A new author!

New to me at least: Michael Knox Beran. Here's an initial collection of his essays I googled just now, a Christmas present for you, with incipits:

• "Never Forget: They Kept Lots of Slaves".

It was bound to happen sooner or later. Each new book on the founding of our republic might as well contain the scholarly equivalent of the surgeon general's warning affixed to our beer bottles. "Warning: Studying the Men Who Founded the United States May Be Dangerous to Your Moral Health."

• Self-Reliance vs. Self-Esteem

Last year's Ralph Waldo Emerson bicentennial was a melancholy anniversary: though a few of Emerson's verses are still read, and one or two of his essays still cherished, he has been largely forgotten. Worse, education theorists have hijacked and debased what is most useful and attractive in his philosophy of self-reliance. Ever since John Dewey, in his 1916 book Democracy and Education, drew on Emersonian self-reliance in his effort to liberate children from the "autocratic" authority of their teachers, the educrats have worked overtime to transform Emerson into a prophet of classroom anarchy, a philosopher of the flimsier forms of self-esteem, and an apologist for a cavalier egotism that ruins lives.

• In Defense of Memorization

If there's one thing progressive educators don't like it's rote learning. As a result, we now have several generations of Americans who've never memorized much of anything. Even highly educated people in their thirties and forties are often unable to recite half a dozen lines of classic poetry or prose.

• Lincoln, Macbeth, and the Moral Imagination

A few years before my grandmother died, she cleared out her house, and gave me some of her souvenirs of Lincoln. There was nothing extraordinary, nothing rare, nothing valuable in the collection: a bad oil painting, a couple of framed copies of Brady portraits, a facsimile of the letter to Mrs. Bixby on the death of her sons in battle - the kind of things many Americans had in their houses a couple of generations ago. One item, however, struck me, the little legend printed at the top of the Bixby letter. "The famous Bixby letter," the legend declared, "the model of perfect English." Reading it, I couldn't disagree. Some have contended that Lincoln's secretary, John Nicolay, actually drafted the letter; if he did he had succeeded wonderfully in mastering his boss's style, in reproducing the precision of his language, the severe grace of his sentences.

• Mysterious Encounters

In a recent address to the bishops and priests of St. Peter's, Pope Benedict called for a greater "continuity with tradition" in the music of the Church, and spoke of the value of the Church's older musical traditions, among them the baroque sacred music of the 17th and 18th centuries and Gregorian Chant. The address followed the pope's issuance, in July, of an Apostolic Letter (accompanying letter in English here) in which he permitted broader use of the Latin Mass, the "Tridentine" rite authorized by the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century and promulgated most recently by John XXIII in 1962.

• Multicultural Abe

In 1859 Abraham Lincoln expressed the fear that the "principles of free government" in the United States would one day be supplanted by those of "classification, caste, and legitimacy."

Lincoln fought a civil war to stave off that threat; if he were alive today, he'd have to fight his own Bicentennial Commission, too.

• To Be As Gods - a review of Alger Hiss's Looking-Glass Wars: The Covert Life of a Soviet Spy, by G. Edward White. Conclusion:

When Chambers abandoned the secular millenarianism of socialism and made his stand for God and liberty, he told his wife that "we are leaving the winning world for the losing world." The words have in retrospect been thought too pessimistic. But conservatism, however superficially optimistic it may be, must always be sustained by a deep core of pessimism. The conservative who wishes to prepare himself for the coming battles will find much instructive material in Edward White's book on the Hiss Case; but he will do even better to turn again to Whittaker Chambers's book, and relive that man's fall from grace and his ascent.