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The Importance of Reading Difficult Books 3
- Literature
- January 25, 2023
In his work The Western Canon, Harold Bloom wrote that a “reader does not read for easy pleasure or to expiate social guilt, but to enlarge a solitary existence.” The apparent message in Bloom’s flourish is that a reader ought to be after something more difficult to attain than mere pleasure. Passive consumption of entertainment
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Ivan Provorov Stands Fast in His Faith 4
- Religion, Culture
- January 25, 2023
Last Tuesday night, the Philadelphia Flyers, a hockey team, participated in an LGBTQ+ Pride Night event. The team—with one exception—donned rainbow-colored jerseys as they warmed up before the game. Defenseman Ivan Provorov opted out. “I respect everybody, and I respect everybody’s choices,” he told reporters. “My choice is to stay true to myself and my
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Even in Our Age of Ugly, Beauty Will Survive 2
- Culture, Philosophy
- January 24, 2023
“Beauty,” wrote philosopher Roger Scruton, “is vanishing from our world because we live as though it did not matter.” Whatever we may think of Scruton’s observation, it seems clear our ideas of beauty are at best confused, at worst degraded, and always subjective. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” is, of course, in
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Jacinda Ardern and Whether Women Can Really ‘Have It All’5
- Politics, Family
- January 24, 2023
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern certainly hasn’t been on my list of favorite people for the last several years, largely due to her draconian COVID policies on masks, vaccines, and quarantines, and her “government knows best” attitude. But I finally had something to applaud her for the other day when she announced her resignation,
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Truth Is More Than Propositional 3
- Philosophy, Religion
- January 23, 2023
Navigating a world riddled with attacks on gender, goodness, and morality, I’m always encouraged by people who cling to truth. Still, even as we hold to rightly ordered propositions, we have to recognize exactly what truth encompasses because it has profound impacts on our systems of belief and how we communicate. What Is Truth? Many
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What is Writing? Why We Misunderstand the Coming of ChatGPT 2
- Education, Literature
- January 23, 2023
Is high-school English dead? A Dec. 9 article published in The Atlantic by Daniel Herman, a high-school English teacher, says yes. Herman asserts that the new AI chat program ChatGPT drastically changes the nature of education, especially the teaching of writing. The software can respond to prompts of almost any kind—even very complicated ones—in a
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