The Catastrophe of Modern Education I have already written on multiple occasions of the urgent necessity of creating Orthodox parish schools in America. Our nation’s public schools have degenerated into prison-like institutions which have outlawed all mention of Truth (the Second Person of the Trinity), which forbid any public prayer to the Lord God, which teach sexual propaganda and promote infanticide to kindergarteners, which lead students to believe that they will likely be…
May God have mercy on us. Yet another school shooting yesterday, with 10 dead and as many wounded. And this time the murderer came from an Orthodox family. And even some the students who survived are not really surprised that it happened: A video interview with one student, Paige Curry, spread across social media, an artifact of a moment when children have come to expect violence in their schools. “Was there a…
The nearly unquestioned assumption about school shootings is that they are usually perpetrated by the mentally ill. This psychiatrist disagrees: The reason the mental health system fails to prevent mass shootings is that mental illness is rarely the cause of such violence. Even if all potential mass shooters did get psychiatric care, there is no reliable cure for angry young men who harbor violent fantasies. And the laws intended to stop the…
People all across the country are demanding action in response to the latest school shooting. And although there have been exceptions, generally action is implicitly assumed to mean political action. This is one of the defining characteristics of modern life — we are far more politicized now than at perhaps any other time in human history. So much so that even to call for a moment of silence is being seen as…
[Edit: apparently the widely-cited report that this is the 18th school shooting of 2018 is inaccurate, thank God. Others put the number between 3 and 10. I post this in the interest of accuracy, not because it in any way diminishes the gravity or the urgency of the spiritual crisis we are facing.] May God forgive us. Seventeen people gunned down in a Florida high school in another school shooting. Nearly as many wounded.…
