All posts by philwade

Blogging through The Silmarillion

The Silver Key is blogging his thoughts while reading The Silmarillion. I see that he has blogged through a reread of The Lord of the Rings too. (via Books, Inq.)

Popular Plays

Terry Teachout links to lists of plays produced across America compiled by American Theatre. To Kill a Mockingbird is very popular, and Terry will have more analysis tomorrow in the Wall Street Journal. (via Books, Inq.)

Tomorrow: Terry’s article in the WSJ is here. Despite my comment made from a quick scan, To Kill a Mockingbird did not make the top 11 most produced plays list. He notes: “It suggests to me that American theaters have a pronounced bias in favor of new and newish plays by American authors, especially ones that have high public profiles. (Six of the top 11 plays of the past decade have been produced on Broadway, while five of them won Pulitzer Prizes.) Up to a point, that’s good news.”

Made in the Image of

Obama, Congressional Leaders Honor Former Senator Edward William Brooke

Chad Pergram of Fox News has an interesting post on the artwork in the Capitol Rotunda. I’m sure I saw what he describes here, but I don’t remember thinking much about it. Of course, I didn’t have a tour guide.

Plastered against the arched ceiling above the Rotunda floor is a gigantic canvas called “The Apotheosis.” It shows George Washington, accompanied by thirteen maidens, rising into the heavens.

Some tour guides and Congressional staff try to downplay the meaning of the word “apotheosis.” But in its official literature about the fresco, even the Architect of the Capitol’s office says that apotheosis “means literally the raising of a person to the rank of a god.”

There’s always chatter about the U.S. being a Christian nation and holding Judeo-Christian values. But in the most-hallowed temple of American democracy, at the top of one of the most recognized pinnacles on the planet, there’s a fresco of the first American president, ascending into the heavens as a god. Alongside 13 women.

And it takes the health care bill to stir people into a tizzy?

Building a Better Citizen

With unemployment holding at a little over 10%, Sol Stern points out E. D. Hirsch’s Curriculum for Democracy. Hirsch observed that students need to have a core of knowledge in order to read well, despite being versed in reading skills. Skills alone are not the sum of learning.

Stern gives an illustration of the problem facing many American students.

My children were students at P.S. 87 on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, also known as the William Tecumseh Sherman School. Our school enjoyed a reputation as one of the city’s education jewels, and parents clamored to get their kids in. But most of the teachers and principals had trained at Columbia University’s Teachers College, a bastion of so-called progressive education, and militantly defended the progressive-ed doctrine that facts were pedagogically unimportant. I once asked my younger son and some of his classmates, all top fifth-grade students, whether they knew anything about the historical figure after whom their school was named. Not only were they clueless about the military leader who delivered the final blow that brought down America’s slave empire; they hardly knew anything about the Civil War, either. When I complained to the school’s principal, he reassured me: “Our kids don’t need to learn about the Civil War. What they are learning at P.S. 87 is how to learn about the Civil War.”

So when will they actually learn details of the Civil War? When they’re trying to relax in front of the History Channel between specials on UFOs and Nostradamus?

Lookin’ 4 a Nu Hobby?

While Lars is blowing snow and avoiding cardiac arrest, you may want to pursue this list of 45 manly hobbies by the folks at The Art of Manliness. Naturally, chess tops the list. Live steel combat is on it too (aka fencing).

Lookin' 4 a Nu Hobby?

While Lars is blowing snow and avoiding cardiac arrest, you may want to pursue this list of 45 manly hobbies by the folks at The Art of Manliness. Naturally, chess tops the list. Live steel combat is on it too (aka fencing).

What to Do with Free Time

“All our entertainments, good as they may be in themselves, can all too often function like sedatives that mask our awareness of some underlying tedium in our reality.” – Richard Winter

Read a brief devotion on this topic at Living Christ 360.