I often file things that I read in my growing collection of 100-year-old magazines—in bound volumes, six months apiece, 1,000 large pages in small font—under the category, “Different World.” Such is an article from The Century Magazine, January 1900, called “Fellow-Feeling as a Political Factor.” Its author knew a lot about political warfare, having long
I have heard it said that Charles Dickens, by his famous novella about the miserly buyer of bad debts who is visited by a series of ghosts and who consequently learns to open his heart and his purse, “invented” Christmas for us speakers of English. That is how we have ended up with a holiday
Under the town of El-Bahnasa, west of the Nile and 160 miles upriver from Cairo, lie the ruins and the garbage dump of the ancient city of Oxyrhynchus. The Muslims had governed the area for 1,200 years, and they had not bothered to search among the ruins. These were finally investigated in 1896 by British
Three years ago, I was smeared before all the students, professors, and staff members of Providence College, where I had taught since 1990. That was some 5,000 people. The authors of the smear were the president of the college, whose final term expires next spring, and the vice president, who will be taking over for
Early in the spring, driving along Interstate 93 in New Hampshire, I passed a large billboard featuring a smiling, attractive woman, the caption “The Heart of a Soldier,” and the name “Tulsi.” She didn’t look like a soldier, and at the time I did not know who she was, so the billboard puzzled me. Of
Reports tell us that church attendance among Americans is falling. I am acquainted with secular professors who apparently have learned nothing from the experiences of atheistic social experiments in the last century. Social experiments, I say, and not societies, because such monstrosities as Soviet Russia and Red China were never social enough to raise the
Many years ago, when I was teaching at Providence College, I showed up for a meeting of the faculty senate. That was rare for me. I loathe campus politics. But a friend of mine had put forward a proposal for a program in Classics, and I attended to lend my support. It turned out that
I belong to about a dozen “groups” on Facebook, all of which are conservative or Christian in outlook, except for one. This group is for college professors. I won’t mention the name, because the moderator has been generous with me and genuinely open-minded. I’d like to describe what I see there, as it reveals some
A young man from the marshes, name of Pip, has unexpectedly and from some unnamed source come into “great expectations,” so he makes his way to London to acquire some modest education fit for the gentleman that he is to be. There he meets his tutor, Mr. Pocket, and his wife, Mrs. Pocket.
