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March 21st marks the birthday of one of the greatest composers of all time: Johann Sebastian Bach. Beyond being a great composer, Bach was also a great teacher who raised many pupils to be masters of their craft. According to Bach’s first biographer, Johann Nikolaus Forkel, Bach’s success as a teacher resulted in part from
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April 13 marked the birthday of American hero Thomas Jefferson. Best known for his role in penning the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson also held the rare and prestigious post of President of the United States. His path to the White House, however, was long and contentious, a fact referenced numerous times during the equally bitter
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In his famous essay on fairy stories, J. R. R. Tolkien asserted that one of the most important facets of fairytales is that they hold up a “Mirror of scorn and pity towards Man”. The fairy story, Tolkien wrote, “may be used as a Mirour de l’Omme” (mirror of man), as something that shows us
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On Aug. 9, 1945, the day the U.S. dropped a second atomic bomb—this one on the Japanese city of Nagasaki—J.R.R. Tolkien penned a letter to his son, Christopher Tolkien. Here is what he wrote: “The news today about ‘Atomic bombs’ is so horrifying one is stunned. The utter folly of these lunatic physicists to consent
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Last week the world once again witnessed an Islamic State’s use of at least one child bomber, perhaps two. A child between the ages of 12 and 14 was reportedly the culprit behind a suicide attack – blowing up the wedding of Besna and Nurettin Akdogan in Gaziantep, Turkey and killing 54 people on Aug.
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Many Americans feel that their liberties are being continuously eroded through government overreach and overregulation. But the following quotation from the eighteenth-century British statesman Edmund Burke makes one wonder: has the government’s erosion of liberty been preceded by the failure over time of Americans to live freely? Burke writes: “What is liberty without wisdom and without virtue?
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