A Dozen-Plus Stimulants, Gathered for Your Edification and Inspiration
Dear Intelligent American,
Among the things that can make one wistful for days of cultural yore is their eclectic mix of American popular music. Once upon a time, the records resting side-by-side in the RCA Victrola could be (were indeed) a mix of Big Band (Glenn Miller’s Greatest Hits), show tunes (“Oklahoma,” “Man of La Mancha”), religio-patriotic (Up with People! . . . you meet ’em wherever you go), operetta (D’Oyly Carte’s “The Mikado”), cool old Italians (Dean-o, Frank, Perry), balladeers (Andy Williams), jazz (Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington), easy listening (the Ray Conniff Singers), brass (Herb Alpert), Latin (Willie Colón), pop (K-Tel Presents!), sing-along (Mitch Miller), rock (Iron Butterfly, or Emerson, Lake & Palmer), soul (Curtis Mayfield), kids (Disney’s “Who Shot the Hole in My Sombrero?”), Christmas (Bing Crosby of course), and classical (one of those fat Time-Life collections). Surely, there must have been a 45 with “Michael Row the Boat Ashore” in the gathering.
There was something—things—for every taste, and in fact everyone had multiple tastes.
When did that end?
Anyway, in the allotment of discs at the cramped apartment on East 235th Street were several oft-played 33s of Sly and the Family Stone. What a great band! Its tunes topped the charts a few times, the first coming in 1968 with “Everyday People.”
Sly passed away a few weeks back. He was heralded in obituaries, with one heiling him as a "funk-rock visionary.” This time of year, Summer having finally arrived, he and his troupe often came to mind, offering all hope for Hot Fun in the Summertime.
We hope where you are, Sly, that it is anything but hot. Rest in peace.
Herewith Long Links to Go with the Long Days (Even Though They Are Getting Shorter!)
1. At The American Mind, fan favorite Daniel J. Mahoney reflects on popes, old and new. From the article:
Promisingly, Francis occasionally warned about reducing the Christian Church to the status of an NGO. But he then endlessly opined as if he were the CEO of a predictably progressive NGO informed by equally predictable ideological clichés. The pope was prone to utopian effusions about world affairs, and acted as if support for open borders and peace at any price were prerequisites of the Christian faith. Some of his ecclesiastical boosters even bizarrely spoke about Francis having his own “magisterium” distinct from that of the historic Church. He had no obvious affection for Western civilization, and spoke not at all about the “dictatorship of relativism” that threatened it from within. He showed little or no realism about external threats to it, such as the one arising from militant Islam. In the manner of a woke-adjacent academic or intellectual, Francis saw Islam always and everywhere as a “religion of peace” (for a paradigmatic example, see the 2013 apostolic exhortation The Joy of the Gospel). His Christian affirmation was humanitarian in emphasis and focus, and he was extremely reluctant to challenge the progressivist shibboleths of our age.
Many orthodox Catholics are relieved, and to some extent even elated, by what they’ve seen so far from the new pontificate of Pope Leo XIV, the American-born Robert Prevost. Pope Leo compellingly speaks about the centrality of the crucified and risen Christ. His calls for unity in the Church suggest a desire to bring Catholics together, and not to side unilaterally with progressives against the tradition-minded. His manner and bearing are modest and far from autocratic and divisive. When he talks about “listening” he seems to mean it. He is unlikely to go wobbly on issues that directly affect the integrity of the moral law, or what eminent Catholic thinkers have called “the truth about man.”
2. At Forbes, edu-guru Bruno Manno ponders “micro-credentialing” and its benefit to K-12 education. From the beginning of the piece:
A quiet shift is underway in K-12 education that is democratizing the types of credentials awarded to students and educators. Increasingly, K-12 is using micro-credentials to verify and document what students and educators know and can do when assessed on particular learning outcomes.
The effect is potentially profound. Journalist Sara Weissman says that young people’s use of micro-credentials is creating “The micro-credential generation, a fast-growing number of traditionally college-age students [who] are bypassing degrees to pursue cheaper and faster alternative credentials.”
What follows examines the emerging use of micro-credentials in K-12 student learning and teacher professional development, the challenges involved in implementing this approach, and the lessons learned along the way.
3. At The Wall Street Journal, Andrew Hartz draws attention to the obsession with “existential” events. From the piece:
We don’t have to overthink every word we say or hear, but there are signals that a word may have an unconscious double meaning. Therapists tend to think this phenomenon is most likely to occur when a word is used in an odd way—when it’s emotionally charged, when it’s repeated excessively or when it has clear resonance with one’s psychological concerns.
The recent political use of the word “existential” seems to check every box. People in the U.S. are shouting about how politics is “existential” at the same time that American society is suffering from a marked crisis of purpose. The term is strange and was used rarely in the past, but its use has been increasing as people have become less able to tolerate the risks and uncertainties of life.
Recent events—the pandemic, geopolitical conflicts, the increasing secularization of society—could have triggered Americans’ existential concerns. Perhaps other factors are at play as well. For many, social-media platforms intensify feelings of insignificance. A loneliness epidemic might heighten anxieties about meaning. Distrust of authority can lead to feelings of confusion and insecurity. Whatever the causes, the sense that everything is an existential crisis is likely exacerbated by the increasing emotional fragility of younger generations.
4. At American Enterprise Institute’s Center on Opportunity and Social Mobility, Brad Wilcox and Linda Malone-Colon point to missing dads to explain why some boys are falling behind. From the article:
Boy-girl gaps such as this have drawn considerable attention in recent years. But the typical explanations for this gender gap have tended to overlook one important factor. We’ve heard about biological differences in boys’ and girls’ development. The addictive hold electronic gaming has on teenage boys. And, according to the American Psychological Association, the ways in which boys are socialized “to project an image of dominance, indifference, and self-sufficiency” that harms their capacity to do well in school.
What we have not heard much about, however, is what can be called the “father factor”—the ways in which boys with disengaged or absent fathers struggle more, while active and engaged fathers often protect boys from academic failure, as well as trouble in and outside of school.
To remedy this, we convened an ideologically diverse group of scholars to research the state of fatherhood here in Virginia. The result is a joint University of Virginia and Hampton University report, Good Fathers, Flourishing Kids: The Importance of Fatherhood in Virginia, which spotlights the ways in which boys (and girls) across the state are more likely to flourish in school and life when they have good dads.
5. At National Review, Michael Brendan Dougherty remembers summers before the age of handheld devices. From the reflection:
Before summer jobs and a teenaged car, my summers were filled by going to local parks and basketball courts, somehow successfully begging for a ride to friend’s house, or pulling some kind of distraction off our own shelves at home—a VHS, a CD, or a book. I spent weeks of one boyhood summer just looking through the huge atlases that my grandfather had collected.
I wish I could have a “before screens” summer again. But it’s hopeless. Connected devices are part of being in civilization now. You can shut them off, but up there in the cloud, or in Irish data centers, the memes, emails, and marketing spam are piling up and waiting to be sent silently across the world and then jump through the night sky onto your device. The demands of your boss, the notifications about birthdays from long-unseen friends, the advertisements designed to make you feel just slightly status-conscious: They are all there with their insistent, impertinent demands. The technology we’ve built has made the home more permeable to the outside world, to the social signals and the culture outside of it. Somehow the longest days of the year have been made shorter, and drained of their potential for adventure. All the attractions and left turns have been mapped out, rated by thousands of people before us, and made accessible to us through QR codes.
6. At TomKlingenstein.com, Ryszard Legutko revisits The Captive Mind. From the beginning of the review:
Czesław Miłosz published The Captive Mind in 1953, a few years after he had abandoned Poland and sought political asylum in France. “Abandoned Poland” is not entirely an accurate phrase. After the war, Miłosz worked in the communist diplomatic service, first in Washington and later in Paris. How the Stalinist authorities ruling Poland agreed to employ him in such a capacity may seem strange today. Two factors came into play here.
First, the communists wanted to present themselves from the best side in Western countries, and they needed people with good names, not hostile to the new regime, to represent them. The communists launched a policy of buying well-known and highly reputed writers. They gave them houses, sometimes with a car and driver, additional privileges, and promises of large editions of their works. Or they employed them in the diplomatic service. This policy lasted for several years and proved quite effective.
Second, Miłosz had friends well-positioned in the new communist structure in Poland, friends from his days as a student at the Wilno University, historically Poland’s second oldest university (now in Lithuania). Among these friends, we should mention Jerzy Putrament, a mediocre writer but powerful apparatchik, one of the negative characters in The Captive Mind. In the beginning, he supported Miłosz and put him in the communist diplomatic corps. But later, he changed his mind and decided to bring Miłosz back to Poland so that he could forever enjoy a communist paradise. Miłosz saw through his colleague’s intentions and chose freedom.
7. At Comment Magazine, Chris Owen advises: Listen to the wind, and learn to discern. From the piece:
If you sail, you learn to pay attention to the wind. Because sailing wasn’t part of my childhood, I didn’t learn to pay attention to the wind. We were motorboat people. Point the bow of the boat in your desired direction, throttle up, and go.
My father, the ever-present danger named Carl, took me out on a small sailboat—a Sunfish—once. I was seven or eight. The boat was stored in a shed at the lakeside cottage we were renting. All I remember is coming to the surface in a panic, gagging out the lake water I had half-inhaled, half-swallowed when the Sunfish, wrong way to the wind by no fault of its own, bucked and flipped. My dad couldn’t read the wind either.
Wind is alive.
There’s so much more, but the beginning of discernment is an awareness that there are lives outside you, and that those lives outside you make claims. The wind is one of those lives. It has moods and seasons: the autumn bluster spinning dry leaves, the summer breeze rippling the pond, the winter gale.
8. At The Public Discourse, John F. Doherty imagines a new Great Awakening, for civil society’s sake. From the analysis:
The first of these revivals, the Great Awakening of the 1740s and ’50s, gave rise to American “civil society”—the moral sentiments and customs that unite Americans apart from the government, and that check government’s power. As Joseph Stuart recalls in Rethinking the Enlightenment, the Awakening “was the first common experience” shared by all the American colonists. It touched not just naturally fervent people, but deists like Benjamin Franklin, a friend of the Awakening’s leading preacher, the Anglican (and Englishman) George Whitefield. John Adams referred to this experience when he said the American Revolution “was effected before the War commenced . . . in the Minds and Hearts of the People”—as a “Change in their Religious Sentiments of their Duties and Obligations.” The Awakening created America’s “civil religion”—not religious symbolism that served politics, but a set of “common values transcending any one denomination” and the colonies’ political boundaries. The Awakening showed the colonists that they could reach God without the state, and that politics was legitimate only insofar as it served man’s “unalienable rights,” dictated by “the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” From this common religious sense arose a common national identity, independent of the British monarchy, that naturally called for a more suitable political framework.
Today, however, Americans’ religiosity is weaker than ever, and their civil society is coming apart. Those with no religious affiliation (the so-called “nones”) make up 29 percent of the population, and they aren’t exactly thriving. Fifty-five percent are divorced, separated, cohabiting, or never married; 63 percent have not finished college; and 36 percent make less than $50,000 a year. The sufferings of the nones may be no accident, as going to church has numerous proven benefits: churchgoers are less likely to die prematurely, commit suicide, suffer from depression, or die from drugs or alcohol. If American religion continues declining, America will become a sad place. It will be more susceptible to the sort of resentful, angry revolutions that destroyed eighteenth-century France and Weimar Germany (where religion had also been weak), and which on occasion we already see flaring up.
9. At National Affairs, Daniel Sonnenfeld explores the trouble with compassion-marinated history. From the essay:
Public debates on the topic of history and historiography have largely been of two natures: disputes about historical facts, and arguments regarding the place of revisionist history in public education. In other words, most writers on the topic have focused on the histories themselves: whether the narratives presented were truthful (e.g., was 1776 really the American experiment's year of origin?) and their places in our countries’ education systems (e.g., should British imperialism be a central topic in high-school history lessons in the United Kingdom?).
In both kinds of debates, the New York Times’s 1619 Project—an initiative that began as an interactive newspaper feature and has since been developed into a Hulu miniseries, a bestselling anthology, and school curricula, among other things—is a lightning rod. First launched in August 2019, the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery, the project “aims to reframe the country's history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of [America’s] national narrative.” In short, it seeks to revise the fact pattern underlying the traditional narrative about America’s founding, and to disseminate this new alternative narrative in American public schools and universities.
Conservatives responded forcefully, in part by critiquing the 1619 Project’s methods and claims, and also by attempting to shore up more traditional accounts of the founding. While this response has been important, it has not paid much attention to the underlying intellectual currents shaping much of the historiographical enterprise in recent decades. And in opposing itself to progressive activist historiography, some of it has run the risk of falling into a different, but equally problematic trap, by treating revisionist histories as coordinated conspiracies seeking to falsify Western history.
10. At The American Spectator, Steven Greenhut finds that California bureaucrats remain in COVID mode, and don’t want to return to the office. From the piece:
In a market system, you show up to work if your employer requires it—or stay at home if that’s part of the deal. If you don’t like the terms and conditions, you can seek employment elsewhere. Currently, California’s state workers are upset that their ultimate boss, Gov. Gavin Newsom, has required the vast majority to begin returning to their offices next month. He’s allowing a hybrid schedule, whereby they work at home one day a week.
It’s a perfectly reasonable requirement, but state employees are complaining about parking costs and the hassles of commuting. They already enjoy above-average pay and pension benefits that dwarf those in the private sector—and now they are pushing back against having to do what so many private-sector workers must do, by showing up to work years after the end of the COVID orders.
The Sacramento Bee reported on a protest at the Capitol by hundreds of state workers who are “fighting to continue working from home and for their paychecks.” It’s not that hard to fight for their paychecks, as they’ll continue to receive them if they do as the governor has required.
11. At American Reformer, Daniel Strand asks an important question: Did Europe’s established churches bring about secularism? From the article:
If the thesis that Christianity only flourishes and grows when it is formally separated from governmental structures is true, then the history of the spread of Christianity in Europe is a giant rebuttal. The disestablishmentarians will have to come up with a better answer to explain the data. Christianity spread because of the help and support of political rulers, not in spite of it. Magisterial Protestants did not seek to overturn this order, but to reform it. And it was also the vigorous support of Christian monarchs and princes during the Reformation that played a crucial role in supporting the fledgling movement and the efforts of its leaders.
What American Christians should be asking is how Christianity in Europe existed for nearly two millennia rather than thumping our chests and proclaiming state churches an abject failure. Christianity has existed in Europe for close to 2000 years and in some form of establishment or explicit partnership with political rulers. American Christianity, in its current disestablished form, has existed for less than 250 years, and in some states much less. The Christianity that was transplanted to America—predominately English Protestantism—came from establishments. Until the early nineteenth century, states maintained explicit establishments, and vestiges of the same remained for some time thereafter. In other words, America was not exactly a disestablishmentarian blank slate. America’s early colonial establishments can be described as more liberal and, well, English than other continental models, but a true and thorough disestablishment is, in the scope of history, a very new experiment.
12. At The Free Press, Ido Hevroni explains how he teaches the Iliad to modern warriors. From the piece:
We opened the 2023–2024 academic year four months late. Because of the war, more than half our students were drafted for reserve military service, and we wanted to wait for them to return. When we finally started reading the Iliad together, it was different. The students returning from war made clear to me what I had intuitively grasped in Amir’s eulogy: The Iliad is a painfully relevant book.
The Iliad describes the outbreak of Achilles’s wild rage following the death of his best friend, Patroclus. Like many comrades in arms, Achilles believes Patroclus is the better of the two and that he—Achilles—should have been the one to die. Following his friend’s death, Achilles returns to battle and behaves ferociously, slaughtering dozens of Trojans and finally killing Hector, who killed Patroclus. Slaying Hector is not enough for Achilles; he then desecrates his corpse and refuses to grant him the last honor due to a warrior: a decent burial. Finally, Priam, the king of Troy and Hector’s father, comes to Achilles’s tent and asks him, in tears, to allow his son a proper burial. Moved to tears himself, Achilles accepts the request. Thus ends the story of Achilles’s wrath—not in heroic song or in victor’s glory, but in a human dialogue between the bereaved father and the killer of his son. With compassion for each other, the two men hold each other’s hands and accept their fragile humanity.
Lucky 13. At The Methow Valley News, Ralph Schwartz reports on a Washington State volleyball “smashburger” fundraiser. From the story:
The Liberty Bell High School volleyball team raised $3,100 Friday (June 13) at a smashburger and french fry fundraiser at the former Treeline Teriyaki in Twisp.
The event’s location and the concept were no-brainers, given that Treeline Teriyaki owner Beth Blank is the volleyball team’s coach. Husband and restaurant co-owner Eric Blank, who spent much of his time in Treeline’s kitchen during its six months of operation, manned the grill for the fundraiser.
The event was such a success, Beth Blank said, that they sold out of burgers during lunch and had to postpone the dinner fundraiser. “We are working on nailing down another date to sell burgers and fries at night,” she said.
Bonus. At RealClear Religion, on the anniversary of Napoleon’s most consequential defeat, Andrew Fowler reminds us of the Waterlooser’s reconciliation with Catholicism. From the article:
However, Napoleon had a “fractious relationship” with the Church. As historian Andrew Roberts states in Napoleon: A Life, the French leader had been a “nominal Catholic in life who made war on one pope and imprisoned another,” the latter which led to his excommunication in July 1809. He even enshrined an “Imperial catechism” that French children recited, which proclaimed Christians owed fidelity to him because Jesus Christ “taught us what we owe to our sovereign.” Conversely, after the French Revolution suppressed the Church’s influence, confiscated its property, and martyred numerous faithful during The Reign of Terror, the French emperor largely restored the religion’s standing and practice through the Concordat of 1801.
Yet on St. Helena—named after the mother of Constantine the Great, the Roman emperor who “made Christianity the main religion of Rome”—he once again wrestled with the faith of his youth, becoming more intrigued and vocal in his spiritual affirmations.
On June 8, 1816, nearing a year in exile, he purportedly stated, “Everything proclaims the existence of a God; that is beyond doubt,” with the caveat “but all our religions are clearly the off-spring of men.” He further insisted his doubts of reconciling with the Church, saying, “A man can swear to nothing that he will do in his last moments; yet undoubtedly my belief is that I shall die without a confessor.”
For the Good of the Cause
Uno. At Philanthropy Daily, Michaela Elliott interviews Chris Whitford about a nonprofit that indeed helps women with unintended pregnancies. Read it here.
Due. The Center for Civil Society provides wisdom to nonprofit worker bees in various aspects of the arts of fundraising and development. This July 17th, from 1:00 to 4:00 p.m. (Eastern), C4CS experts will be providing a master class on “The Elements of Grant Writing.” Count on the workshop to provide the tools needed to improve grant proposals. If this falls within your portfolio, you really must attend. Get more information, right here.
Tre. On the new episode of the “Givers, Doers, & Thinkers” podcast, Jeremy Beer interviews scholar Joshua Hochschild about the importance of subsidiarity. Catch it here.
Department of Bad Jokes
Q: What was Moby Dick’s favorite game show?
A: Whale of Fortune.
A Dios
Please come to the Center for Civil Society’s important America 250 conference this November in Philadelphia. Learn more about it right here.
Now to close, apropos of nothing—except current events—Your Lowly Scribbler, flipping through the Bible, came upon the end of Deuteronomy and Moses’s last words. They seem terribly relevant, despite the dust of three millennia:
“Happy are you, O Israel! Who is like you, a people saved by the LORD, the shield of your help, and the sword of your triumph! Your enemies shall come fawning to you, and you shall tread upon their backs.”
May We Heed the Almighty’s Promises,
Jack Fowler, who lives in just fear at jfowler@amphil.com.
