Our beloved Cecilia Rose would’ve been twelve today. It’s not hard to imagine a curly, brown haired, blue-eyed girl being the delightful middle child of the family, just on the verge of teenagedom. 

I imagine she would still love all the things of childhood—her dolls, her princesses, her games, her costumes—just on the eve of thinking about grownup things. She would be, at age 12, the embodiment of that tug we once all felt, between past and present, between what we love and what we think we should love.

She would love to snuggle with me (a real love, past, present, and future), and she would adore her older siblings, while always counseling her younger ones. Her favorite color, I think, would be a hue of violet, and she would cherish the princess stories of George MacDonald. Her imagination would be her joy.

No matter how I might feel on August 7 or August 9, I never feel quite right on August 8. Even if I didn’t have a calendar in front of me, I know that my soul and my body would know that it’s August 8. 

August 8 is a world between worlds, a twilight existence.

Though I never knew Cecilia Rose well in person, the painful hole, the tearing pit, the deep abyss in my heart reminds me that I knew her completely—at least as a child of Christ. It’s a hole that never goes away, and, I suppose, never will. 

At least not until she (please, God!) greets me at the gates of heaven, grabs my hand, and asks me for a dance.

Happy birthday, my Cecilia Rose (b. and d. August 8, 2007).

I am not a professional economist. Nor have I played one on TV. My own academic background is in literature, philosophy, and then theology, where I earned my doctorate writing about soon-to-be-saint John Henry Newman and the threat of Hell. My knowledge of economics has come out of interest and necessity. My interest is because my own liberal education, no matter how flawed it may have been or dilatory I was in study, convinced me that all knowledge is one, and that to truly have a view of the world, one must have a sense of the importance and place of all subjects. Though economists have often overstated the importance of their discipline, I have nevertheless been impressed with the ways in which economists, though often dismissed with Macaulay’s gibe about being a “dismal science,” have often come, as William McGurn has observed, to the same practical conclusions about freedom and human dignity that theologians and moral philosophers have.

The necessity in my interest in economics is because I am married and have seven children. Though the sums needed to raise them are often overstated, my experience is that they do cost money. “Economy” comes from two Greek words, oikos (home) and nomos (rule). While many of us tend to think of economics as involving titans of industry, IPOs, international deals, and world-scale decisions and players, economics in its original sense is all home economics.
— Read on theimaginativeconservative.org/2019/08/writing-economics-david-deavel.html

My required reading list, H301, Autumn 2019.

Most available at: http://oll.libertyfund.org

Documents to read before midterm: 

John Adams, Dissertation on Feudal and Canon Law

Cato’s Letters: 15, 17, 18, 25, 27, 31, 35, 42, 59, 62, 66, 84, 94, 106, 114, 115

Thomas Gordon, “A Discourse of Standing Armies”

Demophilus, “The Genuine Principles of the Ancient Saxon, or English Constitution”

Addison, Cato: A Tragedy

Hamilton, “Remarks on the Quebec Bill”

Dickinson, Letters from a Pennsylvania Farmer: 1, 3, 8-10, 12

Edmund Burke, “Speech on American Taxation”

Edmund Burke, “Speech on Conciliation with the Colonies”

Samuel Sherwood, “The Church’s Flight into the Wilderness”

CX Letters (will be emailed to you)

Articles of Confederation 

Declaration of Independence (Jefferson’s version; will be emailed to you)

Documents to read before the final:

George Washington, “Circular to the States”(1783)

Northwest Ordinance, Articles 1-6

Farrand, ed., Records of the Federal Convention: May 29-June 8, June 18, June 26, June 28-29, July 26, August 7-9, August 13-14, August 21-22, August 30-31, September 17

Federalist Papers: 1, 10, 39, 45-51, 63, 70, 78, 84-85

Anti-Federalist Papers: 

James Wilson, “Speech to the Pennsylvania Convention”(December 1787)

John Dickinson as “Fabius,”letters 10-3

Noah Webster, “A Citizen of America”

Tench Coxe, “An American Citizen”

James Wilson, “Of the Law of Nature”

James Wilson, “Of the Natural Rights of Individuals”

Burke, “Reflections on the Revolution in France,”pp. 87-176

Burke, “Further Reflections on the Revolution in France,”(1791), pp. 75-124, 160-201

George Washington, First Inaugural Address

George Washington, “To the Hebrew Congregation in Newport”

George Washington, “To the Roman Catholics”

George Washington, Farewell Address

As with all of Tolkien’s great tales of the First Age, the story of Beren and Lúthien transformed dramatically over sixty years from its first imagining and version in 1916 and 1917 to its relatively finalized version in 1977’s The Silmarillion. During those six decades, it appeared as a long tale of the Lost Tales, as a summary in the 1926 Sketch of the Mythology (written for Tolkien’s beloved professor from King Edward’s, R.W. Reynolds), as a radically ambitious poetic lay, The Lay of Leithian (1925-1931), and as an essential story within the various versions, including the final version, of The Silmarillion.

Yet, the essence of the story has remained the same in all of its many versions. Or, as Christopher so wisely put it, “The fluidity should not be exaggerated: there were nonetheless great, essential, permanences.”
— Read on theimaginativeconservative.org/2019/08/jrr-tolkien-beren-and-luthien-bradley-birzer.html