Tuesday, March 19, AD 2024 4:30am

Quotes Suitable for Framing: Anthony Esolen

 

The colleges are thus committed to a moral inversion. High and noble virtues, especially those that require moral courage, are mocked: gallantry in wartime, sexual purity, scrupulous honesty and plain dealing, piety, and the willingness to subject your thoughts, experiences, and most treasured beliefs to the searching scrutiny of reason. What is valued then? Debauchery, perversion, contempt for your supposedly benighted ancestors, lazy agnosticism, easy and costless pacifism, political maneuvering, and an enforcement of a new orthodoxy that in denying rational analysis seeks to render itself immune to criticism. You sink yourself in debt to discover that your sons and daughters have been severed from their faith, their morals, and their reason. Whorehouses and mental wards would be much cheaper. They might well be healthier, too.

Professor Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes

Hattip to John C. Wright.

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Mary De Voe
Saturday, July 22, AD 2017 6:59am

Anthony M. Esolen’s prose is poetic

Don L
Saturday, July 22, AD 2017 7:43am

Perfect definition of political correctness: “…a new orthodoxy…(that) seeks to render itself immune to criticism.”

Steve Phoenix
Steve Phoenix
Saturday, July 22, AD 2017 10:58am

I don’t know what we are going to do about the generation now coming out of our elementary and high schools, let alone our colleges. They are trained to hate American history, to believe the USA was built upon being a slave Kingdom, that only the wealthy rule America, but worst of all, to hate anyone who disagrees with them with a furious bitter hatred.

They will risk nothing for a noble cause; serve nothing, except themselves; and cannot seem to measure themselves by avoiding cheating stealing and lying. It is a grim outlook.

Jay Anderson
Saturday, July 22, AD 2017 11:59am

Hillsdale College is my oldest son’s top college choice. He attended their Liberty and Learning Youth Conference earlier this summer.

Philip Nachazel
Philip Nachazel
Sunday, July 23, AD 2017 3:07am

Jay Anderson.

Thank God.
Ave Maria University, Hillsdale college these are the antidote to the poison that is being happily distributed through out the world. God bless your eldest son’s top pick.
I hope he enters in.

Michael Dowd
Michael Dowd
Sunday, July 23, AD 2017 3:33am

Anthony Esolen is one of the few orthodox Catholic intellectual leaders of our time. Show your appreciation by buying his book ‘Out of the Ashes’ and maybe subscribing to Touchstone magazine for which he is a writer and edits.

Art Deco
Art Deco
Sunday, July 23, AD 2017 6:29am

Dr. Esolen had a long history at Providence College. Toward the end of his tenure there, he was subject to a campaign of vilification from the usual suspects there, a campaign endorsed by the college administration. The whole mess left a bad taste in his mouth and when a job offer came over the transom from a serious Catholic college in New Hampshire, he took it. Providence College is run by the Dominican order. I’m sure there’s a religious order of some vintage which isn’t a scandal. I’m not sure which though…

Steve Phoenix
Steve Phoenix
Sunday, July 23, AD 2017 11:47am

Esolen is of course on target about the need to find a restoration of fundamental moral and societal values, but there is abundant reason for pessimism.

Close to “home” here in the SF Baytheist Area, the product of the k-12 public school system, filled with teachers staffed for decades by radicals from UC Berkeley and San Francisco State, the violence is reflected in the utterly amoral attacks on ordinary citizens in the BART public transit system that have been suppressed by the BART authorities and the media:
http://www.breitbart.com/california/2017/07/11/bart-official-we-withheld-crime-data-to-protect-minorities-from-criticism/
Masses of “youths” — let’s be blunt, black teenagers in the Oakland and Richmond areas—have turned criminal attacks into a sporting event. Although the most attention was given to an April 2017 incident, these are regular events and near-events, now, everywhere here. Specifically with regard to BART, people avoid the system if they are wise. But it is all over the area, now, the Lord-of-the-Flies feral youth.
Now, the most outrageous attack to date occurred this past Thurs, July 20th, at the Richmond BART station, and was witnessed from a train car by, of all people, Richmond Mayor Tom Butt—who to his credit, unlike Mayor Ed Lee (SF) or Sam Liccardo (San Jose), doesn’t try to suppress the exploding crime wave sweeping the Bay Area by “youths” .
http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Richmond-mayor-witnessed-mob-attack-outside-BART-11305657.php

Even while a single man was attacked—who by the way, was a young black guy on his way to work in SF—at least two orange-and-yellow uniformed BART facility personnel watched the attack impassively from their truck nearby—and did nothing. Tom Butt was astounded at the callousness of everyone. When BART police were called by 911, BART police argued that the site of the assault was in Richmond’s jurisdiction. You have to remember, they have been Ferguson-ized, after the Oscar Grant shooting a few years ago, when a BART policeman killed a black hoodlum in the BART Oakland station.

So, this is the context in which I say that the youth emerging from our public schools today at least in the SF Bay Area, are now the most feral, violent, and conscience-less, that I have witnessed in my lifetime.

Jay Anderson
Sunday, July 23, AD 2017 12:17pm

I have always been a big fan of the Order of Preachers, having been brought into the Church in a Dominican parish in the Dominican Province of St. Joseph (covering roughly the northeast and mid-Atlantic, including Providence College). I have a number of Dominican friends, including one who was once the Chaplain at Providence. Let’s just say I lost a LOT of respect for the Dominican Province of St. Joseph in general and for Providence College president Fr. Brian J. Shanley, O.P., in particular, over their treatment of Prof. Anthony Esolen. I wouldn’t send any of my kids to Providence College under ANY circumstances.

Steve Phoenix
Steve Phoenix
Sunday, July 23, AD 2017 3:50pm

Michael Dowd, thanks for the tip on “Touchstone”, now being edited by Esolen. I will subscribe today.

Steve Phoenix
Steve Phoenix
Sunday, July 23, AD 2017 3:59pm

Also, @ Jay Anderson:

I used to regularly support the Dominican Province of St Joseph (141 E 65th St, NY, NY – HQ), until the literature they began sending me with their requests for financial support including the full Frankenchurch in display and they as proud standard-bearers. (They didn’t have the good sense to hoodwink me into thinking they remained the way previously had been at Providence and elsewhere. Oy vey. )

Jane Kosco
Jane Kosco
Monday, July 24, AD 2017 12:18pm

I believe Prof. Esolen was hired by Thomas More College in Texas, not New Hampshire. There is a Thomas More College in New Hampshire, also.

Jay Anderson
Monday, July 24, AD 2017 2:57pm
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Tuesday, July 25, AD 2017 11:08pm

[…] Rite – Fr. Z’s Blg Are There Animals in Heaven? – Nada Mazzei, Catholic Stand Quotes Suitable for Framing: Anthony Esolen – Donald R. McClarey J.D., The Am Catholic Ascension Roundtable: Do’s and Don’ts of […]

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