By Wayne Allensworth The great Christian apologist C. S. Lewis tackled the question of education and the shaping of values in his short 1947 book The Abolition of Man, an amalgamation of his lectures on the subject. Lewis was prompted by what he detected taking place in the British education system of his time, especially in the teaching of “English prep.” What Lewis detected in an English...
By Wayne Allensworth The sun is hitting the porch directly now, and I pull my chair up into the sunlight on a bright, coolish April morning. My wife and I are at her parents’ place in Central Texas, preparing for the estate sale, cleaning up the property to put it up for sale, too. And it’s harder for my wife than she thought it would be, letting go of this place. Yes, I said to her, it’s hard...
From the Mad Men TV series:
By Wayne Allensworth Some readers have occasionally criticized my writing for amounting to “mere” nostalgia, which is apparently supposed to be a bad thing. To that I plead guilty. Americans have long been conditioned to think of themselves as living in the land of tomorrow, a tomorrow without any yesterdays. I look back to a past that never seems distant to me, as dreamlike as it can be. Without...
My favorite Easter hymn:
Chronicles contributor Wayne Allensworth is the author of The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist Russia, and a novel, Field of Blood.
By Wayne Allensworth The picture below, of Christ being led to a snowy Golgotha, is from a movie that, along with others from the film’s director, have often been chosen as among the hundred best ever produced. Rating movies can get complicated, but nevertheless this film belongs in any cinematic canon. The director is Russian Andrey Tarkovsky. The film is his Andrey Rublev (1966) about a...
By Wayne Allensworth I was watching Jeopardy the other night. It’s a habit I can’t quite give up, despite of the predictable direction the show has taken in recent years. When host Ken Jennings was introducing the contestants, one of them, a woman — the signs were there … no makeup, a vaguely androgynous appearance — said she was a writer. And what does she write? She described herself as an...
By Wayne Allensworth To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme (Herman Melville, Moby Dick) I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things (Isiah 45:7) Did he who made the Lamb make thee? (William Blake, The Tyger) From Rockwell Kent’s illustrations for Moby Dick Call me Ishmael…One of the most memorable opening lines...
By Wayne Allensworth On Palm Sunday, I took a walk. It’s the first day of spring and the sky shows china blue, decorated with small cotton-like puffs of clouds. Flowers are blooming and the ducks at the pond have laid their eggs. The beaver are back—I can tell by the trees that have been gnawed down by them near the pond, though I have not yet seen any dams being built. I...
By Wayne Allensworth It was no surprise to your observer that several initial articles I read on the recent shooting at a Christian school in Nashville did not mention one crucial fact—that the shooter was a “trans person.” As far as I could glean from subsequent mass media accounts, the 28-year-old woman, Audrey Hale, “identified as transgender” and was using male pronouns. She had been grieving...
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