We learnt that equality is about equal worth, not equal outcomes. Today our idea of society is shaped around mutual responsibility; a deal, an agreement between citizens, not a one-way gift, from the well-off to the dependent.

~Prime Minister Tony Blair, Brighton, October 2, 2001

Equality, rightly understood as our founding fathers understood it, leads to the liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences; wrongly understood, as it has been so tragically in our time, it leads first to conformity and then to despotism.

~Barry Goldwater, 1964

Inequality will exist as long as liberty exists. It unavoidably results from that very liberty itself.

~Alexander Hamilton

We are told, ad nauseam, that a computer has to go into every classroom to prepare us for the twenty-first century. We have not yet realized that the computers may simply be moving our ignorance around the planet at incredible rates of speed. As one wag put it, “We used to think that a million monkeys typing away at a million keyboards could produce the works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not the case.” A fool in the back of a cart bumping along the road five hundred years ago is, today, a fool in the backseat of a Lexus. Certain things are not changed by the computer dashboard.

Douglas Wilson, Angels in the Architecture, 176.

We want fat-souled children. We want them to have full, faithful lives–joyful, balanced, and lovely. But wisdom doesn’t happen passively. It takes a diligent household and constant prayer, but with that He promises that “the soul of the diligent shall be made fat” (Prov. 13:4). That should be our prayer: Lord enable us to raise children with fat souls. “He that putteth his trust in the Lord shall be made fat” (Prov. 28:25).

Doug Jones, Angels in the Architecture, 125

Stories frame a child’s interior life for living in this world. Fiction is far more realistic than we realize. Fiction and poetry mysteriously transfer truth in a far more powerful way than anything else. God Himself chose to write in passionate poetry and narrative and parables rather than in the bureaucratic style of a systematic theology.

Doug Jones, Angels in the Architecture, 124.

We talk of our willingness to die for the children, but are we willing to sincerely sacrifice careers and vacations and personal talents for their sakes without bitterness? The whole orientation of our household must be focused on sacrificing for our children. This is a sign of deep love.

Doug Jones, Angels in the Architecture, 123.

Part of learning to celebrate includes learning how to splurge and not be so tightly utilitarian. Our culture is so wicked in its neglect of savings and its slavery to plastic credit cards that we, with some right, run the other direction. But if your house is in order, it’s time to learn how to splurge at times. Beauty isn’t cheap, and neither are artistic meals and good wines.

Doug Jones, Angels in the Architecture, 84.

The first Herp Dinner, in 1977, was an outstanding success… The final spread was magnificent and included sautéed alligator tail…; legs of bullfrogs, leopard frogs, and green frogs; snapping turtle salad, (excellent on crackers); slider turtle stew; crispy fried mole salamanders; baked canebrake rattlesnake (a 4½-foot specimen coiled around tomatoes and green peppers); and deep-fried strips of cottonmouth moccasin.

Whit Gibbons, Their Blood Runs Cold – Adventures with Reptiles and Amphibians, 12

• Natural Philosophy Field Trip pictures available: http://www.nsa.foucachon.com/natural_phil_field_trip/

• Spring Windy Pics: http://www.nsa.foucachon.com/spring_windy_06/

• Pics of the Easter Party at the Courtney’s available HERE.

He feeds our bodies through bread and other foods, he illumines the world through the sun, and he warms it through heat; yet neither bread, nor sun, nor fire, is anything save in so far as he distributes his blessings to us by these instruments. In like manner, he nourishes faith spiritually through the sacraments, whose one function is to set his promises before our eyes to be looked upon, indeed, to be guarantees of them to us.

Jean Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book IV, Ch. 14.12

The first degree of chastity is sincere virginity; the second, faithful marriage. Therefore, the second sort of virginity is the chaste love of matrimony.

– Chrysostom, quoted in Institutes of the Christian Religion, book IV, ch. 12.28

As for our writing personally to each other, how often do you hear people complain that emails subtract the tone of voice; that it’s hard to tell if someone is joking or not? Clicking on “send” has its limitations as a system of subtle communication. Which is why, of course, people use so many dashes and italics and capitals (“I AM joking!”) to compensate. That’s why they came up with the emoticon, too–the emoticon being the greatest (or most desperate, depending how you look at it) advance in punctuation since the question mark in the reign of Charlemagne.

Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves, 192 🙂

Getting your itses mixed up is the greatest solecism in the world of punctuation. No matter that you have a PhD and have read all of Henry James twice. If you still persist in writing, “Good food at it’s best”, you deserve to be struck by lighting, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave.

Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves, 44

Jerome commented that in the early church, when visitors used to come, they were commonly frightened at the amen–it had the sound of thunder, said by people who understood it.

Blessed be the Lord God of Israel from everlasting to everlasting: And let all the people say, Amen. Praise the Lord. (Ps. 106:48)

– Doug Wilson, Mother Kirk, 152

Here is our Gilligan’s Island Song Lyrics:

The verbs that take the dative case
With indirect command,
Are impero, mando, & persuadeo,
And persuadeo

The verbs that take accusative with Indirect Command,
Just happen to be these verbs three
Moneo, oro, rogo,
Moneo, oro, rogo.

At last we come to postulo, quaero, & peto,
These are the verbs that choose to take
Ablative with the prep.
Ablative with the prep.

And if you want the actual image, click HERE.

[EDIT] Click HERE to listen to the B Class singing the song!

The nature of the apostles’ function is clear from this command: “Go, preach the Gospel to every creature” [Mark 16:15]. No set limits are allotted to them, but the whole earth is assigned to them to bring into obedience to Christ, in order that by spreading the gospel wherever they can among the nations, they may raise up his Kingdom everywhere. Accordingly, Paul, in desiring to prove his apostleship, recalls that he did not gain any one city for Christ but propagated the gospel far and wide, and did not put his hands to another man’s foundation but planted churches where the name of the Lord was unheard [Rom. 15:19-20]. Apostles, then, were sent out to lead the world back from rebellion to true obedience to God, and to establish his Kingdom everywhere by the preaching of the gospel, or if you prefer, as the first builders of the church, to lay its foundations in all the world [1 Cor. 3:10].

John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, book 4, ch. 3.4

Wine itself is quite a miracle. It’s something like the birth of a child. A man and woman mix and then create a being wholly distinct from themselves, yet with deep family traits–new and yet the same. A ripe grape contains two parts, unmarried–an interior sugar juice and an exterior skin full of yeast. But if you marry and mix these parts by crushing a grape, it will start toward creating wine, a third distinct thing, new and yet the same–a “wine that maketh glad the heart of man” (Ps. 104:15).

Doug Jones, Angels in the Architecture, 83

God has surrounded us with so many amazing tastes, and yet we Americans are barely scratching the surface. The Anglo streak in the American heritage has certainly put a tight squeeze on the breadth of our palates. American food is really so bland and tame we don’t even recognize it anymore. And we pass on our picky eating to the next generation. Pure criminality. But even the English know that for good food you have to leave the country. They like France, but the entire world awaits us. We have much to learn from the feastings of Asia and the Latin countries, especially that land of feasts–Italy.

-Doug Jones, Angels in the Architecture, 82

And, I might add, France. 🙂

Every new $900,000 summer house in the north woods or on the shore of Long Island has so many pipe railings, ramps, hob-tread metal spiral stairways, sheets of industrial plate glass, banks of tungsten-halogen lamps, and white cylindrical shapes, it looks like an insecticide refinery. I once saw the owners of such a place driven to the edge of sensory deprivation by the whiteness & lightness & leanness & cleanness & bareness & spareness of it all. They became desperate for an antidote, such as coziness & color. They tried to bury the obligatory white sofas under Thai-silk throw pillows of every rebellious, iridescent shade of magenta, pink, and tropical green imaginable. But the architect returned, as he always does, like the conscience of a Calvinist, and he lectured them and hectored them and chucked the shimmering little sweet things out.

– Tom Wolfe