“Curtis, Deborah and their three children — Kian, Perry and baby Theodore Wesley — live in a cave, a 17,000-square-foot gouge in the earth left by a 1930s sandstone mine. It’s Tom Sawyer country here in Festus, Mo., just a few miles from the Mississippi River, and the Sleepers showed their adventurous side by making their home 45 feet under a forest (and a neighbor’s home).”

I have purposely selected a poem of exceeding brevity in order to emphasize that the art of memory I’m agitating for here is not be confused with showstopping circus feats of memory power such as rattling off a couple dozen of Shakespeare’s sonnets on cue or spouting whole pages out of Paradise Lost. That kind of industriousness can be intellectually stimulating, I suppose, but to me it’s an approach to memory that smacks more of sport than art. Another thing that makes this little poem “Western Wind” such a talisman for me is the small miracle that it has come down to us at all — and how we can be pretty darn sure that it was preserved in warm blooded memory long before it was set down in cold type.

… the University of Minnesota holds a separate reception for parents so that their sons and daughters can meet their roommates and negotiate dorm room space without the parents around. Grinnell College has the new students sit on one side of the gymnasium and the parents on the other with all speakers talking to the student side — a symbolic way of putting parents in their place.

…Over the next four years, your child will sit under the influence of a few professors who enjoy tearing down the moral and religious views of their students. For such profs, teaching is a game, and the intellectual seduction of their students is the conquest that makes their teaching challenging. Their agenda is to separate students from their parents, thereby, they hope, removing the influence of traditional, Judeo-Christian values.

This article generated some email discussion and was suggested for the Plunder Pile. When I went off to Geneva College, my parents were on the opposite side of the world, and the greatest intellectual threat on campus was “Dr. Matt the Democrat” (as I referred to him in my letters home). When dropping me off at college, my mother told me what her father had said to her: “I hope you give up and come home, but I’m afraid you wont.” My grandpa’s joke was heartening as I’ve been on the verge of packing my bags and heading back more than once. As for the point that Crouse makes about pernicious teachers, the thrill of driving wedges between people is always good to acknowledge and guard against. Whether a mama’s boy or a prodigal, homeward is a good direction to be pointed throughout life.

In other words, the Biblical view directly contradicts the leftist inclination: no, you can’t unjustly confiscate wealth from those who created it to fulfill the righteous goal of helping the poor. The Bible insists that no matter how worthy your purposes, you must employ only righteous means in achieving them.

This understanding turns up repeatedly in Scripture. For instance, a key passage in the Book of Leviticus (19:15) declares: “You shall not commit a perversion of justice; you shall not favor the poor and you shall not honor the great; with righteousness (Tzedek) shall you judge your fellow.” Amazingly, the Bible warns us not to “favor the poor” even before we’re instructed “not to honor the great,” because partiality for the unfortunate counts as an even stronger human temptation.

In the creation, Woman is brought to Man precisely as “gift”, crowning the gift of creation in general, which has been made for him. …The nature of Woman, then, the deepest meaning of her gender, is to be Gift for Man, to manifest the Spirit, just as the deepest nature of Man is to be the Receiver of the Gift, and to manifest the Son to her. Thus femininity in its totality, at its deepest level, is the essence of humanity made visible to itself as the definitive beauty and glory of creation.