Thomas Fleming Makes Speaking Appearance in Michigan
Saturday, October 6, 2018
10:00 am – 11:45 am
Best Western of Okemos / Stadium Room
2209 University Park Dr, Okemos, MI 48864
Free Admission
Category: Free Content
Subsidized Illiteracy
This murder of English and logic is being practiced by academics throughout the 50 states. It results in a professor, testifying in the Senate, who has to ask what the word “exculpatory” means. It results in hundreds of thousands of self-styled intellectuals who ridicule a successful businessman-turned-President who has that particle of common sense they will never have
Life Lived without Law
Two unrelated events have connected themselves in my mind this week. My first story concerns a piece I read a couple of months ago about a priest in the diocese of Fall River, MA. He had begun his career as a seminarian at St. John’s Seminary, Brighton, MA, in the early 1990s. In his first-year there, the academic dean, one Fr. John Farrell, not only described one of his homosexual adventures to the whole first-year class, but “inappropriately touched” our student twice or, as we would say in the language of the law, assaulted him. He was not the only...
Visit Sicily in January
Dear Friends, Fellow Travelers, Subscribers, Casual Browsers: Mark your calendars for the second week in January 2019. The Fleming Foundation is finalizing plans for our second voyage of exploration. This time we are going to Sicily. Many of you are aware that since 2000, I have been taking small groups to Europe. Although we have done programs in Scotland, France, and Serbia-Montenegro, we have concentrated mainly on the two homes of our civilization, Greece and Italy. In 2019, we shall probably be going to the South of France, but I wanted to make what I hope will not be...
About that New York Times Fake Op-Ed
By now you might know who supposedly wrote the fake op-ed, “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration.” Subhead: “I work for the president but like-minded colleagues and I have vowed to thwart parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.” My guess it’s a couple of mid-level, semi-literate staffers. I’ve written a couple thousand op-eds, and edited many thousands more, and it just doesn’t read right. Consider the first sentence: “President Trump is facing a test to his presidency unlike any faced by a modern American leader.” Worse than the Cuban Missile Crisis? Or Reagan facing...
Sweatshops of the Mind: The Rise of Bureaucracy
Community control of schools run by dedicated teachers who looked after each child individually runs counter to the modern assumption that every human endeavor can be turned into a science. Every real “science” requires a theoretical framework, hence the need in educationism for theories of cognitive development and child psychology. Even the acts of learning and teaching must be analyzed, broken down into their components, tested, measured, and graphed with all sorts of coefficients and Greek letters that really mean very little more than up and down, more and less. In the years when I was reading grant proposals...
The Wilsonian Empire
The empire of our good friend Clyde Wilson is spreading. Not only does it encompass Shotwell Publishing but it now includes Reckonin, a Southern political website developed by his daughter, which just put up a revised and expanded version of my off-the-cuff piece, “What is To Be Done?”
Poems of the Week: Light Verse and Doggerel
“The Profane Ballad of Ecclesiastical Reform”
There’s only way with recalcitrant clerks,
Saith experience under the sun:
The Road from Damascus, Part I, By Charles C. Yost
From the beginning, the goal that Dr. Fleming and I envisioned for this series was self-knowledge through discovery of the Christians from whom we have come to be alienated by schism. Let us try to understand, then, how it was that brethren and disciples of Jesus Christ became strangers to one another.
