Why Barry Freed is my new literary hero...

Wednesday, May 30, 2012

“Milty, old boy, come back here,” Ayn Rand said to Milton Friedman in her husky Russian accented voice as she lit yet another cigarette and sprawled her lithe naked frame enticingly on the divan, “I may have said selfishness is a virtue but I never meant in bed.” 

(Not sure if "Freed" is a real name or a reference to Abbie Hoffman) Read the rest of this saucy political science fiction here:

http://crookedtimber.org/2012/05/30/not-so-new-applications-in-the-quantitative-analysis-of-textual-information/

Summer School: The Age of Constantine

Thursday, May 17, 2012

2012 Summer School: The Age of Constantine

The Rockford Institute’s 15th Annual Summer School
The Age of Constantine
July 10-15, 2012
Rockford, Illinois

In the fourth century, at the very moment when the Church emerged from the catacombs, “The whole world groaned,” Saint Jerome wrote, “and was amazed to find itself Arian.”  As blood martyrdom gave way to a different kind of threat, God raised up holy and courageous men, from Saint Athanasius to Saint Augustine, to destroy heresy through a brilliant exposition of the living Faith that still inspires Christians today.

For more information on the conference, go here...

Conference Reading List:
  • Gibbon, Edward: Decline and Fall, chapters  XIII-25
  • Burckhardt, Jacob: The Age of Constantine the Great
  • Marcellinus, Ammianus: History (The Later Roman Empire, Penguin)*
  • Eusebius: Ecclesiastical History
    Life of Constantine
    "Oration on Constantine's 30th Anniversary"
  • "Reply to Hierocles"
  • Porphyry: "Life of Plotinus"
  • "Letter to Marcella"*
  • Fragments of Against the Christians
  • Iamblichus: On the Mysteries
  • Julian: "The Caesars"
  • "Against the Galileans"
  • Sallustius: "On the Gods and the World"
  • Ambrose: De Officiis Ministrorum, On the Duties of the Clergy
  • Athanasius: Life of Anthony
  • Lactantius: The Divine Institutes
    On the Deaths of the Persecutors
  • Basil the Great: On Social Justice (ed. C. Paul Schroeder)
  • On the Human Condition (tr. Nonna Verna Harrison)
  • Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns on Paradise

I teach them all the good I can, and recommend them to others from whom I think they will get some moral benefit. And the treasures that the wise men of old have left us in their writings I open and explore with my friends. If we come on any good thing, we extract it, and we set much store on being useful to one another. - Socrates, Memorabilia
 
 
 
What we maintain is that in none of the problems of life can men afford to lose sight of the storehouse bequeathed to them by the ancients. In the complexus of everything which differentiates man from the brute creation, the voice of antiquity must be heard...

-H. Browne, quoted in "Classics and Citizenship" The Classical Quarterly, 1920