Acres of Literature or Mark Twain on Being a Printer

One isn't a printer ten years without setting up acres of good and bad literature and learning, unconsciously at first, consciously later, [and] to discriminate between the two and meanwhile consciously acquiring what is called a style ("The Turning Point of My Life").

The Ball & the Cross

A recording of G. K. Chesterton's The Ball and the Cross is available at Librivox.org. Just click on the title of this post for the link.

I recorded the first three chapters and another reader completed the novel. I must confess that I am a bumbling amateur but it was a labor of love. The reader who completed the novel did a fine job and her sound quality is superior. So if you can barely make it through the beginning, just hang on!

The book is a great story of a Christian and an atheist who challenge each other to a duel, then become friends and try to convert each other as they travel through England trying to finish their chivalrous fight. The modern world keeps interfering because it doesn't believe in duels, because it doesn't believe there's anything worth dying for, especially religion. The story is a hoot!!

Was Jefferson a Secularist?

Jefferson wished his epitaph to read:

HERE WAS BURIED THOMAS JEFFERSON

AUTHOR OF THE DECLARATION OF AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE

OF THE STATUTE OF VIRGINIA FOR RELIGIOUS FREEDOM

AND FATHER OF THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA.

In his letter to the Danbury Baptists he expresses his interpretation of the First Amendment:

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man & his god, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;" thus building a wall of eternal separation between Church & State. Congress thus inhibited from acts respecting religion, and the Executive authorised only to execute their acts, I have refrained from prescribing even those occasional performances of devotion ... as religious exercises only to the voluntary regulations and discipline of each respective sect.

Leonard Levy in his Jefferson and Civil Liberties: The Darker Side (1989) writes:

Jefferson wrote in his Notes on the State of Virginia: "Instead therefore of putting the Bible and Testament into the hands of the children, at an age when their judgments are not sufficiently matured for religious enquiries, their memories may here be stored with the most useful facts from Grecian, Roman, European and American history."(17) Religion was also conspicuous by its absence from Jefferson's plan of 1817; his Bill for Establishing a System of Public Education enumerated only secular subjects. In an effort to eliminate possible religious influence in the public schools, Jefferson specified that ministers should not serve as "visitors" or supervisors, and provided that "no religious reading, instruction or exercise, shall be prescribed or practised" in violation of the tenets of any sect or denomination.(18) Clearly, Jefferson opposed the use of public funds for the teaching of religion in the public schools.

It is generally assumed that the Founding Fathers were for some sort of Christian education. But Jefferson seems to be following the logic of separation of church and state in such a way as to exclude any form of Christian education. Jefferson seems opposed to even the influence of religion on any state run institution. He believes in the hyper-privatization of faith and religion as a matter of opinion. Perhaps Jefferson was our first secularist calling for religion free zones of public life.

Delivering the Good Thesis Pt 2

The introductory paragraph should not only state the thesis but explain how you are going to prove it. This includes method as well as lines of evidence.

To Change the World!

Alexis De Tocqueville said:

Americans have used their liberty to combat the individuality born of equality, and they have won.

This is old-fashioned populism. The problem with this, according to James Davison Hunter in To Change the World (click on the title), is that populism tends to ignore high culture and leave it untransformed. High cultural forms like academia, media, and government build the plausibility structures that makes the gospel seem implausible to moderns.

Hunter says that we will not change the world until we assume a "faithful presence" in the centers of high culture.