Culture: November 2017 Archives

Alice's Oxford | Peter Hitchens | First Things

Peter Hitchens writes (beautifully)of the Oxford of the past, the Oxford of the imagination, and the Oxford of today.

"So as I walk along the riverside pathways, or slip into the college gardens at dusk, as autumn turns to winter, I am seldom free of the fictional Oxford, or of the small part of its immense, intricate past that I myself have seen. Here I watched England change from being one sort of country to another. That parking lot was a cattle market, fragrant with the smell of damp livestock, herded by suspicious, terse men in brown tweeds, with boiled red faces, for whom the market pubs stayed open all the day. That apartment block was a brewery, whose yeasty stink perfumed the whole city every Wednesday, as that week's mild and bitter, brown and pale ales were made by the methods of the middle ages. That tourist café was a used bookshop, room after room of tottering piles of aged volumes, its uneven staircase climbing upwards almost to the rafters, classics read, sold, reread, and resold over decades by forgotten students. That university building was a grammar school where girls from housing project estates were introduced to Shakespeare and the sciences. Now only money can buy you that, and the children of the poor know nothing of these things. That pretentious hotel was a prison, where men had been hanged for murder and buried in the precincts, within living memory. Now we have none of that sort of thing, but we have more murder, and if our trauma surgeons were not as brilliant as they are, we would have even more of it, for the knife is now a horribly common weapon.  And these colleges, now so modern, gender-fluid, multicultural and progressive, were stern all-male institutions, whose doors were barred at night against the opposite sex and whose walls were savagely spiked to stop adventurers climbing in (and out) on feline expeditions."

Against Princeton | R. R. Reno | First Things

R. R. Reno writes:

"Not only have Princeton, Harvard, Yale, and other elite universities become decadent, they have failed in their self-appointed task. The leaders they proffer our society are increasingly incapable of leading. Our academic leaders oversee a campus culture often riven by conflict. These schools have become hotbeds for identity politics, and administrators kowtow to student extremists. Meanwhile, graduates too often condescend to ordinary citizens, thinking them ignorant bigots or 'takers.'...

"The culture of our time is not overseen by old-fashioned Methodist matrons in the Midwest, nor do today's opinion-leaders emerge from ag schools. Charles Blow is the only regular columnist for the New York Times under sixty years old who did not go to an elite university. For the last half-century, graduates from places like Princeton have been in charge. They are making a wreck of things--not for themselves, of course, but for the rest of society.

"Over the same period of time, these institutions have become fully owned subsidiaries of the Democratic Party. This hyper-partisanship has contributed to the polarization of our politics. Instead of engaging the range of political and moral thinking that has shaped and continues to shape public life, our talented future leaders are fed a party line. Young people are not trained at these schools to be judicious, generous partisans in our political battles. The ideological homogeneity makes liberal students smug and insular--and conservative students radical and combative. There's no denying a simple fact: Elite universities, subsidized by gigantic endowments, have failed as civic institutions."

Christianity Is Just A Better Religion Than I | The Daily Caller

Allan Fimister writes: "This is the West's problem: in itself Christendom, armed with truth and right and freedom, has more than enough resources to resist and overcome any rival civilization. But the 'renaissance' injected into western man an absurd inferiority complex in regard to pagan antiquity and then the 'Enlightenment' insisted on eliminating from public policy and public law the very Christian revelation which defined and ennobled western man. The 'Enlightenment' is a parasite, it will not survive the death of its host. But it is strong enough to weaken the West to the point where its traditional external enemy the Islamic Ummah can strike the killer blow. Deep down the liberals know this is case, as they contracept and abort and legislate our civilisation into extinction, but in the end they don't care. Their ultimate motive was always less the love of 'liberty' and more the hatred of Christ."

Something is wrong on the internet - James Bridle - Medium

"Someone or something or some combination of people and things is using YouTube to systematically frighten, traumatise, and abuse children, automatically and at scale, and it forces me to question my own beliefs about the internet, at every level. Much of what I am going to describe next has been covered elsewhere, although none of the mainstream coverage I've seen has really grasped the implications of what seems to be occurring.

"To begin: Kid's YouTube is definitely and markedly weird. I've been aware of its weirdness for some time. Last year, there were a number of articles posted about the Surprise Egg craze. Surprise Eggs videos depict, often at excruciating length, the process of unwrapping Kinder and other egg toys. That's it, but kids are captivated by them. There are thousands and thousands of these videos and thousands and thousands, if not millions, of children watching them....

"The above video is entitled Wrong Heads Disney Wrong Ears Wrong Legs Kids Learn Colors Finger Family 2017 Nursery Rhymes. The title alone confirms its automated provenance. I have no idea where the 'Wrong Heads' trope originates, but I can imagine, as with the Finger Family Song, that somewhere there is a totally original and harmless version that made enough kids laugh that it started to climb the algorithmic rankings until it made it onto the word salad lists, combining with Learn Colors, Finger Family, and Nursery Rhymes, and all of these tropes -- not merely as words but as images, processes, and actions -- to be mixed into what we see here."

If love wins, we all lose | The Spectator Australia

"I was recently reading C.S. Lewis' classic, The Four Loves. In his introduction, he quotes M. Denis de Rougemont as saying, 'Love ceases to be a demon only when he ceases to be a god.' To clarify what that statement means Lewis re-states it by saying love 'begins to be a demon the moment he begins to be a god.'...

"For a community that identifies itself as being centred on 'love,' this is why their attitudes and actions are characterised by hatred to anyone who will not worship their god with them. The greatest irony of all is that as much as they champion a separation of church and state, they are seeking to impose their very own LGBTIQ theocracy. And if they win, then as we have already started to see, theirs will be a totalitarian regime of compliance."

Miranda Devine: Same-sex marriage debate ending with Christians vilified | Daily Telegraph

What does it take to get an event kicked out of a pub's beer garden? Speaking about the necessity of grace when vilified.

"The event which so antagonised Rose Hotel patrons was a talk last month by American nun Sister Mary Patrice Ahearn titled, ironically enough, Resilient Faith: How to Survive When Under Attack.

"The talk, organised by the University of Notre Dame's Catholic chaplaincy, was not about gay marriage, but how to cope with being attacked for your faith.

"Sister Patrice quoted the Gospels: 'If the world hates you know that it has hated me before it hated you.'

"She mentioned gay marriage as one issue, along with euthanasia, for which Christians would be persecuted.

"'Most of us are feeling... tension, conflict, disruption in relationships, because of these issues,' she said.

"She urged her audience to find 'common ground between the two sides... I'm sure most of us in this room know or love someone who's gay. Persons with same-sex attraction desire love, friendship and intimacy as much as you or I do.'"

Is Yale Elite If Its English Majors Don't Read Shakespeare? - The Federalist - Joy Pullman

"Yes, something is definitely wrong when students are so racist that they will not listen to the ideas of someone who had the misfortune to be born with a currently non-politically favored skin color. It's also prima facie preposterous to assert that someone can be considered well-educated if he has actively shunned reading Shakespeare. Instead of rebuking their students for this shocking display of ignorance, however, Yale administrators and faculty encouraged it and complied with their demands....

"The fact that a core curriculum of any real substance no longer exists at the United States' so-called prestige universities, and is neither desired by many so-called elite students nor professors, suggests it's time we stop venerating and sending our kids and tax dollars to these institutions whose main function seems to be rotting students' brains and American society from its leadership down."

On the Day They Shoot Me Down in My Pew | Lori Stanley Roeleveld . . . Disturber of Hobbits

"If you add anything to your day, days already filled with the work God has put before you as you follow Him in faith, if you add anything that day - pray for our young men. Check in with one you know. Get to know one you don't. Support a ministry reaching this struggling, searching, agonizing generation.

"If they reject you, pray and redouble your efforts. Try again. These young men are worth our love and every attempt to reach them in the moments of their pain and anger and sorrow.

"And then, on the day I am shot down in God's house in my hometown, I want you to gather in yours.

"Turn up the lights, throw open the windows and doors.

"Let the enemy know that where one is fallen more will rise. Where one light is sent on to glory, another will be set aglow.

"Where one heart that beats for Christ now sees Him face-to-face, another will begin to beat for Him anew."