Adam Roberts notes about The Lord of the Rings, “The repeated theme is the danger of words; their slipperiness but also the ease with which they can move us directly into the malign world of the text. One ring to bind us all. Books are bound, too.”

Robert George believes we are at a tipping point with many opinion-makers. “Christians, and those rejecting the me-generation liberal dogma of ‘if it feels good do it,’ are no longer tolerable by the intellectual and cultural elite,” he says. The individualism of modern liberalism has become like a national religion for these elite, so our views on personhood, community, God, and everything else are heretical at best. They are in a position to punish us for holding these views, as George explains in two videos.

Micah Mattix says D.G. Myers was one of our best critics. Last Friday, Myers died of the cancer he endured for the past few years. Patrick Kurp is organizing a Festschrift for him to be hosted by Gregory Wolfe. Terry Teachout described him in an essay only a few days ago.

Kurp has written a few posts on Myers. Here he remembers a story of a dying man by Henry James. Here he passes on information from the family.

In a talk Myers’ gave at Congregation Torat Emet on July 17. 2014, he said:

Several years ago terminal cancer called to me and I answered Hineni, “Here I am.” The religious language may seem blasphemous, as if I were claim­ing to be a prophet, but that’s not what I mean at all. What I mean is Hashem places you in your circumstances, and even the most ordinary of persons can discover his unique role in life, his calling—he can help to complete creation—if he recognizes and accepts where he has been placed.

If the government-sponsored drought doesn’t drive people out of California, the education system should. One California English professor (that’s a professor of California English, not just one who lives in the state) argues in his book that students should be exposed to liberalism in college. Johnathan Marks reviews Donald Lazere’s Why Higher Education Should Have a Leftist Bias.

Here’s the idea: “Neither mainstream liberals nor mainstream conservatives question the ‘unmarked norm’ of capitalism, and consequently students don’t question it either. ‘Isn’t there something to be said,’ then, ‘for … preserving in the human imagination … socialist ideals,’ and ‘mightn’t college liberal arts teachers … be indulged in this role, like the monks who preserved the manuscripts of classical humanists?'”

Marks goes on to destroy Lazere’s arguments with facts, which I won’t repeat here. “Lazere’s great narrowing of the aim of higher education encompasses more than his wish that it occupy itself with preserving the thought of the left. Because Lazere thinks that not only ‘unmarked norms’ but also the deliberate efforts of a ‘conservative attack machine’ have prejudiced students against the left, exposing that machine becomes an important aim of ‘general education.'” (via Prufrock)

Joel Miller explains “What banning this book says about the future of our society,” talking about the Springs Charter Schools removing Christian books from their circulation. That book is Corrie ten Boom’s The Hiding Place.

Rod Dreher describes a bit of how it changed him. “Reading The Hiding Place as a kid dramatically affected me. The moral heroism of the ten Booms sensitized me to the effects of anti-Semitism, and taught me what Christians must do if ever we are in a situation where persecuted people rely on us for protection.”

Miller writes, “Given this Christian impulse to identify with the oppressed and save those in danger, to remove The Hiding Place from library shelves betrays a sort of societal self-defeat, and similar examples multiply as our culture fumbles toward a more rigorously enforced secularity. We’re like the cannibal committing suicide one nibble at a time.” (via Prufrock)

Now this is a vocabulary test.

An independent American-Brazilian research project is “measuring vocabulary sizes according to age and education, and particularly to compare native learning rates with foreign language classroom learning rates.” They ask you to check all the words you can define, not just ones you think you’ve seen before. I got a respectable score, but yours will probably be better. Feel free to let us know. If you know what vibrissae and uxoricide are without me telling you, you’ll do great on this test.

Gregory Wolfe observes, “If the Bible is a closed feedback loop – read me but read nothing else – then sign me up for another religion. I think it’s saying the opposite: read me faithfully and you will be equipped to read everything. If scripture doesn’t send you out into the world with curiosity and compassion, then it’s not from God.”

He answers three quick questions here as a preface to speaking at the Word and Words Conference at Sojourn Community Church in Louisville, Kentucky.