Caveat Spectator

Modern television (or do we say internet?) programs, particularly on Netflix, and other media, have become radically explicit, both in violence and in sex.  Reading this article, even my somewhat jaded soul was surprised that such things could remotely pass for ‘entertainment’, to say nothing of actually being shown to a mass, and indiscriminate, audience.  […]

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Liberal Budget Educated in Red Ink

The Ontario Liberal budget was released yesterday:  As expected, costs are going up, while revenues tank, the deficit is $50 billion, the debt, well, the debt is now more than $300 billion.  With those apocalyptic figures, I am not sure how worried we should be that wine is going up ten cents a bottle.  Perhaps […]

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Humanities, Technology and the Martian

On  a news report the other evening, it was mentioned that enrolment in the humanities (philosophy, literature, history, to say nothing of theology) has dropped by 50% over the past  ten years in our universities.  Burgeoning onwards with full enrolments, on the other hand, are the S.T.E.M. studies, science, technology, engineering and mathematics, with which […]

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Of Universities, Family Day and JP II

*Anyone who is remotely interested in the state of the Canadian university, and especially all the parents pondering where to send their children, and all the high school graduates wondering where to go next year, must read this recent essay by Professor Ron Srigley of the University of Prince Edward Island, on how truly corrupt these […]

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Clarity and Ambiguity

There is an old saying that the three rules of real estate are ‘location, location, location’.  A similar rule applies to public speaking: ‘brevity, brevity, brevity’.  And, we may also apply an analogous principle to teaching:  ‘clarity, clarity, clarity’.   The ultimate point of teaching is to transmit the truth that is in the teacher’s […]

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Return to the Source

In the college at which I teach, we believe in the ‘Great Books’, going back to the primary sources of our religion and civilization, the Bible, the Fathers of the Church, the Greek and Latin classics, the teachings of the Church, Dante, Shakespeare, Newton, Einstein, the great philosophers and literary geniuses.  By reading original works, […]

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Propinquity as Aphrodisiac

Sometimes the truth is expressed in a clumsy, awkward way, like a beautiful person drunk at a party, stumbling and semi-coherent, trying to act funny.  Thus it was in the past couple of weeks, when two high-profile men, established in their careers, both formed in a past era now long-gone, held forth their opinions on […]

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Offending the Malaysian gods

A number of Canadian tourists are currently languishing in Malaysia, and may be criminally charged.  Their crime?  Standing nude for photos on the top of a sacred mountain.  According to the Malaysian authorities, the gods of the mountain were angered, causing an ensuing 5.1 magnitude earthquake which killed a score of people.   Hmm.  I […]

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Sex-Ed Protest Methinks Goes not Far Enough

It was a day of protest in many elementary schools in Ontario, as quite literally thousands of parents kept their children home as a ‘response’ to Kathleen Wynne’s proposed sex-ed curriculum.  The parents were particularly concerned about the introduction of ‘gender identity’ in grade 1, and the normalization of homosexual, ahem, ‘behaviour’.  A small gesture, […]

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