Of all the student papers I've ever received, my favorite is the one that began: "As Karl Marx wrote in his famous book, Selected Writings of Karl Marx, . . . "
It's the little touches that make teaching worthwhile.
Joseph Bottum
13.2K posts
Joseph Bottum
@JosephBottum
Reader, Writer, Layabout. Living in the Black Hills.
- For logic fans, a pretty good example of the AAA-2 syllogism, with its undistributed-middle fallacy. Try the form with other terms: All cows are mammals, and all dogs are mammals, so all dogs are cows.God favors America. Trump favors America. God favors Trump. It's just math.
- No community was ever formed by the idea that we should have community. Community proves interestingly incidental: a by-product of shared purpose. As I point out in An Anxious Age, this was the dilemma of the Communitarians back in the 1990s, and it remains unsolved today.You’re unable to view this Post because this account owner limits who can view their Posts. Learn more
- A number of the statues currently being torn down, from Columbus to Junípero Serra, were actually put up to make outsider Catholics feel part of what they perceived as a Protestant nation.
- "The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people." — G.K. ChestertonCourt awards $40,000 to piano teacher whose neighbor tried to annoy her during lessons. is.gd/MsGzHf
- Those devastating lines of W.H. Auden: God may reduce you on Judgement Day to tears of shame, reciting by heart the poems you would have written, had your life been good.
- Replying to @xan_desanctisAnd the handmaid-mom takes the driver's seat. Her reduction to servant in this cult is unbearable.
- The first piece I wrote for @weeklystandard was in 1996, an essay on Thomas Mann, solicited by @jpodhoretz. Almost 300 pieces later, I know why he's furious at the magazine's demise. commentarymagazine.com/politics-ideas…
- My grandmother Enid Hyde slipped away last night. She was 107 years old, and her passing comes as a thing expected, and still, my heart is made small. A great figure in Pierre, South Dakota, and a woman of happiness—which is a rarity and a gift, in any age.
- Replying to @dougstafford and @OlivianuzziSo is "I," last time I checked.
- "Why read Homer if the world is coming to an end?" a classicist I read asks as a serious question. The answer? Because it's always the end of the world. People have felt the end coming before and will again. Homer—and classics—save us from the terrible burden of the present.
- Thirty years ago—in November 1988—the novel as an art-form sputtered out and died. And a man named Neil Gaiman killed it by writing a comic book. Kind of . . . My look at the 30th Anniversary edition of @neilhimself's The Sandman, today in @FreeBeacon:
- Showing the moral and intellectual fortitude one would expect, @LoyolaMaryland has now preemptively canceled #Flannery O'Connor. A statement from the president, Brian F. Linnane, S.J.:
