200th Post and Award!

In honor of the 200th post, I am finally changing the theme around.  I had intended to do it a while back, but only now got around to it.  I hope everyone likes the art and finds the format easy-to-read and a little less dark.
In other news, I have been sent an award.  Yay!  (And the [...]

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Here’s What’s Next

Exactly two months ago, I wrote a post I called “What’s Next?”  I concluded that I was pretty sure that, whatever it was, I didn’t want to know.  In the first 100 days, President Obama rammed through a number of pro-abortion efforts, insulted allies, played nice with enemies, and promised more havoc on the horizon.  [...]

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Homeschooler Conference: Dale Ahlquist

Ok, better late than never…
The last speaker from the IHM Homeschooler Conference that I’m going to comment on was Dale Ahlquist, the president of the American Chesterton Society.  (For those of you who are encountering Chesterton for the first time, there’s a very helpful (and funny) tab at their website labelled “Who is this guy and [...]

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How health care rumors get started…

So, we were all just in the door from an hour of high-velocity fun at the local park.  I had an hour of peace and quiet, sitting at a bench in the shade, reading A Medieval Home Companion: Housekeeping in the Fourteenth Century.  The kids tore around the park, chasing birds and other kids.  Needless to [...]

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On Iran, Tiananmen Square, and History

After so many botched attempts, you’d think that somebody (or, preferrably, a lot of somebodies) in foreign affairs would notice that nascent democracy movements in dictatorships will fail without external support.
We cheered the democracy movements that tore down the former system of satelite states behind the Iron Curtain… and then failed to do anything about Tiananmen [...]

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7 Quick Takes Friday: Homeschooler Conference

I was going to try to write this last week, half-way through the IHM Homeschooler Conference in Washington, DC, but the last talk finished after 9pm, I’d been up since a time of morning I’d rather forget, and I still needed a shower.  So, instead, I’ll post this as a summary of the homeschooler conference [...]

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Homeschooler conference: Prof. Joseph Pearce (part 2)

Prof. Joseph Pearce’s second talk was “A Matter of Life and Death: The Battle for a True Education.”
He offered his own life and conversion as proof of his thesis.  Given a mostly secular, only sort of Protestant, anti-Catholic education that skipped philosophy and concentrated all of its history curriculum on the *glorious* rise of socialism [...]

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Homeschooler Conference: Prof. Joseph Pearce (part 1)

Ok, this had very little to do with homeschooling, but they were a couple of great talks.  Prof. Joseph Pearce of Ave Maria University talked on “Finding Tolkein’s Catholicism in the Lord of the Rings” and “The Fight for a Good Education: A Matter of Life and Death” (coming tomorrow; I took pages and pages [...]

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Homeschool Conference: Virginia Seuffert

Just looking at the title of her first talk, “How to Make Homeschooling Easy”, made me roll my eyes.  Oh, heavens, not another one of those people: all jeans jumpers, daily mass, never miss a family rosary, all our kids are two grades ahead and want to be priests or nuns, life is always just wonderful, sure [...]

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Homeschool conference: Dr. Ray Guarendi

I just love Dr. Ray.
Unlike some of the speakers on the schedule at the IHM Conference for homeschoolers in Washington, DC, last weekend, I’ve heard Dr. Ray Guarendi before.  (It was very strange to see him in person; I’m used to him being on tape or on TV.)  He’s refreshing after book after book after [...]

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