Author: Thomas Fleming

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More Poems: Shelley in Pisa

The sun is set; the swallows are asleep;
The bats are flitting fast in the gray air;
The slow soft toads out of damp corners creep,
And evening’s breath, wandering here and there
Over the quivering surface of the stream,
Wakes not one ripple from its summer dream.

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Religio Philologi: The Creation of the Church, Part I

According to a later Christian tradition, when Tiberius heard of this strange Jewish renegade who alone did not want to kick the Romans out of Judaea, he proposed to the senate that Christ be included in the pantheon of Roman gods.  The Senate, so the story goes, objected, declaring the new religion to be illicit, though Judaism was protected by law. 

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Antifa and AltRight

These criminal rioters are playing from the same script, but it was not written by George Soros–though he may have bought the current rights to it–but by the revolutionaries in 1848 and, more particularly, by the Communist terrorists of the 1920’s, who tried took over Hungary and tried to take over Germany and Italy.  If you want to understand how Mussolini–a comparatively benevolent despot–and the far from benevolent Hitler–came to power,  all you need to know is that it was facilitated by Leftist terrorism.

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Ask Mr. Autodidact: Diagram Latin Sentences?

A Question from a young Latin teacher. Henle asks that the students learn to diagram sentences in Latin. How helpful do you think this visual division of grammatical parts is for early and early-intermediate students? Much depends on the sort of students you have and what you expect to achieve.  Fr. Henle learned Latin before the Second World War, at a time when an analytical and structuralist approach was all the rage both in linguistics and in teaching English.  While the earliest method of diagramming goes back to the late 1840’s, the system really took off when it was visually...