Western Civilization Archives - The Minnesota Sun

Commentary: The Resurrection of Jesus Is the Most Important Event in History

March 31, 2024 Minnesota Sun Staff

Christians around the world will commemorate the most important event in our faith’s history this Sunday, but the Resurrection of Jesus isn’t just important to those who believe a Nazarene who walked the earth 2,000 years ago is the Son of God. The secular world’s history also turns on this pivotal event, which inspired so much progress that we take for granted today.

Christianity turned the values of the Pagan Roman world upside-down. The Romans considered the early Christians subversives—many called them “atheists” because they didn’t worship any pagan gods—and put them to death for refusing to worship the emperor. After some emperors adopted the faith, Emperor Julian attempted to revive paganism, but lamented that the Christian ethic had transformed the empire.

Commentary: American Achilles in the War on Terror

January 1, 2024 RealClearWire

Professor Emily Wilson has achieved celebrity status … for translating Homer.

University students use her work, and it draws leisure readers as well. Beginning with her translation of the Odyssey in 2018 and continuing with the Iliad earlier this year, Wilson has presented as fresh and vivid material that is, admittedly, old and foreign.

Commentary: Europe Needs to Embrace Western Civilization Again

November 24, 2023 Minnesota Sun Staff

For the first time in a millennium, Europe no longer plays a critical role in promoting Western civilization nor in world history at large.

Ostensibly it should. Some 750 million people live on the European subcontinent.

Commentary: ‘The Thales Way’ Is the Book That Can Save American Education

August 31, 2023 Minnesota Sun Staff

Would you be interested in a book on reforming education by a man who created flourishing grade, middle, and high school charter schools, all with waiting lists today, found them too mired in government bureaucracy and so started 13 even more successful purely private campuses in 2007 — and who is willing to share his secrets of success with you?

In hiring young people for his large private business, Bob Luddy of Raleigh, North Carolina, ran head-long into the problem shared by other employers — namely, that many potential employees with a public-school education did not have the elemental skills required to hold jobs, some unable to understand basic logic or even to read.

Commentary: No God, No Culture

June 25, 2023 Minnesota Sun Staff

What was the inflection point for Western civilization in general, and American culture in particular, after which teachers took it upon themselves to ignore their cultural heritage, or to instruct their students either to despise it or to twist it ’round in support of the political cause of the passing hour?

Commentary: Men of the West, on the Cusp

May 6, 2023 Minnesota Sun Staff

So here we be, again. On the cusp, I would say. Four thousand years of Western Civilization at risk. On the verge. The eve of destruction, as the song says. The best that mankind has to offer is in the balance. I say “the best” because the West has set more men free than any other iteration of civilization, and freedom is the only standard by which we have to judge ourselves for what we are, or what we are capable of becoming. Being able to comply with the dictates of others is only the standard of a slave.

Commentary: The End of Globalization

September 25, 2022September 24, 2022 Minnesota Sun Staff

In the 1990s, William Strauss and Neil Howe predicted a “Fourth Turning” around 2020, meaning the final reordering of a once-in-a-generation global order. Their thesis is not necessarily pessimistic, although a “positive” resolution is not guaranteed. Either way, their thesis is inconvenient to progressives, who promise linear progress, not generational cycles.

Recommended: Great Books to Resist Cultural Indoctrination

January 11, 2020January 10, 2020 Admin

Those classics that are called the Great Books are most closely associated with Mortimer J. Adler and Robert Hutchins.1 When Hutchins became president of the University of Chicago in 1929, he hired Adler to teach philosophy in the law school and the psychology department. Upon arriving, Adler, rather brashly he admits, recommended to Hutchins a program of study for undergraduates using classic texts. Adler had taught in the General Honors program at Columbia University begun in 1921 by professor John Erskine. Hutchins asked him for a list of books to be read in such a program. When Hutchins saw the list, he told Adler that he had not encountered most of them during his student years at Oberlin College and Yale University. Hutchins later wrote that unless Adler “did something drastic he [Hutchins, referring to himself] would close his educational career a wholly uneducated man.”2 Hutchins remained president for 16 years before serving as chancellor until 1951, and the following year, they did something drastic.