True reform comes slowly; and no race was ever freed except by its own efforts, – no man saved except through himself. —John Jay Chapman, “The Negro Question”, ca. 1914
From Lionel Trilling, "Mind in the Modern World"
At the present time the number of trained academic women is perhaps large enough to support the frequently expressed belief that no lowering of academic standards can result from the requirement that women be proportionately represented on faculties. Doubtless it will eventually be possible to say the same thing of the disadvantaged groups, the sooner the better. When that time comes, the anomaly of prescribed social or sexual representation in the life of the mind will perhaps seem necessary to no one. Lionel Trilling, The 1972 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities
I’m told this will be used again.
He banishes devils by Beelzebub, the prince of devils. Sc. 38, Matthew 9:34, Mark 3:22, Luke 11:18
What, then, is the sin of calling Beelzebub the Holy Spirit?
I don’t want ‘cis’ to be censored. —James Esses
Man, made in God’s image, demands like God to be loved.
Remember me and do this. Sc. 82, Luke 22:19, 1 Corinthians 11:24-25
Remember the Sabbath day. Exodus 20:8
Observe the Sabbath day. Deuteronomy 5:12
Because we remember or are mindful of something, we keep it. —Robert Alter, Deuteronomy 5:12n
It’s getting harder and harder to get students to actually be interested in some particular topic or skill. Yes, there are plenty of kids who are into some kind of tech but it definitely feels like, on average, schools are struggling with…call it engagement, or inspiration, or wonder. —Eric Wearne
In today’s Wordle, I thought John Henry Newman and our daughter thought digestion. I got it in 4 and she in 2. Feed the stomach before feeding the soul?
John Jay and Elizabeth Chapman in Hell's Kitchen
For two years there was a difficult experiment in New York. The Chapmans took a store on Tenth Avenue below Forty-Ninth Street, in a district known as ‘Hell’s Kitchen,’ furnished it as a club-room for young people, provided teachers of basket-making, sewing, and chair-caning, and bade the boys and girls of the neighborhood welcome. They flocked in, chiefly Irish and Roman Catholic, of ages from about seven to twelve. They were not an easy lot to handle. Mrs. Chapman recalls the whole experience as ‘like heavy surf-bathing with a bad undertow.’ Another such club had adopted the motto, ‘No praying and no cursing in this building.” Chapman, on the contrary, began the evenings with the Lord’s Prayer and a few verses from a Psalm — which may have accounted for a surrounding hostility to what seemed too Protestant an enterprise.
One episode must be recounted. Two unruly boys were ejected on a certain evening and forbidden to return. Chapman expected them back the next night, and back they came. He was awaiting them outside the door, prepared for the scuffle which ensued, but not for this piece of deviltry: the boys filled their mouths with kerosene, sprayed it on his beard, beneath which they lighted matches. He did not take fire, but when the boys’ eyes and mouths became so inflamed that they could blow no more, he said in a friendly way, ‘Now rub your hands on your coats and get them as clean as possible, then take this pocket-handkerchief and wipe your eyes.’ They obeyed quietly and walked away.
When he reported the matter the next day to Mrs. Chapman, then in a hospital, he was much discouraged — unscathed, but in sorrow for Tenth Avenue. His wife asked him if he had not felt as he stood there that his patience was doing some good to the boys. ‘No,’ he replied, ‘I felt that I could be of no use to them, but’ — this as if to himself — ‘that I might possibly be doing good to somebody in China.’ The next winter the venture was discontinued, on the orders of Mrs. Chapman’s physician that she should not resume her part in it. The enterprise was not one which Chapman could conduct alone.
—M. A. DeWolfe Howe, John Jay Chapman and His Letters, pp, 209–211
Of all his talents, painting is the least.—General Ambrogio Spinola on Rubens, quoted in Charles Scribner III, Rubens, p. 124.
We tell God what we want. The how we leave to Him.