by Quin Hillyer
In a famous essay, former social scientist and U.S. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan called it “Defining Deviancy Down.” This is what happens when society no longer self-regulates to enforce standards of acceptable behavior. Judging from two columns in the Wall Street Journal last week, society in the world’s two most important bastions of ordered liberty, the United States and Great Britain, no longer self-regulates. In Great Britain, deviancy may even have been defined completely out of existence. We’re all in trouble.

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by Quin Hillyer

“It didn’t help that we had responded to Penny’s diagnosis so differently. Two days after our return from the hospital, Peter finished grieving and he walked outside and never looked back. Penny was his beautiful daughter, and that was that. I trusted him – he had immersed himself in grief and had emerged ready to receive our daughter. He didn’t worry about her future. He didn’t wrestle with the theological questions surrounding Down syndrome. He just loved her.

“I wasn’t there yet. I felt too fragile….”

-  From A Good and Perfect Gift: Faith, Expectations, and a Little Girl Named Penny, by Amy Julia Becker.

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by Quin Hillyer

Sometimes it helps to leave current events alone and take a longer view. With Andrew Ferguson at The Weekly Standard putting forth a brilliant piece on the 15^th anniversary of Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, the question arises as to what knowledge is necessary to keep a mind open in a way serving civilization. Herewith, then, my take on the most important basic building blocks from the humanities (not to mention the arts, about which a whole other column begs to be written) that no student should even enter college without knowing, and which every college should make sure they really do know long before the time they graduate:

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 by Quin Hillyer
It’s Easter week, and I don’t know what to write.

This is supposed to be a column about culture and politics, about issues of the day. But sometimes the issues of the day are too depressing. It’s Easter week, and after the darkness of Friday comes the light of redemption.

Depressing public issues shouldn’t intrude on redemption.

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