Musings below the fold

, David Warren discusses re introducing the classics into education, and maybe reteaching the bible.

It is the superiority of the narrative to the syllogistic in the education not only of children but of people, generally. Christ taught in parables, & by example. The Bible is an exemplary storybook, which has obvious use in the moralization not only of our pallid race, but of all races. And the technical foundation, in Latin & Greek (perhaps even a soupçon of Hebrew), is best advanced through the delight of the Classics. (The real Classics, the classic Classics, that take us back to the ground conditions of human experience & language.)

The irony of this is that too often the classics are taught badly (I hated the Oddessey because we were expected to read it as poetry: MEGO).

But I used to tell stories to Ruby, including the classic ones, and now she understands a lot of the metaphors in the Percy Jackson series, about a son of Poisidon. And Tolkien's works have not only brought back Beowulf and renewed the genre of fantasy, but renewed interest in the good part of the middle ages, which were not as dark as the PC of the past insisted (mainly in order to become leaders in their own brave new world).

Warren adds this:

A Catholic re-evangelization, to my mind, must necessarily focus on re-teaching that very same Bible, through all the media of literature, music, & art, resolved in the Liturgy. As much as possible, we must find a way to approach Scripture & Tradition on their own terms, & not through the blinders of faction; to be bravely “catholic” or “universal,” to say nothing of humble in our approach to this magnificent inheritance.

Andrew Greeley does this in his R rated novels, and has several books about the "catholic" imagination, that sacramentally sees God in the little things of life: the flower, the sunrise and in our lover's smile...the old saying goes that we can find out about God in two "books": The bible and the book of nature...

and no, science doesn't negate God (scientism does, but that is philosophy, not science).

one reason he hated the "reformers" is that they tended to be dry intellectuals or have the rigid protestant rule oriented faith, whereas he saw the Bible and all of life as God's telling us a story...

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 Insight has a link to an essay on Love in Shakespeare as divine madness, and how it has deteriorated into cynical coupling or "do your own thing" in the modern world. Yet they are both wrong.

Bookmarked for later reading. It's by Joseph Pearce, who specializes in finding Catholic themes in great books: his more recent ones are about Catholic themes in Shakespeare, who if he wasn't Catholic (see Michael Wood's "In search of Shakespeare" who comes to the same conclusion) had a lot of Catholics in his family...

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 Idle Speculations has a link to the Met's books on art.

MetPublications is a portal to the Met's comprehensive book and online publishing program with close to 700 titles published from 1964 to the present.

It has been made available thanks to the generosity of the Museum and Hunt & Betsy Lawrence

It makes available 370 out-of-print titles, including lots of informative and visually-packed art catalogs from the museum’s past exhibitions. You can read the books online or download them in PDF format

 they also have films here.

again, bookmarked for later reading.

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why am I not surpised

'Spiritual' young people more likely to commit crimes than 'religious' ones, study finds, 

yeah. Spritiual but not religious usually means being a sociopath who rejects all those inconvenient rules that stop one from doing what one wants to do...

and the non believers do even fewer crimes, although I suspect it is because that group tends to be more educated and affluent.

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and the really, really important headline of the day:

Research shows male guppies reproduce even after death

no, not this one

Photographer: Debbie Lockett

this type.

although we never had problem with breeding guppies: they are "live bearers" and gestate the eggs inside the mother, and after the eggs hatch the kids come out and will get eaten if you don't have lots of greens in the tank where they can hide.

which is why Ogden Nash wrote this poem:

Whales have calves,
Cats have kittens,
Bears have cubs,
Bats have bittens,
Swans have cygnets,
Seals have puppies,
But guppies just have little guppies.