"When Textbooks Upheld the Ideals of Our Ancestors"

Still good this weekend!

In my podcast today, I’m reading one of my favorite articles, in which I look closely at a book that seems to me like a message from another world, but surely wasn’t intended as such by its author and editor. You’ll see why I say so when you find out what the book was. The article fits very well with our week on memorials, because I am giving tribute to a man of wisdom who did excellent work in educating young people; because he himself gives tribute to the wise and artful writers not only of the American past but of those cultures distant in time and place that helped to build up the western mind; and because it brings back, in what I hope is an illuminating way, two authors we have often featured here at Word and Song, Alfred Tennyson, especially his great memorial poem In Memoriam A. H. H., and John Greenleaf Whittier, and in particular the poem he wrote as a memorial to his beloved sister Elizabeth, Snow-Bound.

This article has a couple of surprises in it — ones that I trust you will enjoy.

The text of today’s podcast first appeared in Crisis Magazine, 2014.

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