, but perhaps I have been sheltered.

But what if we looked at the chart like this: the the blue foundation pyramids represent the formation of the imagination—in one direction or another—and the subsequent orange pyramids (“higher order thinking”) represent classical Greek and Roman texts and art. The true meaning of this learning would be lost without the right foundation in the imagination—that is, without a moral imagination. This is true of all philosophy, literature, and art. Without a moral imagination for the texts or art to pass through, who knows what the person will take away from the experience.

What is this foundation in the imagination? Should it not be the classics themselves? In part, but not in unabridged form during the younger years. This is where myth (hey, here’s some classics for you), fairytale, hymns, folk songs, poetry, music, nature study (in nature), and most importantly saint stories and the Bible come in. This is the foundation of a lyrical and imaginative education that will lay a foundation for life. Save Ancient Greek and Latin and the history of antiquity until this has been established.

And the good news is that all mothers are up to this task.

But what about the later years? I don’t want my high schooler sitting around reading Grimm’s fairytales and singing Blow Ye Winds! I’m not as opposed to “internet curricula” as the author is, or to the limited use of screens (an online math program has done wonders for our family this year), or to subpar pseudo-classical curricula if you find that it works for you. I’m a huge fan of original texts, and when my children are in high school, I intend to have them read the classics and also enjoy leisurely activity, milk the cow (wouldn’t that be nice?), learn to change the engine oil, and take college courses if they desire. A balance must be struck, obviously, but I’m not a purist when it comes to educational curricula, even superior ones like the Classics.

The important thing is that they are not being indoctrinated, abused, bored, or bullied and are instead at the place where they are loved best. I think of Wendell Berry’s novel Hannah Coulter often, and of her children who all left her for “better things.” Their education and “future” was put ahead of love and contentedness at home, of living “with no thought for the morrow.”

What is needed to save civilization is imagination—specifically the moral imagination. The beauty of this is that it is adaptable, lyrical, open to interpretation, but also rigorous and indistinguishable from the idea of standards. It is the exercise of the higher will in all of the infinite variety of circumstances in which we find ourselves. Homeschooling is well-suited to developing this type of imagination, and I’m here to tell you, anyone can do it.

Edit: in a very amicable conversation with Katakion via Substack (it’s public), she stated that she does not wish to deceive anyone and that she is in fact a woman, am I am willing to take her at her word. I’m leaving the article as is purely for your amusement, but I’m also willing to stand corrected and say so here!

1

Once I began reading this essay as if it had been written by a man and not a “homeschooling mom,” it started to make more sense. His—er, her lack of personal anecdotes, tone, manner of argument, and most importantly bizarre and pronounced digs at women (”things not worth your time: “arguing with women” [see infographic below]; and number 5 in the list of pitfalls—“women”) all suggest that a man wrote this (for me the real smoking gun was Dungeons and Dragons as an example par excellence of high “effort-to-reward ratio”). So, while this avatar claims it is a woman in the bio, I (and a few others whom I have surveyed, including chatGPT) would contend that there is very likely a Y chromosome involved:

Forget the coloring pages (unless that’s your thing) and flip on an episode of the Chant School Podcast (Floriani Sacred Music men’s vocal ensemble) relevant to the liturgical season or holy day.

That’s it.

You’ll be amazed at the results after about a year. We went from a totally non-musical, non-singing family to a table of youngsters and parents wanting to sing the glories of God and finding ourselves in tune (forgive me, I can’t help it) with the liturgical year.

Here is the Pange Lingua, complete with a beautiful translation (and Latin pronunciation, which we just skip over in the podcast). Even if you only do a couple of lines and then return to it on the Feast of Corpus Christi, that’s enough. It’s something to work in slowly and over the course of years. This is the long game.

And here is a link to the Ubi Caritas.

I’ve found that circulating the same core books throughout each liturgical season (and adding a few here and there) has reduced my stress and overwhelm and allowed us to focus on what all of those other picture books point back to: the liturgy. The liturgy really gets to the heart of it, so why not go straight there?

Moreover, it conveys the seriousness of the faith to children from the get-go. Keep all the picture books and supplement with them—I do! But let that Missal get so used that you’ve got to slap on more packing tape to hold it together.

1. The 1962 Roman Missal/ The Saint Joseph Missal (for the traditional Mass).

I started testing my children’s patience this Lent by beginning our mornings with the daily Introit, Gradual, Epistle, and Gospel (sometimes only the Gradual and Gospel, if people seem wiggly or agitated). Depending on the vibes at the table, I’ll ask if anyone can see the connection between the Introit/Gradual (I’ll choose one) and the Gospel. I find this connection especially rich as it shows the clear connection between the Old Testament and the New Testament and it helps us to read the Bible through the lens of Christ.

To my surprise, the children enjoy this morning ritual—which, I should add, starts with them looking at the image of the day on our Illustrated Liturgical Calendar. The image and symbolism there gives them some context for what I’m about to read.

In addition, the illustrations in the 1962 Missal are especially rich in symbolism, and the full color pictures interspersed throughout the Saint Joseph Daily Missal captivate little ones. My four year-old stared at the image of the crucifixion for so long it caught my attention:

The 1962 missal is expensive but I highly recommend it for daily readings to begin your day or homeschool day and to follow the traditional Mass. You don’t even need to attend the TLM regularly to benefit from the Church’s traditional liturgy. The broad connections that Holy Mother Church makes for us in the daily readings has greatly enriched my understanding of the relationship between the Old Testament and the New Testament. And beyond that, it exhibits a poetical brilliance that is clearly the handiwork of the Divine.

2. Children’s Missal (Neumann Press).

   

This is a good way to introduce young children to the rhythm of the liturgical year. I never felt the need to explain anything in this book. I just hand it to the child with the bookmark on the relevant page and let them discover what they will.

3. The Holy Eucharist of the St. Joseph Picture Book series by Fr. Lawrence G. Lovasik.

Don’t overlook this profound little book. I had been thinking about the connection between Old Testament forms of sacrifice (and even pagan sacrifice—as the children’s ancient history books sometimes depict) and the perfect and complete sacrifice of Christ and the institution of the Holy Eucharist. This is central to our Christian faith, but I had not yet discovered a resource that I felt covered this complex history and theology in a way that younger (and even older) children could appreciate—until Fr. Lovasik’s little book!

It was clearly written by someone who understood well the role of sacrifice in salvation in history, and it turns out that Fr. Lovasik (1913-1986) published a book in 1960 for adults called The Eucharist in Catholic Life (it appears to have been republished by Sophia Press in 2001 as The Basic Book of the Eucharist).

4. Stations of the Cross for kids by Regina Doman (TAN Books).

The detailed illustrations on each page with accompanying prayers is nice for children when praying the stations of the cross. It’s also a great book to bring to Mass during Lent and Holy Week.

5. The Resurrection of Christ by Elena Trostnikova. This is an Orthodox book that I discovered a few years ago. We read it every year during Holy Week and/or Easter. The traditional Byzantine style pictures are as beautiful and rich as the text.

So as not to overwhelm, I’ve listed only five books, but if you already have these and are looking for a few more, I can also recommend the following:

1. My Book of the Church’s Year by Enid M. Chadwick (introduction by ). We have a little book stand that holds open the relevant pages of this book. Everyone enjoys staring at the pictures for the week/month/season that we’re in while I read from the daily missal when we begin our homeschool morning.

   

2. The Stations of the Cross in Slow Motion by Suzan Sammons (I just came across this and ordered it—I’ll report back).

3. A Missal for Young Catholics (Os Justi Press). A great “in-between” Missal for children who are beyond the children’s picture-book Missal but not yet ready for the grown-up Missal. Includes illustrations.

Why am I talking about Mother Goose? The US has just plunged itself into another foreign war of intervention. If the conflict assumes the same intractable character as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, then we may not see the end for decades. Let us pray that this is one last desperate act of the waning neo-conservative/liberal internationalist (heavily Boomer) wings of the Uniparty. It may not seem like it, but I think that we have reason to hope that a generation or two hence we will find ourselves less beholden to foreign influences, sacrificing American blood and treasure for other peoples’ problems.

The imaginations of American political leadership have been so thoroughly corrupted over the last century that when we achieve peace and diplomacy, it seems a miracle. I had been hopeful that Donald Trump, as the only major candidate in 2016 to campaign on a platform of peace, would finally start to turn the tide in American foreign policy. The public, reluctant since 1917 to be dragged into foreign wars, responded to this, and I believe it played a major part in Trump’s electoral victories. But whatever his instinct—probably not unlike that of George W. Bush, who also had promised peace—he was overcome by the dark forces in the foreign policy establishment entrenched in Washington. His own imagination and will were not up to the task of resisting the temptation to go abroad in search of monsters to destroy, as John Quincy Adams had once warned against.

We have been educating our children from the youngest age to go out and “change the world,” to “dream big,” to be “global citizens.” And another foreign war is, in fact, just the result we should expect. Look at the brochures for American colleges and prep schools, even public schools, and you’ll see all the same lofty slogans and promises of greatness. By the time the top students graduate college and enter law school or business school, their thinking has been thoroughly colored by this type of dangerous romanticism. To limit their aspirations to the “mere” local and parochial would be to sell themselves short. It is safe to assume that a great majority of the students who make it to the very “top” and after having successfully graduated from a Soros grooming program enter politics, will have dreams only of the most abstract and grandiose sort.

The final result—a president and majority congress and complicit media willing and eager to enter another foreign war, to waste tax dollars on frivolous programs, to persecute its own citizens, and to promote debauchery and heinous crimes against the innocent—is a product of a lifetime of malformation of the imagination. It begins in the nursery with the first books the child is ever read. The little one, of course, won’t yet understand his mother’s grand plans for him, but he will soon catch on. His own imagination will take shape alongside his mother’s as she, too, is encouraged to “dream big” for her child—even as his own mother works full time; the nanny will be there to read the books, and the example of his mother off doing something “more important” will be an important one.

One of the most popular “baby” books which is often given at baby showers is Emily Winfield Martin’s The Wonderful Things You Will Be (my review here). This is the quintessence of abstract romantic dreaming in baby books. In it, the mother wonders with her child what “wonderful thing” she “will be.” It suggests, at its core, that the child is to be valued for what she “will become,” which, of course, will be something extraordinary.

To hope that your child will pass on the faith and traditions of your home to his or her own family is something that sounds so antiquated and irrelevant to the way modernity defines success that it is hardly contemplated by most Americans. Even many Christian Americans bracket their faith in order to lay down rails that head straight to a “good” college—their first priority. It is assumed that everything else will fall into place so long as little Aiden gets into the right school. By that time, however, the die has been cast, and where Aiden’s treasure is, there his heart will be.

Which brings me to Mother Goose, the antithesis of the secular greatness mindset that is encouraged everywhere else in the culture. Mother Goose represents a fundamental humility, the God-given order, and harmony with creation—even as the stories remind us of the presence of nobility. Is it too much to suggest that these stories will help to lay the foundation of an imagination that will resist abstract romanticism? It is, of course, not the stories on their own that hold such power, but the loving act of a mother passing down these stories of old, these tales of pastoral bliss and lyrical beauty. The ditties stand on their own and need nothing more and ask nothing more. There is no future in which the child “will be” anything else. There are no expectations or anticipation of something that is “just” over the horizon. There is only the here and now, the warm lap, and the quatrain.

The mothers and grandmothers who bind the generations with simple, memorable songs and poems have acted as so many links in an unbroken chain, and rusty and worn as that chain seems now, somehow it still holds.

Real beauty, and the first beauty that we encounter is of the most concrete and local sort. This, Mother Goose stories draw our attention to.

We can awaken the moral imagination within ourselves as we form it in our children. Nothing changes one like parenthood, especially motherhood. I am drawn to the simple beauty of a cow lowing in a nursery rhyme right alongside my two-year old. “Behold, I make all things new” (Revelation 21:15).

I was recently perusing through The Annotated Mother Goose to learn something about the rich history and allusions behind these simple rhymes, but for all of the interesting stories behind particular rhymes and even the origin of the name “Mother Goose” as a teller of tales1, what is most interesting to me is the general spirit of the collection and what is says about our American and European Christian heritage.

John Senior and Dennis Quinn discuss children’s literature (thank you to for turning me on to these episodes!) in a leisurely conversation that leads up to Senior stressing the importance of Mother Goose stories. They are not mindless nonsense, even as they sometimes are nonsensical. Rather, Senior says, they deal with the most serious and important thing in the world, nothing less than the Kingdom of Heaven.

“Little Boy Blue,” Senior says, is “like paradise.” It is a meditation on beauty, “seen from the point of view of rest.” It is one of my two-year’s old’s favorite rhymes that we sing:

Little Boy Blue,

Come blow your horn,

The sheep’s in the meadow,

The cow’s in the corn.

But where is the boy

Who looks after the sheep?

He’s under a haystack

Fast asleep.

It hardly needs commenting on. The simple, serene image of a shepherd boy—one imagines a young child—slouched in a shady crevice of a haycock. We are moved by a sense of the beauty of the boy’s ancient vocation, handed down to him by his forefathers who tended sheep on the very spot where he now rests. Senior is right, it is an image of the heavenly Kingdom.

There is nothing utilitarian or purposefully “educative” about Mother Goose stories. They are “spontaneous bubblings of the eternal spirit of childhood, that delicious, joyous, nonsensical wisdom which is foolishness only to men,” Olive Beaupré Miller said. We are encouraged to pause and see the world as a child.

Mother Goose stories, moreover, introduce children to the basic iambic rhythm of English verse: de dum de dum de dum de dum de dum. And one who is familiar with this quality in poetry will be able to make use of its effects in prose, too. Finding the right cadence of speech is an art, and one that shouldn’t be underestimated. Christian apologists (which should, in some sense, be all of us) who can work to breathe new life into the old traditions of the faith are needed now more than ever. Exposing children to poetic harmony lays a foundation for their being able to pick up the art of eloquence and persuasiveness.

To borrow the inappropriate but hilarious example that Sam Leith uses in his “master class on the fundamentals of writing,” Write to the Point2, in 2008, London Times journalist Giles Coren rained fire upon the copyeditors whom he suspected of being guilty of altering one of his restaurant reviews right before publication. His email leaked to the internet to everyone’s amusement. Here is what Coren wrote in his review:

I can’t think of a nicer place to sit this spring over a glass of rosé and watch the boys and girls in the street outside smiling gaily to each other, and wondering where to go for a nosh.

Here is what the magazine published:

I can’t think of a nicer place to sit this spring over a glass of rosé and watch the boys and girls in the street outside smiling gaily to each other, and wondering where to go for nosh.

In case you missed it, the word “a” is missing from the last sentence. He was robbed of what journalists call “the payoff.”

“It was the final sentence,” Coren fumed. “Final sentences are very, very important. A piece builds to them, they are the little jingle that the reader takes with him into the weekend.”

And worst of all. Dumbest, deafest, sh—iest of all, you have removed the unstressed ‘a’ so that the stress that should have fallen on ‘nosh’ is lost, and my piece ends on an unstressed syllable. When you’re winding up a piece of prose, meter is crucial. Can’t you hear? Can’t you hear that it is wrong? It’s not [expletive] rocket science. It’s [expletive] pre-GCSE [like the American SAT] scansion. I have written 350 restaurant reviews for The Times and I have never ended on an unstressed syllable. [Expletive]. [expletive], [expletive], [expletive].

Funny as Coren’s anger is, Leith is even funnier:

“There’s plenty you can learn about cadence from even that little paragraph of (Cohen’s words) ‘anger, real steaming [expletive] anger.’ Look, for instance, at the punctuation of all those “f—s.” He should have capitalized the antepenultimate “f—-,” admittedly—again, written in haste—but had he separated all four with commas the effect would have been quite different.”

Leith brings up the uncomfortable truth that the sentence actually did end on a stressed syllable (“‘Nosh’ is going to be a stressed syllable whether or not it is preceded by ‘a.’ Both versions of his sentence end in a stressed syllable; try pronouncing the second one without a stress on ‘nosh’ and see where you get.”), but he says that Coren is also right in a couple of ways:

“The cadence of the sentence is altered, subtly, by the removal of that article. ‘Where to go for a nosh’ lands the stress with a xylophonic exactness on ‘nosh’—‘where to go for a NOSH’: diddy-dum diddy-DUM.” [. . .]

“And the second way that he’s right is that, yes, what he informally calls ‘meter’—formally, cadence—does matter. The difference between a sentence that really comes off and one that doesn’t may be just below the level of consciousness—but that’s where some of the profoundest work of prose is done.”

So many Mother Goose stories make use of unstressed syllables followed by stressed syllables (da-DUM). The cadence of the stories pleases us, it feels right, and we later intuit it when we are constructing our own poetry and prose.

As Walter de la Mare put it, Mother Goose stories

are tiny masterpieces of word craftsmanship—of the latest device in rhythm, indeed—the ‘sprung’! [. . .] they are not only crammed with vivid little scenes and objects and living creatures, but, however fantastic and nonsensical they may be, they are a direct short cut into poetry itself.

The lyrical beauty of these tales opens the child’s eye to the fact that some things in life can only be expressed aesthetically and appreciated on a poetical level. Children become aware that there is a rhythm of seasons and of the land and of creatures just as there is a rhythm to the words we use to express these truths about reality.

The “lessons” of Mother Goose stories, if we care to read them, are fundamentally Christian. They ground us in the natural order and encourage us to take pleasure in work and leisure—in the ordinary things of life (which, as G. K. Chesterton once observed, are in fact extraordinary). One has to imagine that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poetical masterpiece “The Village Blacksmith” emerged from the fertile soil of Mother Goose stories when he was young. Its penultimate stanza is Little Boy Blue considered from the vantage of manhood—of life having been lived:

Toiling,—rejoicing,—sorrowing,

Onward through life he goes;

Each morning sees some task begin,

Each evening sees it close;

Something attempted, something done,

Has earned a night’s repose.

In one sense Mother Goose invites us to take life seriously, for what could be more serious than recognizing a slice of heaven on earth when we see it? The profound beauty of the natural world, our duty to make order for ourselves, and the preciousness of childhood are accentuated in the simple tale of Polly putting the kettle on or Jack and Jill tumbling down the hill. But, of course, in another sense, her stories remind us to appreciate the lighter side of life and to bring a measure of good cheer to our daily work (isn’t that tough sometimes?). Above all, the images of Mother Goose poems encourage humility.

I’ll conclude with the story behind “The Three Wise Men of Gotham,” a funny Mother Goose rhyme that seems highly relevant for our own time.

Three wise men of Gotham

They went to Sea in a Bowl,

And if the Bowl had been stronger

My Song had been longer.

According to William S. Baring-Gould and Ceil Baring-Gould in The Annotated Mother Goose, the village near Nottingham called Gotham was a total backwater. Saying “wise men of Gotham” would be like saying “a sophisticated young matron of Podunk.” Gotham’s reputation seems to have started when King John (1340-1399) desired to pass through the town:

In those days, any road over which the king passed was forever after a public road, and the villagers (like many suburbanites today) disliked the idea of a main street becoming a public highway. To convince the king’s outriders that everyone in Gotham was mad, and that the king should therefore take a different route, the villagers one and all played the fool. Some tried to drown an eel in a pond; others dragged carts to the roof of a barn ‘to shade it from the sun’; still others tried to trap a cuckoo (and so have perpetual summer) by building a hedge around it—hence our slang word ‘cuckoo’ for crazy.

Let us all have the courage to devise a way to keep the feds out of our towns. And, hey, we might be immortalized with a little ditty to be added to Mother Goose’s tales.

Our favorite Mother Goose books:

The Original Volland Edition of Mother Goose

Kate Greenaway’s Mother Goose

Tasha Tudor’s Mother Goose

My Book House Vol. 1 “In the Nursery,” which includes many Mother Goose stories and a selection of other very short tales and poems for the very young.

The Collection of Caldecott illustrated Mother Goose stories in 4 volumes: First Collection, Second Collection (this one is our favorite), Third Collection, and Fourth Collection (beware of the terrifying story at the end of this one, “The Babes in the Wood”—I don’t recommend it for children!)

The Real Mother Goose

I recommend staying away from the less beautifully illustrated and altered and abridged modern editions of Mother Goose.

If you have other editions that you love, share them in the comments!

Subscribe now

Maurice Sendak is one of the most celebrated authors of children’s books of the 20^th century. He was a prolific writer of children’s picture books and an illustrator of many more. His influence permeates the contemporary children’s literary scene like a philosopher touches the intellectual scene of his age. Even if some of his books have fallen out of fashion, his spirit lives on.

Most modern literary critics and those who listen to what the American Library Association has to say, continue to pay tribute to Sendak’s work. They are counting down the days until 2028, the centennial of Sendak’s birth. I shudder to think what new horrors will be unveiled for the public’s edification and “enjoyment.”

Is this fanfare warranted? Are Sendak’s sometimes captivating, vivid images worth our kids’ attention? Are they beautiful?

Gregory Maguire, author of Making Mischief: A Maurice Sendak Appreciation, says that Sendak’s lasting contribution to the world of children’s literature lies in his unique “storyboard” approach to storytelling—“a set of discrete moments to be unpacked and regarded one at a time, like a set of nineteenth-century engravings of the wonders of the world. Look at this wonder! And this!” Such was the method of Where the Wild Things Are that brought Sendak his fame. (If you’re a reader of The Christian Imagination, then you’ll know how I feel about that one. You can read it here.)

But what about content? It is easy to get lost in Sendak’s detailed and highly imaginative images—and I have to say that the minimal, succinct text is a welcomed reprieve from the long and tedious children’s books that read like a liberal meme. But what is Sendak actually exploring aesthetically and morally? It is obvious that Sendak was dealing with dark themes in his books. Maguire speaks for many when he says:

“What Sendak has contributed, before, during, and since the wild things, is a child’s grammar of narrative and image sturdy enough to convey the anxiety and adventure, the danger and potential reward of the mortal world—a grammar that can be deciphered by a child too young to read.”

This—introducing into the nursery anxieties and dangers that heretofore were kept from the eyes of small children—seems to be Sendak’s real contribution to children’s literature. The images and minimal text are, actually, the appropriate medium to carry the message. How else could young children grasp such difficult, adult concepts as existential dread and terror? These were the things that Sendak wanted to confront children with. But why?

After reading about the lives of “Golden Age” children’s books, I’ve discovered how often the books’ authors suffered from terrible trauma as children and young adults (if you’re interested in children’s literature with quick but interesting biographies of the authors, I highly recommend Sam Leith’s The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading). These people later wrote books for children, and it seems to me that the children’s books that they authored can be put into one of two categories:

1) A story of childhood (or a timeless, child-like setting) that represents a blissful refuge from adult life—The Wind in the Willows, Winnie-the-Pooh, Swallows and Amazons, and The Secret Garden (all of which I wholeheartedly recommend for children who are out of the “nursery” years).

2) A story of childhood that emphasizes its real or potential dangers and anxieties. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland inaugurated this Trauma-first genre as I titled it in my previous post, and Charles Kingsley solidified it as a new norm with The Water-Babies (a book that he wrote while in a state, as he characterized it, of “dark nameless dissatisfaction and dread”). So many modern books fit into this category that it would be almost pointless to choose examples, which brings me to Sendak.

I will leave it to the reader to weigh the evidence and determine if there is something perverse about Sendak’s imaginings or if he is, in earnest, exploring the normal fears and anxieties of childhood. Perhaps it is both. It would seem that, at the very least, he is exploring the fears and anxieties that he dealt with in his childhood. The question for the modern parents is, should we expose our children to these same negative feelings?

I’d like to present a Sendak-style “storyboard” of images from some of his most well-known and celebrated books. I’ll borrow Maguire’s method which he presents in his paean to Sendak, Making Mischief. Maguire chooses various images from Sendak’s different books, “to approach a life’s work as if it were a single creative act and to concentrate on a presumed internal consistency.” I, too, see an internal consistency in Sendak’s work and I agree with Maguire that for our purposes here it would be less fruitful to “dissect[] a single Sendak book in its entirety” (if you’re interested in that approach, see my review of Where the Wild Things Are) Yet I detect different themes than Macguire, or at least, I interpret the themes differently.

Have a look.

The first two images below show the opening pages of Maguire’s “storyboard” of Sendak:

In case you are wondering who Gregory Maguire is, as I was at this point in his book, I did a quick Google search:

And here is my “storyboard”:

I could go on, but you get the idea.

I’ve admittedly selected some of the most damning images from Sendak’s books, but I don’t think that they are out of character or that they suggest something that isn’t there in the main. These are images from major titles he illustrated (many of which, he authored). Several of them were available at my local library (some of which I had to wait for because all of the copies were checked out from all of the local branches).

What type of culture shows these books to their children? Maguire sees in the images of flying children and children being cooked, a continuation of themes found in old fairytales. Yet Sendak’s flying children do not fly of their own volition but levitate away against their wills—and not only this but they quickly become naked. It shows how “vulnerable” children are, Maguire briefly explains. Does it? Do we need to depict children graphically in order to illustrate their vulnerability? Mother Goose manages to do this simply by placing children in their mother’s arms or asleep under haystacks. Their vulnerability is implied.

No, Sendak is after something else.

When describing his inspiration for Where the Wild Things Are, Sendak said:

“The wild things are my aunts, uncles and cousins who came from the old country, those few who got in before the gate closed, all on my mother’s side. These people didn’t speak English, only Yiddish. And they were unkempt. Their teeth were horrifying. They had hair unravelling out of their noses. And they’d pick you up and hug you and kiss you. ‘Aggghh. Oh, we could eat you up’, they’d say. And we knew they would eat anything. Anything.”

Throughout Sendak’s work runs a theme of cooking children, but these tales are no mere continuations of folklore. They introduce something qualitatively different. Sendak’s gay partner of 50 years, psychoanalyst Eugene David Glynn argued in his book Desperate Necessity: Writings on Art and Psychoanalysis (Sendak illustrated it) that our most intense desires come from a place of inner emotional necessity. Art and the creative act, Glynn argues, can arise from a desperate need to give expression to repressed feelings. Hidden emotional forces, especially those imprinted on us during childhood—shame and trauma prominent among them—shape the creative urge in ways we don’t consciously recognize.

In addition to being open about his childhood being an unhappy one, Sendak told a strange story about his father, who Maurice has said was a big influence on him. Sendak senior would embellish stories from the Torah with racy themes, which Maurice retold at school, unaware that it was inappropriate, and he was sent home. Sendak senior, apparently, would narrate “softcore Bible” to his children (Sendak senior’s father had been a communal Rabbi). At the very least, it is probably safe to say that Maurice’s imagination was colored at a young age by sexually explicit themes.

Sendak’s imaginative vision of what childhood is about was influenced by his own childhood miseries (we also know that he was sickly and often bedridden), and his books represent the quintessence of Trauma-first literature—exposing children to the realities of adult (and sadly, sometimes children’s) life struggles. “I refuse to lie to children,” Sendak said.

Not only is Sendak’s style of “honesty” now widespread within children’s picture books, but also many have come to see it as their duty to expose children to the darker side of life, lest they seem to be deceiving them. An important question that needs to be asked is: are representations of ugliness and trauma good for children? I answered that question in my previous post. I argue that children, even (and perhaps especially) abused children, deserve representations of beauty, and in fact forcing them to confront dark themes can do further harm. As for children who experience more or less domestic peace, why would we expose them to such nightmares?

And I don’t care if Sendak’s stories “end well.” The supposedly happy endings do not resolve the main evil of the story—which is that children live in an unbounded existence, constantly vulnerable, and full of anxiety. This may have been the experience of Sendak—and it sounds like it was—and it may be the experience of some children, but that is not the norm of childhood, nor should we represent it even to traumatized children.

The difference between the seemingly unbounded world of old folk tales, such as the darker Grimm stories, and Sendak’s stories is this: the pornographic element and lack of goodness and proportion. When I read one of Grimm’s fairytales I feel that I am being given a window in human nature and into the ways and feelings of the human race. When I read one of Sendak’s stories, the only thing that I feel is horror or, as the kids say, cringe.

There is a deeper cultural problem that is revealed in America’s love affair with Maurice Sendak. I doubt many of the readers of this Substack have his books on the nursery shelf—maybe Where the Wild Things Are, which I was gifted as a new mom. But many, many people loved him and continue to love him. His Where the Wild Things Are is constantly on the “best children’s books of all time” lists. I came across an article that said something like, Where the Wild Things Are belongs next to the Bible— on a Christian website! The secular literary world salivates over the man’s work, and if any of them were to read this article, they’d roll their eyes into the back of their heads and scoff that this lady simply “doesn’t get it.”

Sendak’s books are complex and treat children as whole beings, full of real emotions, including fear and anxiety, they would aver. This is true. And it is true that how to represent childhood in stories is a complex problem. On the one hand, we ought to respect a child’s intelligence, sensitivity, and developing interior life; but we also must respect the child’s innocence and youth. But the main thing that the secular Sendak lovers are missing is the element of beauty, both aesthetically and morally—the two, in fact, are connected. With few exceptions, Sendak’s books lack this quality (I’ll say that we love the Little Bear books, but remember that Sendak only illustrated these books; he did not author them). And while some of his drawings are captivating, vivid, imaginative, interesting, I wouldn’t call them beautiful when their subject matter is perverse.

A moral-spiritual vision guides all children’s books. If we look at the moral-spiritual quality of Sendak’s stories, we see the darkest side of life. Children are alone in a dark world—the color palette of his books reflects this—without parents or with a parent who isn’t paying any attention. Look at the emotionally-absent mother staring into the distance in the image above from Outside over There. Or at the camp of homeless children in We are all in the Dumps with Jack and Guy, half-clothed and fending for themselves.

If we’re concerned about the mental health crisis among young people and children, we ought to look at what we’re feeding their imaginations. It’s incredible what repeated exposure to ugliness will do to the mind.

And I must admit that I’m a little tired of being told by childless gay men and women in the publishing industry what my children ought to be reading, what “honesty” toward children means. If you explore the nexus of authors, illustrators, “paper engineers” (the person who creates pop-up books, for example—Sendak’s Mommy?), and publishers connected to Sendak, you’ll notice how many of them are homosexual, without children, and/or living, shall we say, unconventional lives. It’s curious that so many of them are drawn to the genre of children’s literature. Ursula Nordstrom, the famous publisher and editor-in-chief of children’s books at Harper & Row from 1940 to 1973 and Sendak’s publisher, refused a “promotion” to adult literature because she believed that the more interesting and important work was in children’s literature—publishing “good books for bad children” she famously said. (Nordstrom was smart as a whip and witty to boot, and also childless and living as a lesbian).

The instincts of Nordstrom and Sendak and many others may have been well-intentioned. Children have a rich inner world of imagination that deserves more than didactic morality tales. But to drop the child into an unbounded world in which good and evil are either confused or ambiguous is to harm the proper development of the child’s imagination, which ought to be taking shape as a moral imagination. Just because something is original and imaginative does not make it good or beautiful or even true. Beauty must be the first standard of good literature. And the mistake that Nordstrom, Sendak, and so many others make is to assume that just because something is (partially) true, it is also beautiful. Is it true that some childhoods are dark and traumatic? Yes, sometimes. But this partial truth lacks proportion and therefore beauty.

Recall ’s observation from The Ethics of Beauty, which I examined in the previous post: “Trauma results from a very powerful encounter with ugliness, especially if that ugliness strikes us as a kind of revelation, disclosing to us the real truth about the world.”

I don’t think it is any coincidence that the people who promote and defend Trauma-first literature, such as the books imaged above, are themselves living disordered lives, and very possibly are the victims of trauma. They see trauma and disorder as the key to understanding reality, hence Sendak’s statement that he refuses to lie to children.

Building up the Christian imagination requires the work of both demolition and construction. Thus, I will conclude with a list of links to books that build up the Christian imagination (notice that most aren’t explicitly Christian) for paid subscribers—thank you! These books could replace Sendak’s titles on the nursery shelf. The following are some picture books that our youngest children have enjoyed and that, I believe, exemplify the kind of proportion and beauty that is a part of the liturgical Christian life, in no particular order1:

Read more

I’m reading an interesting book by the Orthodox Christian called The Ethics of Beauty. I’m only about 100 pages into this 700+ page book, but so far, Patitsas’s interview-style meditation on a Beauty-first Christian ethics has opened up for me new and different avenues for thinking about the moral and romantic imagination. Interestingly, it has helped to sharpen my understanding of exactly what is wrong with so many modern children’s books.

Patitsas begins with a discussion of trauma and how Beauty-first ethics can address the healing of combat veterans. He draws on Jonathan Shay’s pioneering book Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character, in which Shay argues that Homer’s Iliad was a poem meant to heal the veterans of the Trojan War and that it has much to teach us about healing our own veterans of war.

As Patitsas points out, modern psychotherapy in America is talk-therapy, which is a fundamentally rationalist approach to healing. It assumes that the victims of trauma must confront their problems by talking about them, but this only worsens the issue. Drawing on the work of Dutch psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, Patistsas says that trauma “induces a rewiring of our brains” and that “various bodily systems and the brain are themselves the places where trauma is being ‘remembered’ or stored.” Thus, attacking the problem intellectually, as talk-therapy does, misses the point. In fact, talking about the trauma over and over, as modern therapists encourage, “actually involves a reliving of the trauma in the synapses and chemicals of your brain . . . This re-living them further intensifies the hold of these events over you as you re-fire the neurons and chemical reactions that made them so powerfully present in you to begin with.”

Patitsas observes that today’s war movies are veritable orgies of blood lust and theatrics. Unlike the Iliad which, although it contains such elements, “is a noble sorrow for the soldiers whose lives are cut short, who experience bad leadership, privation, homesickness, confusion, fear, and pain. The poem was recited to a group of veterans who felt all these emotions again, but on behalf of Achilles, Ajax, Hector, Odysseus, and all the other warriors who in the story go through just what these later soldiers had gone through.”

This first part of The Ethics of Beauty sheds light not only on the role of the Iliad in ancient culture and our modern social failure to help combat veterans heal, but also on the romantic imagination more broadly. Patitsas points out that a great many “serious films . . . revel in their capacity to mimic trauma-inducing experience and to evoke the feeling of being traumatized within the viewer. The pornography of trauma has come to dominate the film-making art.” And, I would add, the literary arts as well.

I think that this observation gets at the heart of what the romantic imagination thrills to. So many artistic and literary representations from the Romantic period (see my series on that here) absolutely indulge in the dark and horrific. It is as if the flattening of life of the ascendent industro-materialism created an intense yearning for feeling and emotion, which it was assumed would lead the way to spiritual or religious experience (Christianity having been long ago discarded by the cultural elites). The representation of trauma is a quick and easy way to draw out that emotion.

The Western moral-spiritual ethos of sentimental humanitarianism is driven by emotional excess and representations of trauma. This modern ethic requires us to indulge in fantasies of suffering in order to motivate us to revolt against reality. It is the recipe of revolution.

Patitsas’s insights could be very profitably applied to understanding the romanticism that plagues modern literature, film, art, and the social and political landscape in America and Europe in general. Patitsas recalled how when he was younger he had mistakenly thought that “traumatic experience was the key to authenticity.” In our culture, Patitsas says, there is “this belief that trauma and traumatic experience alone vouchsafe authentic truth. I felt this, too, growing up — that somehow only the person who had been a dramatic sinner had anything to teach me about spiritual life.”

Is this not the prevailing assumption of Westerners from the eighteenth century until now? If one has not felt deeply and keenly for the suffering of others, then what good is that person’s opinion? Identity-politics is all about vicarious trauma “suffering.” So long as you “identify” with a supposed victim-group, then you are permitted to participate in the public square. This is why men aren’t permitted to weigh in on the issue of abortion: they can’t be the hypothetical victims of an unwanted pregnancy. Or why white people can’t weigh in on, well, anything. As the great perpetrators of History, white people can have no say in politics according to the Identity Politicians. No matter that it is all a fiction. As Rousseau and his Romantic counterparts showed us, the mere desire for victimhood is enough to cause hallucinations of it.

Why are we drawn to the hideousness of trauma and victimhood as a kind of guiding light? Why do we seek out the experience vicariously through politics, books, and movies?

Read more

[Edit: I’ll be putting together a reading list for ages 8/9 and over soon. For now, I’ve listed some of our favorite books (on top of the ones that I leave on Senior’s list) for ages 5/6 to 9/10ish]

As promised, I’ve taken a red pen to some of the books on what is otherwise a pretty decent book list—the 1000 Good Books of John Senior. But it has some flaws, and I think that because of the stature of the titles on the list, fond memories that these books recall of our own childhood reading or reading with our children, and Senior’s reputation as a fine philosopher, educator, and Catholic, we might be reluctant to revise his suggestions.

Because this post is not about destruction but about building up the Christian imagination, I offer some suggestions below to replace what I’ve crossed out in Senior’s list. These are books we cherish and that I would highly recommend for ages 5/6 and up.

If you’ve been keeping up with my recent posts, you’ll know that I’ve begun to hold “classic” children’s literature up to the light of scrutiny. Since Senior’s list has been so influential and is gaining new steam on the Internet, I thought I would take a closer look at what he suggests as the best “good books” to prepare a person (child or adult) for the Great Books (Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, etc. etc.). I think that Senior is onto something when he says that “the seminal ideas of Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, St. Thomas, only properly grow in an imaginative ground saturated with fables, fairy tales, stories, rhymes, adventures, which have developed into the thousand books of Grimm, Andersen, Stevenson, Dickens, Scott, Dumas and the rest.” I think that the first part of this clause gets it right—we need an imaginative ground saturated with enchantment and adventure, but the second part, that these stories and adventures “developed into the thousand books of Grimm . . .” etc., is less clear.

A certain imaginative disposition is required for the ideas of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, etc. to bear good fruits in the soul of the reader, but is it primarily literature that prepares the soil? And, moreover, the literature of the Grimm brothers (good fairytales, to be sure, but these two Germans were heavily influenced by the German romantic movement), Dickens, Dumas (also a romantic), etc.? These authors have produced wonderful literature, but it may not be their literature that prepares the imaginative soil for a fruitful reading of the Great Books—or, more importantly, the formation of a Christian imagination.

Karl Marx and many other “erudite nihilists” (as one reader nicely put it in the comments) read the Great Books and were versed in Greek and Latin, and yet the imaginative soil that Homer and Dante fell on had not been properly nourished, and the fruit it bore was toxic to man. Senior intuited such a possibility, which is why he stressed the need for a certain imaginative disposition in order to understand the meaning of the Great Books, which Marx and many others have missed. But one can get the impression from Senior’s list, which floats freely around the homeschooling and classical education Internet these days, that the 1000 books he recommends are the essential reading for the Great Books, and I don’t think that 1) books in general are what prepare an imagination for rightly interpreting the Great Books or 2) the books that he has chosen are the most suited to the task.

This is a bold claim. I greatly respect Senior’s work and what he accomplished through the Integrated Humanities Program at the University of Kansas. Senior himself recognized the need for more than academic learning in order to shape the imagination. His program was replete with practical experience in the outdoors, encounters of beauty through stargazing, folk dancing, singing, and trips abroad, and enriched with friendships among students and faculty that make life truly worth living. This latter component—the example and inspiration of the faculty and the camaraderie that Senior and his colleagues inspired among their cohorts of students—should not be underestimated in gauging the success of the program. I think that to model their success on a micro level—in home education or at a classical school—requires an appreciation of this aspect and not focussing unduly on the book list.

In fact, the book list is perhaps the most known aspect of the program—many people might only know about the 1000 Good Books without knowing anything about IHP. But it is also the weakest aspect. Reading the books on this list will not necessarily put one on the same path as the students at IHP.

Because this post is not meant to be a work of destruction but rather of critical improvement and of fine-tuning our understanding of the formation of a Christian imagination, I offer my own substitute suggestions at the end of this post, and I hope the reader will take the time to consider my reasons for amending Senior’s list.

Two Flaws

In the 1000 Good Books list, I see two major flaws. The first is that many good books are recommended at too young an age. There is no real moral danger in reading these books to young children—at least no moral danger from the books themselves. But I see no real benefit to the child, either. The early years are so crucial for laying the foundation of a Christian imagination. I don’t think that Senior clarifies this point. He knows that students are in need of a certain quality of imagination in order to appreciate the ideas of Plato and Augustine, for example, but he doesn’t define what that quality is. It is a moral imagination, of course. But what exactly does that mean?

Before children can even get to some of the books that he recommends for the earliest years—Grimms, Anderson, Carroll, Collodi—some foundations must already be laid. Children (and adults, it should be added) must have enough contact with reality in order to appreciate the Christian message that is at the heart of all truth and beauty. Consider this: a secular Waldorf parent and a Christian classical education parent both reading one of Grimm’s fairytales to their child. The former parent will take away an entirely different message from the Christian parent—perhaps about the natural enchantment of life; the wonder of the forest; the feeling of moral irrationality in the world; etc. The Christian parent, on the other hand, will recognize that whatever is true and beautiful about the story points toward Christ in the world. The goal is for the child to come to recognize this, too. Then his imagination, which defines his relationship with reality, will be of such a coloring that he will see and understand the actual meaning of any story, whether expressly Christian or even anti-Christian. But this type of imagination does not come from reading Grimm’s fairtales—for the right kind of imagination must be in place to properly understand Grimm. Senior’s list alone does not convey this truth.

The second flaw that I see is that the list is heavily skewed to nineteenth-century British literature. The simple “lack of diversity” isn’t necessarily a problem. We don’t need diversity for diversity’s sake. But the picture of life that these books give is distinctly British—and nineteenth-century upper-crust British. This is not a bad thing if we’re including these books as part of a whole curriculum, but they don’t give a rounded view of life. They give a whimsical, turn-of-the-century British view. Enjoyable, to be sure, but won’t lay the groundwork for a Christian imagination. Remember, many of the books of the “Golden Age” of children’s literature—which is heavily dominated by British authors—were written largely by non-orthodox Christians or non-Christians. And is it too much to suggest that the sentimental flavor and romantic longing that characterized many of these books reveals something about British national identity that would explain the nation’s current trajectory toward cultural suicide? I wouldn’t rule out the connection, and maybe this is a thread I’ll pick up in a later post.

As for Senior’s list, it may be a matter of emphasis. I think that right now, anyway, the emphasis ought to be less on romantic whimsicality—although doses of that are never entirely unwarranted—and more on scripture and saint stories (which do contain lovely shades of romantic whimsicality, but rooted in the beauty and truth of the faith and tradition). Senior lists the category of “Spiritual Reading” at the end of his book list, which can give the impression that it is a separate “subject” or reading experience. Instead, I would suggest that spiritual reading be considered simply a part of reading, and that the Bible and “spiritual stories” should be stressed as the sina qua non of childhood reading.

Perhaps Senior would have done well to emphasize the need for scripture reading and also the need to read the stories of the saints at the beginning of his list, but he did compose this at a different time and the urgent need for a robust and thorough Christian education may not have been so apparent. Now it is clear that if our children are to withstand the onslaught of modernity and its dark and demonic forces, which have been revealed for all with eyes to see, Christian formation must take precedent over “education” in the narrow sense.

Scripture and stories of the saints enchant, which is what parents are looking for when we reach for Grimm’s tales or The Wind in the Willows or Beauty and the Beast. We are hoping to peel back the veil so that we can experience the beauty of a non-materialist existence, one in which providence is present in our every breath. But the stories of the Bible and the lives of saints teach us this—only they do so in a way that is more real and more beautiful because it is more true. I did not appreciate this until, first, I started to read many saint stories with my children and also began to understand many parts of the bible that reveal the spiritual nature of reality. For this, the podcast The Lord of Spirits by two Orthodox Priests deepened my understanding of the Old and New Testaments. I find myself passing on my knowledge to my children as we go through the Old Testament readings. Passages that I otherwise would have passed over, I am now able to shed some light on and pique my children’s curiosity. We are all fascinated by the Nephilim, giants, by the other “gods”—i.e. demons—mentioned, by Moses speaking “face to face” with God, and so much more. It turns out that the world is very enchanted, and once children see that God is the source of all enchantment, it will color their reading of Andersen, Lang, and Grimm and later any other author that they read.

This Christian foundation can be a very rich one. Especially now, there are many publishers bringing back old, out-of-print traditional Christian children’s books and modern authors who are creating along these traditional lines. There are also audiobooks (the Holy Heroes stories of the saints CDs are great) and even television shows (the “Littlest Saints” series on Formed features actual children play the roles of saints, and the shows are memorable and very moving)—I disagree with Senior that we should chuck out the television. I think that film and certain shows have their place in shaping the imagination and allowing us to take joy in the beauty that is possible with this medium.

I only tackle the “Nursery Years (Ages 2-7)” part of Senior’s list. I will eventually get to the rest, I imagine, but I think that my major criticism of the list is that in these very crucial “Nursery” years, we should not be preparing the imaginative soil with some of the books that Senior recommends. The books that I cross out, I do so (except in one case) for two reasons: 1) they ought to be saved for later, at least age 8 and over, not for moral reasons but because these years ought to focus on laying an explicitly, traditional Christian foundation in the imagination. And 2) I think that these books would be appreciated more fully and would give a richer experience if delayed a bit. Pinocchio and The Wind in the Willows, for example are profoundly beautiful but difficult for a 5-7 year-old to appreciate, aesthetically or morally.

It might be more enriching to the child’s imagination and moral-spiritual life at this early juncture to spend that time laying Christian foundations of imagination: the bible, stories of the saints, singing hymns and folk songs, reading Mother Goose stories (these are brilliant, by the way, so don’t overlook them during the younger years), looking at beautiful picture books, enjoying the seasons and living liturgically (whatever that might mean for your family), and spending time outside and in work-play.

I’ve prefaced all of this with some 2,000 words because I feel somewhat reluctant giving what sounds like curriculum or parenting advice, which is not my expertise. I have come to my conclusions from my study of history, politics, and epistemology (how we know what we know). I’ve recently turned my academic interests in these areas to questions about how to teach my children and what I believe shapes their imaginations most profoundly. I’ve spend my entire professional “career,” if one could call it that, inquiring into the role of imagination in politics broadly considered (so, in all human social relations. If you’re interested in my academic work, I published a book with Oxford University Press in 2022 called The Ideology of Democratism). As I started homeschooling, I began to notice a deficiency in many educational curricula out there and philosophical approaches that do not stress the role of the rightly formed imagination in shaping our relationship with reality. This formation of the moral imagination is, I believe, the most essential aspect of education. It is what orders our souls for the rest of our lives (not to say that they can never be re-ordered; with God, all things are possible).

[A Note about the list: it is the complete “Nursery” section of Senior’s list. Most of the PDFs on the Internet are the abbreviated “1000 Good Books,” which you’ll notice do not have anywhere near 1000 books. If an author wrote multiple books, only a few will be listed. Thus, the title “1000 good books” does make it appear that the list is more diverse than it actually is. Some authors have a dozen books.]

I highlight in red the books that I believe should be saved for later years, probably the next age category, which is “School Days (Ages 7-12).” I cross out one book entirely. Some things are a matter of taste, I suppose. I highlight in green the books that I highly recommend for this age. The rest I leave untouched. These are indeed good books and suitable for this age category, depending on your preference. And below are links to my own book recommendations for ages 2-10.

Read more

There is no shortage of well-intentioned parents and educators out there calling for the return of good books to a child’s education. I agree. The tablets and video games ought to be extinguished in a modern bonfire of the vanities, Savonarola style. It’d be tempting to heap my own cell phone onto the pyre. It is true that instead of being plugged into the Matrix, children ought to spend some of that time reading good books.

But are we fetishizing “classic” children’s literature? Are we treating it as a sort of panacea? I’m thinking about mainstream conservative-leaning, classical-education proponents. There seems to be huge stress on the role of literature in a good education but relatively little stress on the formation of the will and of the right kind of imagination. Sure, we hear about “character formation” and various “values” that a classical education should instill, but the bread and butter is a book list, and it’s tempting to obsess over it.

I think we would all recognize that classic books, however good, cannot on their own create a moral imagination. I recently met an interesting young man who was homeschooled and is now a professional classical musician. On his bookshelves were volumes of philosophy, political theory, literature—the great books. He owned the complete works of Plato and Aristotle, and I saw books by C. S. Lewis on display. Yet his favorite philosopher was Nietzsche, whom he could read in German. And he had an interest in magick—not the nerd game but the gnostic practice of “using ritual, willpower, and symbolism to influence natural forces and effect change.” Christians will recognize this as the summoning of demons or tapping into dark forces in order to try to change reality.

This young man was versed in the classics and in languages, was widely read, and was obviously educated. I think that because of his intelligence and curiosity, he naturally gravitated to literature and philosophy in search of answers. And for these same reasons, he came to understand that philosophy ultimately dead-ends. It cannot satisfy our desire to know the eternal truths. For that, we must engage the spirit. One turns either to Christ or to false gods, but for the true philosopher, the poverty of the intellect is manifest (Nietzsche’s concept of the “magic of the extreme” illustrates his own acknowledgement of man’s longing for enchantment). Only the spiritual life can answer to our highest desires.

Literature can deepen the spiritual life. It can invite us to consider a reality to which most of us are not privy in the ordinary workaday world. It does this by appealing to our imagination in a concrete, real way. We experience with the protagonist all of his sufferings and joys. But—and this is the crux of it—we have to have the right kind of imagination to benefit from good literature and to resist the effects of bad literature—and even to discriminate between the two different qualities within the same work.

We must be able to thrill to the right thing. Plato intuited the power of the imagination when he observed in the Republic that the rhythm and harmony of poetical works burrows into the soul (401e-402a) and can work good or evil on a person. For this reason, the musical modes, melodies, and rhythms had to be carefully controlled so that the future guardians would learn to love that which is beautiful and hate that which is hateful.

Classical education (homeschool and brick-and-mortar) has blossomed of late as a response to the abominable state of public education. Greater attention is even being paid to the role of the imagination—once the domain of the Left. But there is something missing, and that seems to be an awareness of how to form the right kind of imagination. Karl Marx was versed in the classics. He read Homer and Dante. He knew Greek and Latin. And yet the Great Books passed through his imagination to no effect. Indeed, one scholar has argued that Marx modeled Capital after the Inferno, providing us with a new picture of hell, one that is not the eternal consequence of having distanced ourselves from God but is the earthly hell of unfair economic systems.

If this is true, then the Inferno merely gave Marx the framework for reinterpreting hell and sin as his secular mind pleased. This is an extreme example, but it raises important questions about the imagination. How do we teach it to thrill to the right things?

The West has long been prone to hyper-rationality and an intense skepticism of the imagination. Plato, for all of his insight into the human condition, believed that the corrective to the fanciful imagination was right reasoning. Reason, however, is impotent in the face of a thrilling vision of life. Communism is the perfect example. In spite of its manifest historical failures, New Yorkers (or, rather, residents of New York) have elected a communist mayor. Why? Because people would like to believe that they don’t need to work and that an earthly paradise is possible.

It cannot be reason or rational thinking that defeats a faulty imaginative vision. Only a competing imaginative vision can succeed at winning over the soul. Part of our work of forming children is the difficult task of helping them to form imaginative visions that take pleasure in the Christian life—all of its challenges and graces. The right kind of literature can be an aid to this task, but books must pass through the filter of an already-existing imagination. There must be fertile soil for beauty and good ideas to fall on and take root.

That soil, surely, is a loving Christian home—a home in which children receive unconditional love, strengthen their wills through work, negotiate sibling disputes, overcome challenges, etc. This isn’t anything that readers of this Substack don’t already know. The point I’d like to raise has to do with emphasis. Within the world of conservative education, broadly speaking, there seems to be an overemphasis on Good Books and not enough emphasis on cultivating the type of imagination that is required in order to properly appreciate these books—and also the will that is needed to support the moral imagination.

John Senior intuited this. He realized that students entering Great Books programs did not possess the imaginative prerequisites to take in the meaning of what they were reading. A more holistic approach was needed—one that provided the remedial “skills” they had missed as children. Fairytales, stargazing, folk dancing, poetry recitation, and exertion outdoors were among the “subjects” in the Integrated Humanities Program at the University of Kansas that he founded. And yet Senior’s lasting legacy seems to be his “1000 Good Books list.” I recently came across an article on the program titled, “Born in Wonder: A Humanities Program Taught Us How to Change the World Through Literature.” It’s funny that this was the title of the article because the author mentions all of the other things that came together to create a wonderful humanities program: the relationship between the faculty and the students; trips abroad; stargazing; hiking; folk dancing. Senior and his colleagues created something greater than the sum of the parts, and literature was only one part. Yet the title of the article betrays something about the classical education movement today: the overemphasis on books, even good books.

It isn’t that literature will save us, but that good literature can help to deepen our contact with reality. The best books in the world will be of little avail to a malformed imagination, although there is no saying how or when beauty can take root within the human soul. With God, all things are possible. But strictly from an epistemological standpoint, the primary formation of the imagination occurs in reality itself—our “lived experience,” if you will. Aristotle got it right when he said that the home is the basic foundation of political order. The home forms us.

It’s worth remembering that children’s literature did not exist as a genre prior to the 18^th century (and the modern novel did not come into its own until this time either)=. This happened to be the century in which the West’s cultural demise began. Thus, our pre-modern ancestors, who were arguably much better off spiritually, did without the very books that comprise the bulk of modern education. This is sometimes lost when we simply hear the words “classical education.” We assume that we are going way back to when things were good, but modern classical education is a kind of hodgepodge—much good is mixed in, to be sure, but it is not the education of the ancient Greeks or Romans or medieval Christians (no, Dorothy Sayer’s “trivium” does not predate her famous essay).

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not calling for a Great Simplification. Each room of our house has its own library it seems. But I am starting to wonder if I placed too heavy a stress on the role of books in the formation of a moral imagination. I understood the danger (or uselessness) of twaddle and ideologically-driven books and also the beauty of good literature, but I think that I was overeager to get my kids reading books for which they were not prepared. And I think that this is a danger of the classical education model and of Good Books lists, Senior’s included. We can be tempted to assume that just because a book is a “classic” and has “stood the test of time” (although, a century or two really isn’t very long), it contains infinite worth and should not be judged. L’art pour l’art. It should be left up to the individual, even a child, to make of it what he or she will (again, I’m only talking about classic books, not modern agitprop). To suggest that children aren’t ready for certain “classic” books is to appear philistine, even within Christian circles.

I once assumed that children could handle any classic book—or at least that it couldn’t do any harm. But I think that their imaginations must be readied by interacting with reality before they are prepared for certain—perhaps many—classic books. I say this not because we need to protect children from “complexity” or suffering or death or other “difficult topics”—all of that is pretty well covered in the Bible and in the stories of the saints, which ought to be their literary foundation. I say this because children lack the experience to be able to distinguish between true and false visions.

Many children’s books (and even adult classics) are tainted with a romantic view of life—one that leads us away from reality rather than deeper into it. The genre was birthed during the romantic era. These books are seductive, interesting, imaginative, and richly described. Few children could resist the tantalizing tale of the moral life reimagined. Books tainted with romanticism encourage us to believe that life could be altogether different, better, easier, more beautiful. They tempt us to reject our given reality in favor of a dream.

The danger of these types of books lie in their aesthetic appeal—they cannot be combatted on a strictly rational level. So when parents say that they read all kinds of books with their kids and then “talk about them,” they miss the powerful epistemological role of imagination. The good news is that these parents are probably still safe on the whole from the ill effects of bad books because their Christian home life likely works to inoculate their children against the deceptions of romanticism. The Christian home does this, again, by offering a competing imaginative vision, one that is ultimately the more attractive.

But still, the books that children read are woven into their experience, imagination, and sense of reality. It is impossible to say what children take away from books that they read. Our own history and experience makes for an entirely different experience when reading the same story as our child. Books that tend toward romantic visions can color a child’s mind in a way that we don’t fully appreciate. Given the general cultural trends since the advent of children’s literature, I have to be somewhat skeptical of the genre and wonder if we shouldn’t be even more selective when it comes to what we read our kids. Should the bulk of it be the Bible, saint stories, fairytales, folk stories, and family stories that our ancestors once nourished their children’s imaginations with? Leaving certain modern “classics” as a mere garnish? There is still plenty of room for other stories—not least of which should be history.

But rather than jump to what children should be reading “instead,” I’d like to bring up the faculty that seems most neglected in all of this classical education talk, and that is the will. I’ll cover this important topic in the next post (and in the interim, I’ll have a paid-subscriber post—lest I should be skewered by the nitpickers and the naysayers out there— in which I take a red pen to the books that I think are best left off of the Best Classic Books lists for children).

Peter Pan flew in through the window of Darling children’s nursery in order to listen to stories, Peter tells Wendy. He and the lost boys know no stories. The maternal Wendy is deeply saddened by this. She insists that Peter stay—she knows lots of stories!

“Those were her precise words, so there can be no denying that it was she who first tempted him.

[Peter] came back, and there was a greedy look in his eyes now which ought to have alarmed her, but did not.

‘Oh, the stories I could tell to the boys!’ she cried, and then Peter gripped her and began to draw her toward the window.

‘Let me go!’ she ordered him.

But Peter Pan “had become frightfully cunning. ‘Wendy,’ he said, ‘how we should all respect you.’” He knows just how to get to Wendy, telling her that she would tuck the boys in at night and darn their clothes and make pockets for them—“none of us has any pockets.”

And so the children fly off to Neverland with Peter. It is a long and exhausting flight around the world, and when they arrive, the mists of their former romantic notions about Neverland immediately dissipate. Neverland “was real now, and there were no night-lights, and it was getting darker every moment.” The Indians are on the war path and the pirates are after the lost boys.

Peter points to a pirate asleep in the jungle beneath them. “If you like, we’ll go down and kill him,” Peter tells John.

“‘Suppose,’ John said, a little huskily, ‘he were to wake up.’

Peter spoke indignantly. ‘You don’t think I would kill him while he was sleeping! I would wake him first, and then kill him. That’s the way I always do.’

It turns out that Peter has killed many of pirates—“tons,” he says.

If Barrie didn’t constantly break the fourth wall to remind his readers that we’re just having fun and play-acting, then we might be more alarmed by his “children’s” story. Barrie’s Peter is not Disney’s sprightly and childish boy. He is vain, conceited, tyrannical, perhaps even demonic. But Barrie’s subtle and humorous delivery somewhat disguises the evil in Peter’s character.

Peter does not allow the lost boys to break their make-believe play or he raps them on the knuckles; he expects them to cheer on his return; he forbids them “to look in the least like him”—this is why they wear animal skins. As for the twins,

“Peter never quite knew what twins were, and his band were not allowed to know anything he did no know, so these two were always vague about themselves, and did their best to give satisfaction by keeping close together in an apologetic sort of way.”

Yet these quirks, shall we say, of Peter’s and even the constant flow of blood on the island are meant to make us chuckle. We are to feel sorry, somehow, for the lost boy Tootles who always manages to miss out on the fun, returning when “the others would be sweeping up the blood.”

Peter Pan’s character is such a strange mix that we are not entirely sure what to make of him. Barrie tries to make it clear that he is not a sympathetic character, and yet we instinctively want to sympathize with the boy who won’t grow up. When the children are making their long flight around the world before getting to Neverland, little Michael continually drifts off to sleep. Wendy cries to Peter to save him, but Peter always waits until just before Michael hits the sea to grab him. “[Y]ou felt it was [Peter’s] cleverness that interested him and not the saving of human life. Also he was fond of variety, and the sport that engrossed him one moment would suddenly cease to engage him, so there was always the possibility that the next time you fell he would let you go.”

Peter’s—what should we call it?—sociopathy? prevents him from forming friendships with the lost boys. I suppose it’s no wonder because when the boys get to be too old, Peter kills them (“The boys on the island vary, of course, in numbers, according as they get killed and so on; and when they seem to be growing up, which is against the rules, Peter thins them out.”) And Peter is so forgetful that he even loses track of who Wendy is when they are flying to Neverland.

An unruliness characterizes Peter. He wreaks havoc on the island, terrorizing his band of brothers and murdering the pirates (who, it has been speculated, are former lost boys who escaped Peter killing them). Yet Peter’s wild energy and taste for “adventure” is not really childlike. It seems to have more in common with the frenzied nature of Pan, the Greek god.

Peter’s pipes seem to be Barrie’s way of showing us their kinship. Barrie studied classics and Pan would have been well-known to him. Pan lived outside of civilization in uncultivated nature, and he loved to create chaos. He played his pipes as a way of hypnotizing his victims (it happens that Barrie was drawn to one of London’s literary giants, George du Maurier, who was fascinated with hypnotism and practiced it himself; it figures prominently in his wildly popular novel Trillby. Barrie had hoped to meet du Maurier, but he died before he could. Instead, Barrie “happened” upon his grandchildren—the Llewelyn Davies boys in Kensington Gardens one day).

Most stories of Pan have it that he was so hideous his mother rejected him after birth. Peter, recall, flew out the window when he was 7 days old and when he returned, his mother had barred the window and was holding another baby. Barrie’s own feelings of rejection as a child after the death of his brother must have figured into this mythic creation as well.

Take a look at Pan next to the illustration of Peter from Peter and Wendy. Does Peter not have the illusion of horns?

The word “panic” comes from Pan, as he would put those around him in a frenzy. And here we have Peter, like a wrecking ball on the island. He terrifies even the pirates. In the early versions of the story, Peter Pan was actually the villain. Hook did not exist. And Barrie had originally called the stage play “Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Hated Mothers.” The producers gently suggested a different title.

The early Church fathers believed that the pagan gods, including Pan, were demons. Nor was this a fringe belief. Saint Justin Martyr (110-165) wrote that, having heard from the prophets that the Christ was to come, the demons “put forward many to be called sons of Jupiter, under the impression that they would be able to produce in men the idea that the things which were said with regard to Christ were mere marvelous tales, like the things which were said by the poets.” That is, the demons (fallen angels) were trying to deceive humanity by telling stories that would imitate or pervert the true story of the Logos. Justin Martyr says,

The prophet Moses, then, was, as we have already said, older than all writers; and by him, as we have also said before, it was thus predicted: ‘There shall not fail a prince from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until He come for whom it is reserved; and He shall be the desire of the Gentiles, binding His foal to the vine, washing His robe in the blood of the grape.’ The devils, accordingly, when they heard these prophetic words, said that Bacchus was the son of Jupiter, and gave out that he was the discoverer of the vine, and they number wine [or, the ass] among his mysteries; and they taught that, having been torn in pieces, he ascended into heaven.

Saint Paul, Athenagoras of Athens, Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Lactantius, Eusebius, Saint Augustine, and other Christian fathers and Second Temple Jewish literature shared this perspective. It was mainstream.

“We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against power, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”

Zephram Foster at Ad Fontes recalls an interesting episode from history about the death of Pan:

The story, according to Plutarch, goes like this: sometime during the reign of Tiberius, an Egyptian mariner named Thamus was sailing to Italy by way of Greece, and on the deck of his ship heard a voice from heaven address him by name. The great loud voice told Thamus that when he arrived at shore, he was to announce to all that “the great god Pan is dead.” Thamus followed his orders, and the news was met with great cries and groans. The great god Pan was dead–what did this mean?

One important thing to note–and this is my favorite part–is the time frame. This happened during the reign of Tiberius. There was another somewhat significant event that took place while Tiberius was in charge. Namely, the death, burial, and resurrection of the Lord of all creation.

Peter hates the one who begot him (his mother) no less than Pan hates the one who begot him (God)—and it might be added that Barrie, too, resented his mother. The chaos that these two Pans create is as a result of their rebellion against their creator, the one to whom they owe love and devotion. We can see Peter’s longing (and Barrie’s, too) for this thing which he has rejected in the character of Wendy, who acts as a surrogate mother to the lost boys. This aspect of the story is the most touching, and we want to cling to it as if it were the whole story—a story of boys in need of mothers. But this, if I dare say it, is the romantic veneer that disguises the true heart of the story of Peter Pan.

In early drafts, Barrie referred to Peter as the “demon boy.” Peter was a villain who kidnapped children from their beds. Later, when a statue was erected in Kensington Gardens of Peter Pan, Barrie famously said, “It doesn’t show the devil in Peter.” We can’t be sure if Barrie was entirely aware of what he was creating. Art has a way of defying strict categorization and escaping the intentions and even full knowledge of its creator.

Still, there is no escaping the romantic dimensions of Peter Pan. It is, in part, a sentimental story of a boy who doesn’t grow up. But it is also a dark, even nihilistic, tale of life apart from Christian morality and civilization. This story follows the classic path of all romantic imaginings: the dream turns to nightmare.

It is impossible to understand modernity and the degeneracy of Western culture apart from Romanticism. Peter Pan is a romantic story. But the interpretive key to it is not so much Rousseau as Nietzsche. The Übermensche is the culminating personality type of romantic sentimentalism. Nietzsche’s superman fills the void left by our cultural abandonment of Christian morality. The sentimental-humanitarian ethic of Romanticism encouraged us to throw off all civilizing and restraining forces so that “natural man” could be free to create an earthly utopia. But the result of destroying Christendom and unleashing man’s inner “goodness” was not the will to brotherhood (as Rousseau et. al. would have us believe) but the will to power. Peter Pan, I would argue, personifies this.

Peter, in rejecting adulthood (he had informed Wendy that the very mention of his becoming an adult drove him to escape straightaway) rejects not just some abstract thing but the concrete aspects of life as an adult: marriage, fatherhood, a vocation, manners, civilized behavior. Peter can be seen to represent the Nietzschean figure who has transcended Christian morality and created his own moral schema.

As Nietzsche might have predicted, Peter uses his liberation not to create brotherhood with his fellow liberated boys but to gratify his own lust for power. With procrustean enforcement, Peter kills the boys who no longer serve his fantasy. He single-mindedly pursues the pirates, the war with which Peter started. The scale of values that Peter asserts in place of the old one he rejects is one of Peter’s own making. He is like a god on Neverland—or, rather, a demon.

“The imagination of the superman [Übermensch],” Irving Babbitt observed in Rousseau and Romanticism, “spurning every centre of control, traditional or otherwise, so cooperates with his impulses and desires as to give them ‘infinitude,’ that is so as to make them reach out for more and ever for more,” Babbitt said. “The result is a frenzied romanticism.” I couldn’t think of a better way to describe Peter Pan.

Babbitt argues that the Übermensch is “a most authentic descendant” of romanticism. Babbitt references a passage from Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra:

“Out into distant futures, which no dream hath yet seen, into warmer souths than ever sculptor conceived . . . Let this love be your new nobility, — the undiscovered in the remotest seas.”

This is the romantic dream set before our eyes—a Neverland, where, as Barrie says in the beginning of the novel, “we can still hear the sound of the surf, though we shall land no more.” It is the place of the heart’s content, which probably never was, and yet which the Romantic longs for. But this is the dream-side of the dual-natured Romantic imagining. The nightmare is its other side.

Why does dream turn to nightmare in every Romantic fantasy? Because we are not as gods. When we reject the Creator’s parameters for reality and try to invent our own, as little Übermenschen, there is only one way that things can go: south. Throwing off the very institutions and systems of support that bring us closer to God—the family, the faith, prayer, work, etc.—does not make us into “noble savages.” It only makes us savages. Peter Pan personifies this.

As Edmund Burke observed after the Revolution eviscerated civilization in France, “power, of some kind or other, will survive the shock in which manners and opinions perish; and it will find other and worse means for its support.” Once civility and morality are destroyed as mere vestiges of “white privilege” or whatever else the revolutionaries call it, a greater and more diabolical power will emerge.

The danger of Peter Pan is that Barrie makes his romantic vision entertaining and attractive. Barrie need not hide the ugly side of the romantic vision—the tyranny, the killing, the kidnapping—he need only make it appear funny, “childlike,” “imaginative,” “original.” And once he has done that, he succeeds in heading off criticism of his vision. Even now, to call into question iconic stories such as Peter Pan is to seem “puritanical,” as if the alternative to such “wild vagabondage of imagination,” to borrow Babbitt’s delightful phrase, must be puritanical morality tales.

But morality tales do not capture the imagination. And if Barrie has taught us anything, it is that the imagination is key. Capture it, and you can convince a person of anything. You can pass off ugliness as beauty; death as life; lies as truth; demons as gods. So the antidote to romantic imaginings is not morality tales or self-conscious “Christian stories.” It is works of imagination that deepen our understanding of reality. Stories informed by a moral imagination, rather than a romantic imagination, heighten our sense of the real, even as they operate through a “veil of illusion.” All of these stories will be Christian in nature because they will, in one way or another, reflect reality back to us. There is no reality apart from the Christian reality.

George MacDonald said that “In physical things a man may invent; in moral things he must obey—and take their laws with him into his invented world as well.” Barrie violates this cardinal rule, and the result is a Romantic bipolarity that manifests, by turns, as sentimental idyll and Nietzschean will to power.

All of this has caused me to think twice before handing my kids “children’s classics” (to say nothing of modern, mainstream children’s books). It makes me think that all books must be carefully vetted. This may sound extreme, but the imagination forms a child’s relationship with reality itself. My preliminary conclusion is that Romanticism permeates many children’s stories, and given where our culture is, especially in our near-obsessive desire to “get kids reading,” we might perhaps pause and pay closer attention to what they’re reading.

Why should children read? This is a question that I have begun to ask myself in earnest. As I discovered the dark side of children’s literature—a side that even many conservatives are reluctant to look in the face if the book is deemed “old”—I’ve found myself revisiting the first principles of my educational philosophy. I had assumed that the foundation of a young child’s education ought to be books, like the base of a pyramid. But after embarking on a home-education journey with my own kids and investigating deeply the themes and origins of many children’s books, including those we would consider “classics,” I have started to rethink this. Is it possible that children’s books should occupy the middle or even the top of the pyramid of education?

This is a radical prospect—for me at least. But it seems to be a question worth asking, for it will help to clarify the very idea of what an education is for.

Children’s literature did not exist until the romantic period (circa mid-1700s), and then it was not until the mid nineteenth century that it can be said to exist as its own genre. In the latter half of the nineteenth century and until about 1930, children’s literature enjoyed its “golden age.” In this time period, earlier Victorian tales of moralism gave way to more imaginative stories that dwelt in the realm of childhood for its own sake. It was the era that gave us the highly imaginative Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Tom Brown’s School Days, The Secret Garden, Peter Pan, and much more.

I’ve worked my way back, so to speak, to the golden age, as I have slowly discovered how painfully rotten most mainstream modern children’s books are. The Golden Age was before the proliferation of modern ideologies that corrupted modern children literature, so I assumed that these books could get a blanket pass; I could open up the trove and lay it before my children, resting easy knowing that blue-haired trans activists didn’t contrive the tale for the “education” of my children. But once I read some of these books and the biographies of their authors, I had the sinking suspicion that at least some of the classics are not entirely wholesome for young imaginations.

I’ve long known that what children read matters, but it was only when I began to ask the question, why should they read? that I started to sharpen my understanding of what they should read. Just because a book is “old” (all children’s books are relatively recent) does not mean that its imaginative vision is good, true, or beautiful. It may not be tainted by feminism, communism, or any of the other -isms, but the imagination of the author may still be warped or perverted.

I’ve already mentioned the problematic nature of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as children’s reading and the possible connection between its strange vision and the questionable personal life of the author. After coming across some intriguing information about Peter Pan and its author J. M. Barrie, I decided to investigate his work and life, hoping that this would add one more piece to the puzzle of children’s literature—and to help answer the question, why should children read?

A brief history of Peter Pan

Peter Pan’s character is first introduced in Barrie’s 1902 adult novel, The Little White Bird. In this story, an unnamed and lonesome bachelor, “Captain W—,” intimately befriends the six year-old boy David. David is, the narrator says, “a child of nature.” When he takes a tumble, as young children do, “he comes to the ground like a Greek god.” The narrator’s preoccupation, dare I say, obsession, with David can be explained in terms of the major theme of Peter Pan: a longing for childhood. But it can also be explained more cynically.

In one particularly startling passage, the narrator and David have “a tremendous adventure”—a sleepover. The man is over the moon that David’s mother has allowed him to spend the night, and he dwells on each detail of the evening, from David’s first entrance to his undressing (“I placed him on my knee and removed his blouse. This was a delightful experience, but I think I remained wonderfully calm until I came somewhat too suddenly to his little braces, which agitated me profoundly. . .”), his “dripping little form in the bath,” and finally to his place of repose in the man’s own bed. At one point, the boy wakes from his own tiny bed, apparently scared:

“You are not frightened, are you?”

“Am I not?” [David] answered politely, and I knew his hand was groping in the darkness, so I put out mine and he held on tightly to one finger.

“I am not frightened now,” he whispered.

“And there is nothing else you want?”

“Is there not?” he again asked politely. “Are you sure there’s not?” he added.

“What can it be, David?”

“I don’t take up very much room,” the far-away voice said.

“Why, David,” said I, sitting up, “do you want to come into my bed?”

“Mother said I wasn’t to want it unless you wanted it first,” he squeaked.

“It is what I have been wanting all the time,” said I, and then without more ado the little white figure rose and flung itself at me. For the rest of the night he lay on me and across me, and sometimes his feet were at the bottom of the bed and sometimes on the pillow, but he always retained possession of my finger, and occasionally he woke me to say that he was sleeping with me. I had not a good night. I lay thinking.

Of this little boy, who, in the midst of his play while I undressed him, had suddenly buried his head on my knees. . .

This is the most damning part of the story from the modern reader’s perspective. It may not have struck its original audience with the sexual overtones that it hits us with, but no matter how you read it, it is about a lonely adult seeking, in some way or other, intimacy with a child.

It turns out that Barrie had been seeking just such intimacy when he came across three little boys with their nanny in Kensington Gardens one day. They were the Llewelyn Davies boys, and their lives would never be the same. Barrie inserted himself into their family immediately as if he were a close relation. The boys’ mother, Sylvia, seemed to enjoy the company of “Uncle Jim,” but their father Arthur resented his presence when he’d return from a long day of work and find his children playing with this stranger.

The youngest, Michael, became the favorite of Barrie, and this was well-known to the other boys. Although no evidence of any sexual abuse has come to light, the tragic story of Michael’s life seems to reveal that his relationship with Barrie was not a healthy one. Biographers often note Barrie’s emotionally controlling and overbearing nature. He supported the family financially and even took Michael and Sylvia on holiday once (without either Barrie’s or Sylvia’s spouses). After the premature deaths of Arthur and Sylvia, each to cancer, Barrie took an even more active role in the boys’ lives. He would bring them to Scotland with him for months at a time. He paid for Michael to attend Eton, and he wrote daily letters to him—brother Peter Davies destroyed over 2,000 letters between the two.

While at Eton, it is reported by a fellow student that Michael had a male lover. When Michael left Eton for Christ Church, he became very close friends with a fellow student named Rupert Buxton, whom it was rumored was also a lover. The nature of their relationship came under scrutiny after the two died in a mysterious drowning incident at a dangerous swimming spot on the Thames river.

The story is all the more haunting because of Michael’s recurring nightmares about drowning—nightmares that Barrie said he could quell only by staying up all night with the boy. The parallel with the episode from Barrie’s novel is, to say the least, startling. The Little White Bird was first published in 1902 when Michael Davies was only two years old. It is as if Barrie’s fantasy had come true.

The overwhelming circumstantial evidence suggests that Barrie groomed Michael Llewelyn Davies. Whether this was conscious or the result of his own unresolved childhood trauma remains an open question.

The defining moment of Barrie’s childhood was the death of his older brother David (the name, recall of the boy in The Little White Bird). On the eve of his fourteenth birthday, David, who was his mother’s favorite child, fell in an ice-skating accident and died of a skull fracture. Barrie, six at the time of the accident, recalls how he had tried throughout his childhood to cheer his depressive mother. He dressed in David’s clothes and tried to impersonate his mannerisms. The idea of eternal childhood had occurred to young Barrie.

“I sat a great deal on her bed trying to make her forget him,” Barrie wrote, “which was my crafty way of playing physician.” Zipes highlights Barrie’s love of doctoring—not only his mother but many people with whom he came in contact, “prescribing how they should feel, what they should do, and what medicine they should take in certain instances—basically, ordering their lives for them.” Barrie indulged in this part of “doctor” in the lives of the Llewelyn Davies boys and their mother. It is possible to read this type of controlling behavior as a coping mechanism for Barrie’s feeling as though he had no control over his mother’s emotions—the one thing he would have liked to control.

Barrie was only just over 5 feet tall and struggled socially; he never had a romantic relationship with a woman before he met his wife, and it is reported that their marriage was never consummated. He threw himself into his writing. His first novel, The Little Minister (1891), did very well. Its main character falls in love with a gypsy and must navigate the unhappy reaction of the townsfolk to his nonconformism—he explored romantic themes from the outset of his career. Margaret Ogilvy is the biography he wrote about his mother, “which in part created the legend of young Jamie, who could never replace his dead brother in his mother’s eyes.” His second novel, Sentimental Tommy (1896), foreshadows Peter Pan, telling the story of a boy “so fond of being a boy that he could not grow up.” Zipes tells us that this book “had strong autobiographical elements.”

The theme of longing for childhood and the idea of an eternal childhood are further developed in Peter Pan, which expands the story-within-a-story of the Peter Pan who flies around Kensington Gardens that is told to David in The Little White Bird.

Peter Pan was first performed on stage in 1904 and later adapted into the children’s book Peter and Wendy in 1911. Barrie explores the very Romantic (era) idea of childhood as a world of its own, and Peter Pan becomes a symbol of this—one that entered our cultural mythos almost immediately.

By turns, witty, sentimental, entertaining, and also surprisingly dark, Peter Pan is nothing if not a highly imaginative, often enjoyable, story. My favorite part of the book, by far, is the character of Hook, which made me laugh out loud. Hailing from the British upper crust and a graduate of Eton College, Hook vacillates between a preoccupation with “good form” and anxiety about the ticking crocodile that is ever in hot pursuit (having enjoyed Hook’s hand so much, Barrie tells us, the crocodile was after the rest of him).

When we first encounter Hook, he is made to appear ridiculous, a once-important figure in society who, although having fallen from grace, still clings to old etiquette. Barrie seems to be inserting his own social criticism about turn-of-the-century British society. Despite his life as a pirate, Hook’s frame of reference remains the old elite boarding school; he thinks about its rules as he hunts down Peter Pan and the lost boys and tries to avoid the tribe of Indians. All of the bands of beasts, Indians, pirates, and boys are in pursuit of one another, in a “procession [that] must continue indefinitely until one of the parties stops or changes its pace.” The entire scene is meant to be as absurd as each individual character.

It is during the final battle with Peter Pan that Barrie is at his finest. Hook drops his sword and when Peter Pan “with a magnificent gesture” invites him to pick it up, Hook does so, “but with a tragic feeling that Peter was showing good form.” Hook had, up to that point, “thought it was some fiend fighting him, but darker suspicions assailed him now.”

‘Pan, who and what art thou?’ he cried huskily.

‘I’m youth, I’m joy,’ Peter answered at a venture, ‘I’m a little bird that has broken out of the egg.’

This, of course, was nonsense; but it was proof to the unhappy Hook that Peter did not know in the least who or what he was, which is the very pinnacle of good form.

At Eton, for a student to be selected for the top club, he must not only have good form but prove that he didn’t know he had it. Thus, the real death blow to Hook was not that Peter outfought him but that he did it innocently with good form.

Peter Pan is imaginative, colorful, and very entertaining. It is an alluring story. But is it a worthy vision? Is it one that we ought to be seduced by? Or is it, at bottom, an adult projection onto childhood of an adult’s desire not to grow up?

I’ll explore this idea and the dark threads that lurk in Barrie’s vision of Neverland. What does his vision, which has had such staying power and has captivated so many, say about our own cultural imagination? Stay tuned.

But Leith shows in one biographical sketch after another just how many of these authors were writing from a place of deep trauma; or, interestingly, inflicting trauma on their own children through their work (Christopher Robin was only one child of many whose resentment ran deep). Chances are good that one or more of the “classic” children’s books on your shelf was written as a form of adult therapy—and it’s not clear that its aesthetic working out in the children’s story is beneficial to its audience.

Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, A Little Princess, Winnie-the-Pooh, Pippi Longstocking, and The Sword in the Stone are just a few that, after reading Leith’s book have given me pause. That’s not to say that Leith warns against any of these books. Not at all. He presents relevant biographical information alongside interesting aspects of these stories. He provides the food, to paraphrase the dear modern children’s movie Ratatouille; I provide the perspective. Which is to say (besides that I am playing the role of a man named Anton Ego, if you’re still with the Ratatouille reference) that Leith has done incredible work laying out a brief—if you consider 500+ pages brief—but brilliant history of childhood reading, and I have drawn certain philosophical conclusions. One of those conclusions is that even if a book is on a conservative- or traditional-minded good books list, it should be carefully considered before handing it to a child. And, moreover, the effect of these books on adults should not be overlooked.

In the course of writing this Substack newsletter, I have learned a great deal about the personal lives of children’s authors (true children’s authors, that is, who have expressly written for a child audience). What I have learned is that the personal life of the author is very often related to the imagination behind the story. I was, of course, surprised and saddened to learn that Robert Munsch, the author of the iconic ‘90s children’s book Love You Forever had decided that, when the time comes, he would be making use of Canada’s assisted suicide program. I had previously written about the imagination behind his “classic” book and how disordered it was. When his personal life came to light in the news, it seemed to me of a piece with the story he’d written. And then there’s Crockett Johnson, author of Harold and the Purple Crayon. Johnson, I discovered (after giving his famous children’s book some thought) was a card-carrying communist on an FBI list (back when this meant something). I could go on. But my point is that when Leith started to draw his readers’ attention to the, shall we say, complicated personal lives of authors, I was not entirely surprised.

I should set out by saying that even the most troubled artist (sometimes because of his suffering) can produce great works of art. God can create incredible beauty out of brokenness. Moreover, there is not a 1-to-1 correlation between the author’s personal life and his stories. Great art is variegated, layered with different meaning—sometimes meaning that escapes the author’s own intentions. The question I would like to ask is, should we reconsider some of the books that have entered the western canon of children’s literature?

Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland is one such book. This has a definitive place on the bookshelves of children and adolescents in the Anglophone world. Yet its bizarre creation and strange storyline (if it may be called that) and adult themes suggest that this is not at all a book for children. Carroll himself was an odd fellow. Having received a studentship at Christ Church, it was expected that Carroll (born Charles Dodgson) would enter the priesthood and remain unmarried. He did remain unmarried but was never ordained. “Does this point to a wavering of faith — as can seemingly be found in the almost nihilistic flavour of parts of the Alice books?” Leith asks. It should be noted that Leith is no conservative or even a Christian, as far as I can tell. Leith nonetheless provides an excellent history of childhood reading with fascinating biographical details of the authors. Of Carroll’s book, Leith says,

“It’s almost impossible to overstate what strange books Alice’s Adventures and its sequel are. That they are nonsense, and that they are the account of a dream, or a nested series of dreams, is relevant. From these premises they get their giddy transitions and shifts of scene, their doublings and their longeurs (there can have been few readers, I think, who have wished that the Alice books contained more puns). Their heroine’s progress through Wonderland proceeds more like a string of static tableaux or set-pieces than a continuous narrative.

There’s a strong case to be made that they aren’t really — or aren’t primarily — even children’s books at all. The current of feeling that animates the myth of their creation, and animates the books themselves, is an adult one. They contain mathematical conundrums [Carroll was a lecturer in mathematics], theological echoes and philosophy-of-language jokes, and admit of psychoanalytic and mythological readings, many of which seem quite an unusual bill of fare for what Carroll himself called ‘a fairy-tale.’”

After perspicacious analysis of Alice’s Adventures, Leith informs readers of Carroll’s odd affinity for children—what we might call pedophilia today. The conclusion of Alice’s Adventures is rather odd, as Alice wakes and her sister, in whose lap Alice has been lying, begins to dream:

“First, she dreamed of little Alice herself, and once again the tiny hands were clapsed upon her knee, and the bright eager eyes were looking up into hers — she could hear the very tones of her voice, and see that queer little toss of her head to keep back the wandering hair that would always get into her eye . . .”

Leith says,

“There, as nowhere in the body of the book, is the tender and exact recollection of an authentic mannerism, that head-toss. Though it’s ascribed to Alice’s sister (Alice Liddell’s older sister Lorina was only thirteen [Alice Liddell was the little girl to whom Carroll told the story one lazy summer afternoon]) that is surely a Carroll’s-eye, an adult, gaze. A grown man, more than a thirteen-year-old girl, would be struck by ‘little Alice’, her ‘tiny hands’, and the eyes ‘looking up into hers’”.

It is at this point that Leith tells readers about Carroll’s “child-friends,” whom he had accumulated throughout his life, “and did so in a way that looked an awful lot like what we’d now call grooming.” Leith goes on,

“He found excuses to talk to them in public places, befriended their parents, beguiled them with toys and tricks, and sought permission from their parents (some of whom, latterly, would have been impressed by his fame) to meet and photograph them. Some of these photographs depicted the children naked.”

There are some weird people out there, and apparently Carroll was one of them. If Alice’s Adventures had redeeming literary qualities then I could perhaps overlook his perversities. But Alice’s Adventures is, like so many “children’s” books, not a book for children. Again Leith’s analysis is incisive:

“The books are haunted by anxieties about identity, meaning, death and the passing of time — though they approach those anxieties through jokes and riddles and paradoxes. It takes an adult to really apprehend the ways in which they are frightening. . .

Early in the first book, as she shrinks, Alice worries that the process might end ‘“in my going out altogether, like a candle. I wonder what I should be like then?” And she tried to fancy what the flame of a candle is like after the candle is blown out.’ Shades, perhaps, of a smile without a cat. The image is reprised, in still more alarming form, in Through the Looking-Glass, when Tweedledee points out the sleeping King and tells Alice: ‘Why, you’re only a sort of thing in his dream! Tweedledum chimes in: ‘If that there King was to wake, you’d go out — bang! — just like a candle!’ Suddenly, we’re in what’s sometimes called a mise-en-abyme, an infinite corridor of mirrors: Alice’s dream contains a dream-character for whom Alice is herself a dream-character.”

At this point, I found myself wondering, at what age should this be read, if ever? For children, who are struggling to understand reality and their own place in the world, a topsy-turvy trip like Alice’s Adventures is the exact opposite of what they need. Rather than helping them to find their footing morally, ethically, practically, the floor—literally—drops out from under them.

And yet, like so many adult “children’s” books, I suspect that children are unable to incorporate much of this story into their imaginations—either to give it assent or to reject it. It is nonsensical. What is its effect on children? It almost seems experimental to read it to them. If it does not deepen their contact with reality—which is to say, form in them a moral imagination—and does the very opposite by prompting existential anxiety, then why should adolescents, to say nothing of children, read it?

“The books may be concerned with childhood but their protagonist is an odd, and not very childlike, child,” Leith says.

“Alice is pragmatic, good-natured and a little proud — though often also frequently bewildered and frightened or upset. Both books end with violent tantrums. But she doesn’t noticeably develop; such changes as she undergoes are changes of mood (and size). Rather, she’s there as an interlocutor, a foil to the succession of peculiar individuals and situations she meets: a proxy, in some way, for the rational reader wondering what on earth is going on. In most respects, she’s more adult than the characters she meets on her adventures. You could even see Wonderland as an externalisation of her childishness.”

Unless we’re using Alice’s Adventures as an aesthetic expression of the futility of, say, Soviet Communism, then I don’t see it as a book that is particularly valuable for children or adolescents (or perhaps even adults) to read. It is doubtless a projection of the author’s own existential insecurities, perhaps having lost his Christian faith, never found the stability of marriage or family life, his unnatural attraction to children, or some combination. The utterly disordered psychic reality of Carroll’s desire for “child-friends” surely played no small role in his literary exploration of an upside-down irreality with an adult-like young girl at its center.

Something that Leith mentions in The Haunted Wood (a title so alluring that my children asked me to read it to them) is that childhood reading is something of a paradox, for the books are written by adults who are writing about the experience of childhood. Yet there is an enormous chasm that separates the mind of an adult from the mind of a child. The author Edith Nesbit (1854-1924) says it well: “There is only one way of understanding children,” Leith quotes her saying in 1913. “They cannot be understood by imagination, by observation, nor even by love. They can only be understood by memory. Only by remembering how you felt and thought when you yourself were a child can you arrive at any understanding of the thoughts and feelings of children.”

Yet how many authors can remember this and remember it vividly? My own experience of poring through children’s literature over the past several years is, as I have noted here, that a great many “children’s books” are actually books by and for adults. There seems to be almost an inverse relationship between the most well-known “classic” children’s books and my children’s interest in the books. It is something I’ve wondered at. I’m starting to believe that this is because these particular books are not for children (even some that were written for children). This isn’t to say that they are all morally questionable, as I believe Alice’s Adventures are, but that they are not suitable for a child’s imagination.

Children are in a constant process of forming their imaginations, their wills, and their reason. The purpose of literature is to broaden and deepen our understanding of reality. When we read books as adults, we are able to synthesize what we read, to sort it out, and reflect on it. Sometimes we only intuitively sense that we like or dislike a book. This is because of our already-formed imaginations. What we read resonates with us because of our “lived reality,” to borrow the modern expression. We have experienced reality through contact with other people and with the world. This is what allows a book to change us—or not, if we deem it false. But children do not yet have the ability to discriminate between the moral imagination and a partial and warped imagination. They must be guided in this.

My question is, have we been sufficiently discriminating about what and how much our children read? If they have not had enough experience of reality in order to engage properly and critically with a book, then it might not be appropriate for them at that juncture in their development. And I wonder if far more books fit into this category than we think.

The Great Simplification, shall we say, of the post ‘60s West has left those of us who are trying to recover our lost heritage reaching for old things—old books, old houses, old ways of life. And rightfully so, I think. But perhaps more play and less reading is called for. Perhaps we are overeager to thrust the classics into the hands of our young-ish children. Or maybe that’s just me, and this is my own revelation. But I sense that I am not alone in the conservative or traditionally-minded culture in wanting to give my kids the books of which I was “deprived” as a child.

I don’t, in fact, remember reading anything between Aesop, which my dad read to me when I was about 6, and Othello in ninth grade. I played outside in the dessert behind my house in New Mexico for most of my childhood, and I’m wondering if that really did me so much harm. I grew to love reading. Now, I can’t get enough of it. And yet, having four children has forced me to slow down and really digest, in small bits, books and philosophical ideas. I don’t publish nearly as much as I’d like, but then again, should I be cranking out essays? As I sit on ideas and churn them in my mind as I wash dishes or scrub toilets or haul chicken feed, I refine them and change them. I discuss them with my best friend, another homeschooling mom with a PhD in Politics, over the squeals and yelps and needs of our party of 10. My domestic responsibilities force me to slow down and really consider what it is that I am reading and thinking and writing. It has been enormously helpful in sharpening my understanding of reality.

I now wonder if I shouldn’t “impose” some of that space for restful contemplation on my children a bit more. That space is provided by actual contact with reality—work and plenty of play. Could it be that in our attempt to recover our lost traditions, we have of late placed too heavy a stress on our children reading classic literature? I’ll continue to meditate on this theme as I cover more of Leith’s tremendous book in the next post.

Did you read as a child? Did you read the classics? Give me your take in the comments!

[affiliate links above]

Yet modern child psychology, educational theories, children’s literature, and the average parent operate on the basic assumption that a child’s self-esteem depends on a great deal of praise. Praise for a picture well-drawn! Praise for kicking the ball at soccer practice! Praise for train town well-built! Praise for eating dinner! But as it turns out, a child praised as “clever” may react by becoming afraid to try. Why? According to Professor Grosz, if that child has already shown herself to be “the best,” then what else is there except the looming possibility of failure, of doing less than the best? The child may, Grosz says, “simply repeat the same work—why draw something new, or in a new way, if the old way always gets applause?”

Grosz cites a famous 1998 study, which divided 128 children ages 10 and 11 into two groups. The children were to solve math problems. One group of children was praised for their intellect—“You did really well, you’re so clever.” The other group was praised for their work—“You did really well, you must have tried really hard.” When the kids were given more complex problems, the group of kids praised for their efforts showed much greater resilience and perseverance. The children who had been praised as clever showed greater fear of failure and an unwillingness to be creative to try to solve the problems.

Grosz summarizes the study’s findings:

“Ultimately, the thrill created by being told ‘You’re so clever’ gave way to an increase in anxiety and a drop in self-esteem, motivation and performance. When asked by the researchers to write to children in another school, recounting their experience, some of the ‘clever’ children lied, inflating their scores. In short, all it took to knock these youngsters’ confidence, to make them so unhappy that they lied, was one sentence of praise.”

Yet praising children for their “cleverness” is precisely the object of almost all children’s books published in the last half century. These books push hard a message of “affirmation.” You are brilliant, a light unto the world! I wrote a review of just such a book, The Wonderful Things You Will Be by Emily Winfield Martin. The message of this book is stated on the first page: “When I look at you and you look at me, I wonder what wonderful things you will be.”

I have to wonder if reading this to a child will not instill the very fears and anxieties that Professor Grosz warns us about. I hinted at this very thing in my review of the book. If you don’t feel like reading the whole thing, here is my conclusion:

The Wonderful Things You Will Be concludes with: “And then I’ll look at you and you’ll look at me and I’ll love you, whoever you’ve grown up to be.” Metrical abominations aside, what a supremely depressing ending! It’s supposed to be the ultimate tear-jerking moment of the story, but if you read this book not from the narcissistic parent’s perspective but from the child’s, then it sounds a lot like I will love you, rather than I do love you. And it also sounds like the mother’s love is tied to the creative or professional success of the child—of the child needing to embody the modern “virtues” that the mother-narrator has outlined for her child.

It seems that there is scientific evidence behind the conservative suspicion that treating your child as if he were the cleverest thing in the world is not, in fact, helpful to him, and it may be very harmful.

Even unsuspecting Christian parents can fall for the trap. Because Christianity has been so sentimentalized and whitewashed, we can forget that there is a crucial difference between having natural dignity as a child of God and being naturally clever or perfect. The two are not the same. When we love our children unconditionally, we love them without expecting anything of them. Calling a child “smart” or “clever” or “brilliant” sets up expectations (for the parent and the child) and subtly says to the child, I love you because you are these things.

I remember when a well-meaning family member told my son after a soccer game that he was “the best on the team.” My son was under no illusions. He knew that this was a lie. He stared quizzically, seeming to wonder if the grown-up had, in fact, watched him play at all. He was a decent player, but there were some superstars on his team. He looked at the ground. I think that I managed to recover by telling him that he played great defense that day. The episode confirmed what I’d long suspected—that such over-the-top praise doesn’t do anyone any good, least of all the child on the receiving end.

We can express similar ideas or feelings, but in constructive ways. “I love how you painted the sunset.” “That was a great goal that you scored.” Or simply, “can you tell me about this [thing] that you made [or did]?”

One other thing that the author of the article said that caught my attention was that parents who praise their children in this harmful way reveal a lack of presence:

“Admiring our children may temporarily lift our self-esteem by signaling to those around us what fantastic parents we are and what terrific kids we have — but it isn’t doing much for a child’s sense of self. In trying so hard to be different from our parents, we’re actually doing much the same thing — doling out empty praise the way an earlier generation doled out thoughtless criticism. If we do it to avoid thinking about our child and her world, and about what our child feels, then praise, just like criticism, is ultimately expressing our indifference.”

If presence is the goal, rather than praise, as this article suggests, then how can we be present? We are told that reading with our child is a great way to connect, but so many modern books simply restate the basic, thoughtless praise that is so harmful.

While I love reading a good children’s book, I have found that learning to sing folk songs together is one of the richest ways to connect with my children. The songs are usually funny and have a levity and spirit that just makes you want to join in and sing. The young kids usually listen silently, sometimes with a wry look. But after a couple week of older kids singing and hitting “repeat” on the tune, even the four year-old can’t help but sing lines of it as he builds his Legos.

We start by learning the first couple of lines and then continue to fold in additional lines. We don’t do it systematically. We just listen to the song frequently. It’s even more fun to learn it with other kids, such as in a co-op or scout troop. But it’s fine just to learn it as a family. It adds to the pleasure when you know a little bit about the history of the song. Some folk songs, such as “Barbara Allen” go back hundreds and hundreds of years.

Pete Seeger has a great version (although I’m also a sucker for Joan Baez’s rendition):

But my kids’ favorite song so far is “The Keeper.” It’s vivid, catchy, appeals to boys (and girls!), and is so much fun to sing. There are different versions out there, so we just picked the one we liked best.

These guys are great:

Right now, the boys are singing “Blow ye Winds” on repeat. I never thought that I would catch myself humming a sea shanty while cooking dinner. Here is a good version of that one:

There is sometime timeless about these songs. They contain seeds of truth about reality and about the world that we live in. Yet they weren’t written to teach. They came about out of concrete, local circumstances. On a whaling ship. At an English ale house. In the Yukon during the gold rush. And out of these ordinary experiences emerged an aesthetic representation that tells us something about what it means to be human. Having never been on a whaling ship or at a pub in England, we can still feel something of the texture of that life. Children intuit something of the imaginative experience. The music binds us. It tethers us to people we never knew and to people whom we will never meet. It connects us with family and friends and countrymen who even now sing the old tunes.

You don’t need any training or resources (other than a YouTube video and some lyrics) to sing folk songs. You don’t even need to know how to sing (trust me). You don’t have to be in the country or on a homestead or a in co-op. You don’t need anything, really, other than a willingness to tap into this nearly-forgotten cultural practice.

What I love about these songs is that they are rebuilding an almost-forgotten culture, and they are doing it in a lasting way. Music stays with us, especially the music we listened to when we were young. I have no doubt that my children will remember these songs forever. They will have a repertoire of fun, wholesome songs that will help to root them in their cultural heritage.

Don’t let anyone tell you that we don’t have a culture or that the West is dead. We’ve got such a rich inheritance. All we need to do is live it.

Subscribe now

Paul Kingsnorth, a recent convert from eco-activism and Wicca to Orthodox Christianity, has attracted a wide audience to his work. He has published Against the Machine as the culmination of his writings on his Substack, “The Abbey of Misrule.” His trenchant critiques of modern techno-capitalism and the searching spirit he brings to his stories resonate with many. Christians, in particular, have turned to him as a sort of “prophet,” as he has frequently been called, of this modern technocratic dystopia.

What is “the Machine”? Kingsnorth says that it is the working of technology united with omnipotent state power to control and bleed dry, both materially and spiritually, the people in whose name it ostensibly rules. It is also “a tendency within us,” a “story” that we tell ourselves, a “new type of civilisation,” a “cultural inversion,” and either is or contributed to many other aspects of modernity including AI, the quest for unlimited economic growth, climate change, religious decline, transgenderism, imperialism, Leftism, conservatism, open borders, nationalism, cars, and more. There’s much to agree with. But that’s also the problem. One of the weaknesses of Kingsnorth’s thesis about “the Machine” is that it is such a broad category, it seems to be almost indistinguishable from the word “modernity” itself.

One of the most illuminating chapters in the book was “The Universal,” in which Kingsnorth shows where his real strength lies: uncovering the implications of Artificial Intelligence. This chapter explores the frightening development of AI, a veritable Frankenstein’s monster. For those who are not familiar with the words of some of the creators of AI, this chapter will open your eyes. Kingsnorth’s account only confirms my suspicions that AI is demonic. Indeed, Kingsnorth connects it with the antichrist.

But AI is only one of a great many topics that Kingsnorth tackles in this book. He also tries to lay out the Machine’s history and development. Kingsnorth is very open about his disdain for modern technocracy, but the reader must pay careful attention to glean his beliefs about politics and human nature that undergird his social criticism.

There is much at work in Against the Machine, and to unpack all of Kingsnorth’s claims, many of which compete with one another, would require a book in itself. Thus, I have limited the scope of this review to the points that I take to be most salient. There are many different currents and cross-currents in Against the Machine, and it often reads like a series of blog posts stitched together, which is, as Kingsnorth admits, how the book came about. At times, it feels a little like an introductory reader to “the Machine,” a concept that many others besides Kingsnorth have named and described over the last century and a half.

What is more significant, in my opinion, than the blitz of names with which Kingsnorth hits the reader is Kingsnorth’s own account, and in particular, his underlying assumptions about man. For Kingsnorth is open about his Orthodox faith and many of his readers assume that his perspective is a Christian one. Is this the case, though?

Kingsnorth gives a brief history of the rise of the machine, which, it turns out, is as old as time. As soon as Adam and Eve left the Garden of Eden, the Machine began to come to life. Pharaonic Egypt was a Machine society. It is as if man is destined to create the Machine.

The Enlightenment turbocharged the Machine, and the French Revolution all but sealed the fate of the West in its grip. Kingsnorth rightly mentions the role of figures such as Descartes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau in helping to destroy custom, religion, and ancient institutions—the very things that would resist the Machine.

Rootedness and tradition, Kingsnorth often says, are the antidote to Machine modernity. They are the forces that preserve our humanity and that resist the overweening control of technocratic globalists. But what does Kingsnorth mean by “roots” and “tradition”?

Kingsnorth draws heavily on the writing of Simone Weil (1909-1943) when he talks about “rootedness.” Weil is a paradoxical figure. While lamenting the rootlessness of the modern world, Weil nonetheless lived something of a rootless life herself, both physically and metaphysically. She insisted that her parents call her by the masculine name “Simon,” and this is how she signed her letters. She traveled to Spain to fight on the side of the communists in the Spanish Civil War, and actually arranged for Leon Trotsky to reside at her parents’ apartment in Paris in 1933. She rejected her Jewish identity but never converted to Christianity. To illustrate to his readers that Weil was no conservative, Kingsnorth quotes her words, “For centuries now, men of the white race have everywhere destroyed the past, stupidly, blindly, both at home and abroad.”

It is curious that Kingsnorth should rely so heavily on a figure who is neither in the Christian nor conservative tradition. Yet this only struck me toward the end of the book when it became clear that Kingsnorth is largely unaware of the conservative intellectual tradition in the West—the tradition that defends rootedness most incisively.

Kingsnorth dismisses conservatism as one of the “foremost defenders” of “oligarchic capitalism” in the West! It has always, he says, had a “love affair with private property and the sovereign individual.” Is Kingsnorth confusing conservatism with Lockean liberalism? None of the major names that I associate with conservatism—Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk, Irving Babbitt, Robert Nisbet, G. K. Chesterton, the American southern agrarians, William F. Buckley Jr., Roger Scruton—ever hint at having such a love affair. They are the staunchest defenders of the social, cultural, and religious norms that restrain the dreams of avarice of which Kingsnorth often warns.

What, then, does “rootedness” mean to Kingsnorth? He connects it with tradition and with localism and nature. He says that we have neglected the “Four Ps”: past, people, place, and prayer. Throughout the book he refers to this abandonment. Yet they remain largely abstractions. This seems to be, in part, because Kingsnorth does not wish to defend the West or to call for its cultural restoration. The West is “dead,” he declares, and anyway, it was only an idea, “a way of seeing.” Thus, we must “create our own cultures of refusal.” The word create seems to be key. It would explain why Kingsnorth is reluctant to go beyond mere abstractions about “place” and “prayer.” He wants to leave those concepts open-ended because he is not calling for us to restore or renew the culture of the West. We are to imagine a new future, a new culture.

There is ample evidence that Kingsnorth, despite his criticism of progress and of utopian scheming, has given in to this romantic temptation to dream of a future untethered to the past, free from the burdens of our messy history. In one chapter, Kingsnorth says that we ought to imitate the hill peoples of Asia who have managed to escape being governed by centralized power. Following James C. Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed, Kingsnorth says that we would do well to take the example of these “raw” and “cooked” barbarians, whose mobility, nomadism, ability to flee into the mountains and caves, and “loose and shifting identities” allowed them historically to remain ungovernable.

“Any attempt at building utopia will fail,” Kingsnorth warns. Not utopia, but “some form of free survival is the goal,” Kingsnorth says. “Survival in order to live a life unconformed to the dictates of the Machine, and to uphold the values of a true human life.” Utopians never imagine that they are building utopia. To the utopian, the plan always sounds attainable, at least in some distant future. But the hallmark of a utopian scheme is that it is based on an abstraction, so there are no practical steps that can be taken to bring us any closer to the goal. The desire to live “unconformed to the dictates of the Machine” is such an abstraction. How can we ever hope to live unconformed to a thing that, as Kingsnorth has said, is “a tendency within us”?

It is worth asking, where does Kingsnorth believe that the Machine comes from? He rightly points to the dangers of rationalism that were present in the Enlightenment and to the destructive tendencies within Rousseauistic romanticism, but at the same time, Kingsnorth lays heavy stress on the historical importance of economic relations between human beings, in a way that parallels Marx’s reading of history. “I’m no Marxist” Kingsnorth says when he highlights what he takes to be the “brilliant insights” of the Communist Manifesto. But he then says, “we can usefully understand our time by seeing in it the final result of the centuries-long tension between the merchant class and everyone else.” Kingsnorth is not wrong to see some value in Marx’s criticism of modernity. Technological and industrial society is dehumanizing and alienating. But are Marx and Kingsnorth correct that an entire class of people—call it “merchant” or “bourgeois”—is guilty for modernity’s woes, or that the antagonism between a guilty class and a non-guilty underclass is one of the main drivers of history? Kingsnorth asserts, quoting Marx, that this guilty class has “drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism” and “left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment.’” These are the words of a revolutionary—indeed they are from one of the most revolutionary documents in history, the Communist Manifesto, and they are not remembered for their insights into the nature of contemporary society but for setting the world aflame.

Russell Kirk, who shares many of Kingsnorth’s criticisms of technocracy and greed, writes in Beyond the Dreams of Avarice that the Marxist does “service to Mammon” no less than the capitalist. “Proletarian avarice,” Kirk says, “is no less corrupting than the avarice of an oligarchy: indeed, it may be more disastrous to a society than the passionate accumulation of possessions by a few, because the triumphant proletariat is less disposed to tolerate the dissenter, the eremite, the contemplative.” Kingsnorth seems not to consider this in his reading of history. Moreover, it is worth considering why Kingsnorth sees the rise of the merchant class as problematic. Is it because its rise ultimately has separated us from Christ? Or because it has given rise to this thing called “the Machine”?

Continue reading at Crisis Magazine.

“I found [homesteading] too exhausting with a part time job and small children and I quit after 3 years,” writes the reader who prompted this series of posts (see the first post here) on the nature of the modern homesteading movement.

I eventually quit my job, too, to focus fully on the children. . . I was definitely surprised at what rural life was really like . . . Southern culture continues to unravel. It isn’t Walker Percy’s South anymore. The gentility is almost all gone. I think many people long for the village and think they will find the village by going back to the land, but in the land you will find land and not the village. It is a seemingly intractable problem: the suburbs are a no-place, rural areas are isolating, and as you aptly characterized, cities are Democrat run cesspools. A city of course, ought to be good, a jewel of civilization. But, in bad times, bad cities. . .”

I think that this reader and I both agreed that the homesteading movement, whatever that really means, can conjure up romantic dreams that may not be consonant with the reality of rural life. The country has its problems just as the city does. One has to be careful in some rural places where fentanyl has finished off what the death of American manufacturing started.

Yet city life has its own set of problems. It may be more “practical,” more convenient, afford greater opportunities for fellowship and community, but it comes at a cost. Ultimately, there is no structural solution for evil. We must live as Christians, no matter the circumstances.

But something interesting is happening with this modern homesteading movement. I know many families that are opting for it. And it looks different for different people, but one constant is land. They are looking for some land. Why? Is it because of a primordial call to live in accord with nature—the seasons, the soil, the solace of open sky and enchanted forest? That must be a part of it, even as it may also be an act of rebellion against city life and its moral and aesthetic drawbacks in the year 2025.

Little “villages” are coming back to life. A general store. A coffee shop. A brewery, of course. As a result, the beautiful old victorian homes that had fallen into disrepair are being bought and fixed up. The real value of localism is becoming apparent to us after so many decades without it—after the disaster of the “Urban Renewal” projects of the 1960s, in which the federal government paid cities to destroy their historic districts.

Here are a couple of postcard images from the 1940s of my hometown, Las Cruces, NM:

And here are images of the “downtown mall” that I grew up with in the 1990s:

But there is hope. My own hometown took on the massive project of reversing this 1960s disaster. Although the old buildings and homes that were demolished can never be recovered, there are still ways of beautifying and making the space usable and humane:

Such actual urban renewal is, I think, related to the homesteading movement. Both recognize a problem with the modern, urban hellscape. The no place.

And it’s not just conservatives who see value in life lived on a human scale. It was probably, in fact, a liberal city council, informed by the actual desires of the community, that undertook the renewal of the Las Cruces downtown. Even liberals are attracted to beauty and to localism. Perhaps this is one enterprise that we will unconsciously contribute to together—building up main street and a healthy local economy.

The reason that I didn’t opt to live in a “main street” town is because, quaint as the main street in Las Cruces is, it is surrounded by the city, which has been transformed under liberal municipal, state, and federal policies since the 1960s—a disastrous era, if there ever was one.

Perhaps we can recover some of the traditions of the countryside that were also razed to the ground in the postwar era. Wouldn’t it be something if we learned to grow some of our own food and raise some of our own animals and spend some of our money locally? Growing vegetables and flowers brings a simple human joy to the hearth and home. As we continue to learn about how practically everything industrialized is toxic, from the food we eat to the recycled garbage that they pass off as “sustainable” clothing, it is becoming more urgent that we opt out of the system in whatever small ways that we can.

The strange combination of modern technology and the bizarre Covid episode in our history has allowed some of us to return to the land (or to a main street town). Families who were once tied to a particular place because of a job can now relocate far from a major city or close to a main-street towns thanks to remote work. Industry and technology once drove us away from the farm, and now technology is allowing some of us to return, even if only to enter the halfway house of hobby farming.

Another reader offered the sensible wisdom that “the web of human society is quite complex; our given situations will vary such that we weigh many goods and pros/cons when we decide where to put down roots.” She said that homesteading will look different “depending on whether we have a windowsill garden or have a few acres, whether we live in the city or the country or in between (often the latter nowadays, it seems!).” She warns of the dangers of sentimentalizing life on the farm. “Long story short,” she says,

“Over the years I’ve come to believe that agriculture, and real folk culture, and high culture are intimately connected. (Others have mentioned John Senior in this thread—he’s really helpful on this!) We need good farms, good villages, good churches, good cities, good suburbs—all of it. Where individual families will end up will depend on a host of factors, but from where I stand, I don’t think those arguing for the importance of homesteading need be read as arguing for it as a silver bullet to our times. . . But it’s very true, as you say, that it’s a challenge in many places to find the community we’re looking for in a rural place here in America. (We were blessed to live in a small walkable town with an amazing farmers’ market and a pretty vibrant intellectual life at one point in our lives, and a friend from England visited and commented that it reminded him of home! Alas, it’s hard to find that just anywhere in these here United States.) . . .

Wherever we are, it will take creativity and imagination (“imagination in place,” Wendell Berry might say!) to raise our families within a vital, living Christianity—and to recover truly the symbolic imagination, the ability to perceive spiritual realities, through living liturgically, as Emily writes.”

The reader who warned about the dangers of romanticizing rural life was correct to point out this possibility. There are fewer families to mingle with when everybody is spread out. Nearby schooling and co-ops are limited. And then there’s the “farm.” Living off the land ain’t easy. For every hour I would spend milking a cow or caring for a sick sheep is one hour less spent on the alternative, which for me would be reading, writing, or baking—two labors that I enjoy and that rejuvenate me (and, thereby, my family).

At the same time, there are families opting for rural life—mine included—even if they can’t go all in. I wonder how things will change as more people, especially large Christian families, move out to the country. Will rural communities see a revival? Will more “villages” of old spring up? I dare say that we may be at the start of something. Enough people are tiring of modern industrial life. Industrial medicine. Industrial schooling. Industrial food. It would be romantic to believe that we could opt out of all of this entirely. But surely we can opt out of some of it, even if we don’t move to the country to do it. The “homesteading” movement, at the very least, is encouraging anyone with a backyard to get a few chickens or grow a garden. You don’t need to have much space to grow potatoes in a container or a lemon tree on a sunny porch.

Being in touch with the land and the seasons in whatever ways we can might give our children a taste for country life and for home-grown food and even for hard work. They will be able to see the actual fruits of their labor: chopped wood, cucumbers, eggs, or whatever else is possible. One of the virtues of rural life—when it entails actual labor—is that it resists abstraction. We are able to see our efforts through to completion. This puts us in contact with reality.

Jefferson, for all of his failings, was correct, I think, in his belief that a country of small landowners would be less of a danger to itself than a country of metropolises.

Wendell Berry was a great advocate for the older understanding of conservation that had more in common with Christian stewardship than modern global “sustainability” projects. Berry reminds us of the importance of individual action and responsibility and of the futility of global initiatives when it comes to rebuilding the local culture and economy.

“If we think of this task of rebuilding local economies as one large task that must be done in a hurry,” Berry said, “then we will again be overwhelmed and will want the government to do it. If, on the other hand, we define the task as beginning the reformation of our private or household economies, then the way is plain.”

Berry frames the issue from the perspective of the household unit. When we think about what we can do as a family to take control over our health, safety, environment, etc. it seems much more manageable than thinking about the culture war in general or, God forbid, changing the world.

What can we do exactly? Berry gives sensible advice. Choose where you spend your money and get used to having less money. “In a healthy community, people will be richer in their neighbors, in neighborhood, in the health and pleasure of neighborhood, than in their bank accounts. It is better, therefore, even if the cost is greater, to buy near at hand than to buy at a distance. It is better to buy from a small, privately owned local store than from a chain store. It is better to buy a good product than a bad one.” In other words, quality (of both the product and the community) over quantity.

There is nothing romantic about this. It is a concrete prescription to a concrete problem. There is something that we can actually do, right now.

However, for people to start spending more on food and clothing and essentials, they will need to feel like they are not simply supporting a charity but getting value for their money. I think that we are at that point. The genetically modified and lab-grown food, the glyphosate contamination of wheat and oats, plastic clothing and plastic everything, is giving even normal people pause (we extremists have long known of the dangers). We are at a critical juncture. If the longing for clean food, fresh air, and a true safe space for children to play continues to gain momentum and manifest in the form of a modern “homesteading” movement, then we may see a real revival of country life. As Trump brings manufacturing back to America, the chances only increase that more and more small towns and the surrounding countrysides will revive.

It may be helpful to recall what romanticism is. It has to do with the wild and wonderful (as in full-of-wonder). But it also has to do with what is probable. If one is “being a romantic,” that means that whatever the goal, it is probably not going to be achieved. We can all but count on its failure. And contrary to popular belief, dreaming the dream is not moral activity. Dreamily fantasizing about something that can never be is not lofty or noble. That false belief, in fact, is at the root of modernity’s moral and cultural rot (if you’re interested in romanticism, which I believe, is central to diagnosing our modern cultural degeneracy, see my series on romanticism.)

The question to ask when considering the modern homesteading movement is this, is it a realistic way to achieve a concrete goal? If the answer to that question is yes, then it is not merely a romantic dream, although it may contain some of the salutary elements of romanticism—an appreciation for the wonder that nature inspires and a certain enchantment that comes through rural living.

If the goal is simply to escape city life, then moving to the country may not be the right answer. It all depends. If the goal is to raise cattle, grow an orchard, give your kids more space for exploring, and go to a place where a liberal city council won’t be able to put a homeless shelter or Section 8 housing next door, then the goal is pretty concrete. And a plot of land in the country may be the best way to achieve it.

I thought that this post might end here, but then I read Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry. The next post will explore Berry’s aesthetic exploration of this topic.

Subscribe now

I received an interesting comment from a reader, that

“The modern Catholic homesteading movement appears to be a sort of agrarian Romantic movement in itself. It greatly reduces the time and resources people have to collaborate and community build. (Which begs the question, Qui bono? Why indeed is this so popular now?)

Homesteading is not the direction we need to be going as Catholics if we are serious about community building and preserving the intellectual traditions of the West. It’s agriculture, not high culture.”

This reader makes a good point, one that I’ve often contemplated. We recently moved to a rural-ish property in the mid-Atlantic from a small-ish town in California. In and around this town lived a wonderful, thriving Catholic community. Because it’s California, no one can really afford to “homestead,” but some of us had some chickens in our backyards and gardening wasn’t too difficult, especially with two growing seasons. Avocados fall off trees. Tomatoes sprout of their own accord. It was lovely.

And things were nearby. Friends were close. I desperately miss my neighbor who was two doors down. What a blessing to be able to send one my boys to her door for a couple of eggs or a can of tomatoes. Our children got along well. And the soccer plex was ten minutes away. The grocery stores were all within ten minutes. We even had a Latin Mass in town. We loved it.

So why did we leave? There was one thing that was missing, and that was extended family. We decided that being near our parents—our children’s grandparents—was more important than all of the things above. The children love their grandparents dearly and the grandparents love them probably more. They need each other. It is a relationship that fills a void deep within the soul of a child. I know because I remember my grandparents filling it in my soul, and I remember how I longed to live in the same town, or even state, as my grandparents. But things couldn’t work out that way for me. So when circumstances came about that made it possible for us to uproot and move to be near grandparents (at least some of them), we decided to make it happen, despite all of the pain it caused to leave our close-knit community, neighbors, and beloved Mass and priest.

We decided that we could not raise our family in the very urban metropolis where the grandparents reside, so we opted for the country within a two-hour drive. We were nervous about this decision. We would be farther from the Catholic community, groceries, and soccer, and whatever else. We have a Latin Mass, but folks travel from all directions, and many of us drive over an hour, so we often only see each other only on Sundays.

I don’t know how things like meal-trains work out here. They worked like a well-oiled machines back in California, where families filled up the meal-train of a new mom within hours. It was beautiful. I was on both the giving and receiving end of those many times. Here, with people being so spread out, I imagine that they don’t work quite the same. The community finds a different way to live together and to build up the body of Christ.

There are still church picnics and people gather after Mass for a long time, often hours. Because everyone drives in from so far away, they make a day of it. My Orthodox friend has the same experience at her rural church. Everyone stays for “fellowship,” which is a big, hearty potluck. The kids play for hours and the grownups get to talk. It’s truly a day of rest.

At first I thought that driving over an hour to Mass would be killer, but it’s working for us right now. The youngest no longer screams in the car, and we are able to listen to saint stories or audiobooks or hymns and enjoy the drive through the beautiful countryside. My husband and I sip a coffee and, for once, get to just sit and talk. It’s not what I imagined it would be. I was devastated to leave our old Mass, which was only an 8-minute drive. But at this one, we can hang out and get to know the priests and parishioners for hours afterward. It is a trade-off, to be sure. We used to spend the time in our garden or playing soccer in the yard that we now spend in the car. Is one better than the other? It’s hard to say.

To get back to the reader’s comment, she goes on to say,

“On top of that, it is impractical. As families increase in size and children get older, ‘homestead fatigue’ and ‘homestead disillusionment’ are common, with many families selling their land to live closer to social and recreational opportunities.

Homesteading is constant labor that used to be done *in community* (not by one nuclear family, with a dad who has a full time job), plus all the complexity of modern life and its demands. It is impossible to find an earthly parouisa; impossible to escape the modern economy. We need to meet the challenges of our own times. I respect people’s grit, but I question the wisdom of homesteading as the popular prescription to save Western civilization, as it is essentially atomizing.”

She makes a good point. I have met a couple of these families who, at one point, lived in the country, and as their children entered high-school ages, they decided they needed to be closer to town. The kids played sports. Some wanted to attend a brick-and-mortar school. And probably other reasons. I also know families who still live in the country and who love it, but who have slowly shed the farm animals that they once acquired with eagerness. As this reader mentions, farming is hard work, especially if dad works in tech or somewhere else that isn’t on the homestead to earn a living.

My husband is not a farmer, and neither am I. I had fantasized about getting a dairy cow and being able to get our own raw milk, fresh daily. We could make cheese, I said! We could churn our own butter, I said! And think of all the ice cream! Then, as the mists of romantic dreaming cleared in the light of reality, I thought about actually going out there at 5 am to milk the cow and then again in the afternoon. Homeschooling is difficult enough, and I could kiss my precious little writing time goodbye. I came to the same conclusion as this reader, that if I go all-in and get the cow (and also, by the way, the sheep and hogs and everything else I wanted), then my own contribution to Christian culture, modest as it is, would dry up.

There is the rare family that is able actually to homestead—to subsist off their own land and efforts. I know one family that does this, and God bless them. They radiate their farming knowledge outward through the community, teaching other families how to process chickens, how to convert land into particular types of farm land, and other skills that only true farmers know.

But is there a halfway house for the rest of us? Is there a happy middle ground for the homesteader-wannabes? My husband and I believed so, which is why we moved into the country. We are rural, but not that rural. Costco will still deliver to my house, if I ask it to. We have forest and field. We plan to get beef cattle, which, I hear, are not terribly onerous, although some farm work will be involved. We love gardening. We are half-decent at growing fruit trees and some vegetables (but not cauliflower). My husband keeps bees.

And I think this is where many families who wish to retreat to the country fall. There is an undeniable longing right now for land. Many of us can feel it. Something is happening in the culture and if things continue on the present trajectory, I shudder to think where we will be in a generation. So, for more reasons than one, we left town-life for the country. It is nice to have some acres where the kids can roam freely, can play in a creek, can imagine enchanted worlds in the forest until dusk, can build forts, and can benefit from physical labor—chopping firewood, corralling chickens too dumb to make it into the coop in the evening, pruning fruit trees, mowing grass, and other modest “farm” duties. They can see the seasons and know their meaning experientially (seasons were such an abstraction in southern California, although I admit that I liked it that way.).

It is (nearly) impossible to get off the grid and opt out of modern economic life entirely, but I think that there is a place for rural or semi-rural Christian life. When we asked our priest about moving across the country to be closer to grandparents and also to be more rural, he said that the thing we need to consider is what will bring us closer to Christ. My husband and I prayed about this for well over a year before making our decision. It required a lot of imagination, in addition. We came to the conclusion that we could grow close to Christ in either situation. We knew that things would be very different if we moved, but one thing would remain the same. We could still live out a Christian life. We would still have the Latin Mass—something that, we had decided, we could not do without.

And, as Democratic city councils (and national policies) ruin more and more cities, country-life starts to look better and better. Red counties make life much easier.

I’ll illustrate by way of one example. In our old town in California, we enjoyed strolling through the farmer’s market on occasion. My eldest decided that he wanted to sell lemonade at a booth. And my younger children said it would be fun to sell some other things from our backyard such as avocados, tomatoes, and eggs. How the county bureaucrats would have laughed had they heard us naively thinking that we could simply sell things from a booth at the farmer’s market!

Living in California, one is really able to imagine the future Orwell predicted: “a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”

To get a spot at the farmer’s market would have required half a dozen permits and special connections. The process, shrouded in mystery, is run by one woman. There is no waitlist, and no, she said, we cannot get a spot anytime soon. Besides, she warned, you won’t be able to get the permits.

The bureaucrat at the county kindly informed me that I would need one permit to sell eggs, one permit for vegetables other than avocados, one permit for avocados, and another one for “prepared food.” Lemonade that is freshly squeezed falls under this last category and has its own set of regulations, including need of a tripartite sink and the completion of a course on food prep safety. It turns out that my children can’t even legally sell lemonade in front of our house. “But,” the nice man said, “I won’t report you.”

So the modern city isn’t what it used to be. Kids can’t roam free and sell their lemonade like they could even in the 90s. Yes, yes, all towns are different, and not every city has been ruined by a woke city council. But many have. That’s just a fact.

I’ll continue this meditation on town and country life in the next post.

Subscribe now

Several months ago, I took on the iconic children’s book Love You Forever by Robert Munsch [I’ve removed the paywall from this essay]. I called it “one of the most disturbing children’s stories ever published.” When news emerged that Munsch is planning to undergo assisted suicide in Canada where he lives, I was hardly surprised.

Writing this Substack newsletter, I’ve learned a lot about authors of children’s books. Adults who write children’s books do it because they wish to reach impressionable minds. It was only after I began reading to my own kids and trying to curate a home library that I took a real interest in children’s literature. I instinctively hated most modern children’s books but didn’t think too much about why. I reached for older books. They seemed calmer, more pleasant, less full of whiny brats and sarcasm and weak parents. They presented a vision of life that was beautiful, joyful, even sorrowful—but full.

Once I began this Substack, I really wanted to uncover what was wrong. What is the story saying exactly? What are the implications? And what is left unsaid? It revealed a great deal. And then I looked into the personal lives of the authors who wrote some of these very popular books. Turns out, most of them are childless, non-Christian, gay, or some combination. Why the attraction to children’s stories, I had to wonder? I assume it’s for the same reason that the ideological movements today, whether the LGBT+ movement or the transgender movement or the woke movement more broadly seeks to reach the minds of children: because there is where you can affect abiding change in the culture.

Subscribe now

The more I learn about the authors of the most popular children’s books in America, the more I think we need a “Libs of Children’s Lit” TikTok that can give even the briefest bullet points about the authors of the books that shaped the minds of generations. You’d be shocked.

As for Munsch, I see a real connection between his Love You Forever and his desire for annihilation.

At first glance, it would seem to be a grossly ironic twist that the author whose character proclaims that he will “love you forever” to his aging mother should himself decide to commit suicide before getting to a decrepit state himself. But I don’t think it’s ironic or paradoxical at all.

There is an intimate connection between the romantic imagination, such as Munsch displays in the sentimental Love You Forever, and violence. I’ll never forget Anatole France’s observation about what doomed the French Revolution from the start: “When you want to make men good . . . you are led inevitably to the desire of killing them all.” That is, when you begin with an unrealistic ideal with universalist pretensions, you end in nihilistic violence. Love You Forever is no revolutionary treatise, but it betrays the same romantic inclination to reimagine the world along the lines of wishful thinking.

How touching, the unsuspecting reader thinks, as first the mother rocks her growing son and then the son rocks his growing mother, always singing that heartfelt little song

I’ll love you forever

I’ll like you for always

As long as I’m living

My baby you’ll be

It appeals to that gnawing feeling that all mothers have, that one day, our little babies will be grown and the bond we have now will be forever changed. That this special and intense time will one day end. It strikes deep at the sentimental desire within each mother to hold her baby forever. Who wouldn’t be at least a little bit moved by this image? Of course, the odd turn that the book takes where the mother continues to rock the boy long past the time during which such action is needed or appropriate reveals something much more than a natural desire to hold on. It reveals a deeply romantic sentimentalism that verges on the narcissistic. The mother is indulging in her own need to hold on to a mere projection of the child as a baby, rather than giving her child what he needs at each stage (such as discipline and her presence at a dinner table, for example).

But this is the romantic imagination. It loves to indulge in sentimental feelings and emotions while neglecting the difficult work that needs to be done.

The romantic imagination dwells amidst the dreamy mists of a life without difficulties. It even presents certain difficulties as if they were normal and good and not hurdles to be overcome at all. Take a look at the various stages of the child’s life in Love You Forever:

We are to smile when the toddler is naughty, flushing his mother’s watch down the toilet. We are to chuckle when the boy carelessly traipses through the kitchen in muddy shoes with a spilling soda bottle. We are to laugh when the teenager breaks the living and disrespects his parents’ home. Never are we to pause and ask if this disorderly life is really one worth representing to children. And the final hallmark of the romantic imagination in this story is when the boy, who grew up in such disorder and ugliness (with the one exception of his mother singing to him at night, when all was calm and no particular effort was required on her part), gets married and has a child and a home of his own. It is as if by magic the next generation has it all together. But this was the fundamental error of the Boomer generation, and arguably of their parents: to assume that we need make no special effort to create order and pass on traditions. That it will all somehow be taken care of. But the chickens are coming home to roost.

The above was an account of the “wishful thinking” of Munsch’s story. The sad decision of Munsch to end his own life is the nihilistic despair aspect. He leaves this part out of the children’s tale. Munsch presents a vision of life in which no special effort is required to find happiness and fulfillment. Everything is silly and messy and the kids are wild! It’s hilarious! But it turns out that life is serious business. The disorderly chaos that Munsch would have us laugh at and enjoy in his children’s book leads not to the boy becoming a man and a father of a household but to a vision of life so hopeless that ending it seems the best thing to do.

It’s time for our culture to leave behind the children’s books that repeat the lies about life that lead to the sad despair of their authors.

Edit: Robert Munsch has not decided to go through with assisted suicide through Canada’s MAID (Medical Assistance in Dying) program yet, so there is still time to pray for him to reverse his decision.

Subscribe now

Does this sound familiar? How many times have we heard this trope repackaged in the intervening centuries and up to this very day? We must be clear, the call for us to “return to nature” and to leave behind our rotten civilization are not of Christian provenance. Nor are they compatible with Christianity. These are the ideas of eighteenth-century Romanticism.

The Indian or Aborigine or Eastern mystic often serves as the proverbial guide to the Westerner trying to escape his cultural inheritance and to return to…well, to something old and something pure. Rousseau and Thoreau looked to the Native American; the Hippies of the 70s looked to Eastern non-Christian religions, New Ageism, and the occult; and today there is renewed interest in all of these.

The Church has always had to be on guard against heresies, but the challenge today is particularly grievous because of the disarray within the Church. Right now can be felt an intense longing for an older and more traditional Christianity, one that puts us in touch with wonder, mystery, and enchantment. But we seem to be lacking earthly guides to a proper re-enchantment, as the majority of our Church leaders have abdicated their responsibility as good shepherds. Faithful Christians, therefore, often feel that they must find their own way to grow in the faith. I’ve felt this.

We have 2,000 years of tradition as our guide, but we must know how these traditions have been lived out historically and how we might bring them to life anew in our own personal lives. There is no blueprint for that. Even the best guide to “liturgical living” can’t do it for you. It’s a long road and it requires above all an historical imagination—an imagination that can understand and appreciate the value of Christian liturgical (both formal and informal) practices and then bring those practices to life in our own homes, in our own ways. There is a danger here. The imagination must be tethered in some way, lest it should distort the traditions. The imagination is always tempted to take flight and to bring us to a land of our own wishful thinking, a dreamworld. The seductive power of this type of thinking is formidable, and it is safe to say that it has its own ideological advocacy group in the form of the romantics (not just the formal school of Romantics).

Even the most traditional- and orthodox-sounding Christian can fall prey to the romantic temptation. Just because a practice is very old and traditional for some people does not mean that it is compatible with Christianity. It may subvert it. Given that we are in the midst of a Romantic rejection of modernity—not an unwarranted rejection, either—the temptation can be to imagine a sort of “Romantic Christianity.” John Locke and Thomas Jefferson, children of the Enlightenment, tried to rationalize Christianity in order to fit it into the new “scientific” worldview. Romantic Christianity, seeking re-enchantment and an escape from the flat, secular materialism of modernity, looks to the “natural” existence of the Native Americans, the “mystical” experience of hermeticism, and other exotic practices that seem to be vital and alive, where the average Catholic or Protestant church in America is whitewashed and utterly lacking in mysticism and mystery.

Romantic Christians recognize something that their secular Romantic predecessors understood well: the need for freshness and renewal of symbols. For symbols to posses their vital meaning—to be alive to us—they must resonate with our imaginations in a meaningful way. Romantic artists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries felt urgent need to renew cultural symbols. They’d mostly abandoned Christianity and thus felt need to create their own religious symbolism—or in the case of figures such as William Blake, reinterpreted Christianity along Romantic lines.

Today’s Romantic Christians are hoping that foreign rituals and practices can bring vital meaning back to Christianity. And vitality is sorely needed. We could charitably interpret the Second Vatican Council as having tried to achieve this. Unfortunately, instead of real visionaries who understood that vitality in ancient Christian symbols and rituals is due to the imaginative state of the beholder, we got the bureaucratic minds who destroyed the rituals and tried to invent new ones. These architects of the new Mass did not appreciate that to renew the meaning of our ancient symbols and rituals we had to renew ourselves and our own imaginative states. Only in this way can the universal that is embedded in the symbol or ritual come to life and hold significance for us.

The danger for today’s Christian who desires re-enchantment is to look outside of the liturgical life for it. Native American communion with nature, hermeticism, and magic may sound exotic and alluring, like sure sources of enchantment, but they are more a projection of the romantic imagination onto Christianity than truly compatible with the faith.

How does one know wherein lies true enchantment? On the one hand, it is about seeing and recognizing spiritual reality—that life is not just dull materialism. Understanding the presence of demons and angels, for example, is important in shaping our imaginative perceptions of spiritual reality. The earlier we open our eyes to such realities, the better. That is why I focus so heavily on children’s literature. We can begin to reintroduce enchantment into the culture by way of the next generations. We can slowly re-enchant the world. But it isn’t a matter of inventing our own symbols or adopting foreign rituals. This would be the easy way. And there is no quick or easy way to bring back enchantment. As an adult on this path, I fear that I will only ever see the world enchanted through the glass darkly, as it were. I hope that my children see the reality of the spiritual world more clearly.

True enchantment comes by way of the imagination, which is shaped by the will—by our actions. This isn’t a liturgical living blog, but I will say that living liturgically in the formal and informal senses (going to liturgy; surrounding ourselves with rituals and symbols that suggest the richness of the liturgy in our everyday life) holds the key to enchantment. It takes work. As far as it goes, I would argue that Leila Lawler’s has done more for re-enchanting the West than entire books of philosophy dedicated to the topic. Why? Because Mrs. Lawler is helping women to regain their proper place in the Christian home by giving them practical tips for action. Philosophy is important, don’t get me wrong. It’s what I do here! It helps us to analyze, clarify, and sharpen our understanding of reality and of particular problems. This is needed in order to live an examined life, to think through problems and possible solutions. But change—personal or social—happens at the level of action.

The idea of action and activity and how it relates to our formation, imagination, and change is something that has interested me more as I watch my children grow. As they play-act, I think deeply about how children’s imaginations incorporate stories and experiences and how all of that play and activity is the actual formation of their person. Yet this process never stops. Our actions and our imaginings intertwine and are indistinguishable from who we are. The Romantics are loathe to focus much on the action part of this equation. They love to dwell in the land of ideas and imaginings, of what could have been and what might be. But the present is where the action is, and we would do well to linger there. My children have helped to tether me to the present like nothing else. Action is demanded of me almost the entire day, except for rare moments of genuine leisure—restful contemplation.

But restful contemplation isn’t the only basis of culture. It is also here, in unrestful un-contemplative activity that civilization grows.

Philosophers can speculate all day long about whether Western culture should live or die, but for us ordinary mothers and fathers, there is no other way than to build it. For us Western civilization is no mere idea but a living reality. Every Christian tradition that we bring to life afresh in our home helps to strengthen the “partnership between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” This was Edmund Burke’s understanding of what society is. It is not a Platonic Ideal. It is not a static “thing” that can simply be discarded and redone. It is living. It lives in us and in our ways and traditions and in all of our spiritual and even material inheritances. And it grows and endures just when the philosophers declare it to be “dead.”

Subscribe now