Category: Feature

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Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off, Conclusion

Early specialization has eliminated the common culture that could produce a D’ Arcy Thompson or an Anthony Powell or a Douglas Young, and we are left with an intellectual life dominated by trained savages who can do their job, understand (perhaps) some little corner of the universe (and, in the case, of cosmologists, that corner is very tiny, indeed!), but they cannot integrate what they have learned into a larger picture.  Read popular books by scientists, and whenever they step outside their field of specialization, they either fall back on the platitudes of the Durants or, what is worse, rely...

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Guns ’n’ Grammar

The late Charley Reese got the gun issue right: “Some might say the Second Amendment is obsolete. Our own century shows us that it is not.  Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Fidel Castro, Pol Pot and Mao all saw to it that people were disarmed prior to commencing their reigns of terror and tyranny.  God forbid, but Americans, too, could find themselves some day having to choose between submission or resistance to a tyrant.”

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Χρίστος Ανέστη

This great Easter hymn was composed by Venantius Fortunatus, an Italian who lived roughly from 530 to  600 or some time thereafter. Born in Venezia, near Treviso, he was educated in the then still-civilized Ravenna some time after Justinian’s reconquest of Italy.  He made his way to the Frankish court in Metz, where he established himself as court poet.  

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The Inconvenience of Truth

In its original Latin use, inconvenient, meaning not accordant or unsuitable, was—as far as I know—innocent of sinister implication; but in the six hundred years since its importation into English via French, it has tended to take on the coloring of a euphemism.  Although the Oxford Dictionary shows no awareness of the fact, in the days of Elizabeth I, if her Lord Treasurer William Cecil began to think that someone’s presence or behavior was inconvenient, then it was probably time for that person to start thinking seriously about putting his property in trust, and planning a trip overseas. In contemporary...