Thomas Jefferson and I apparently think alike. A couple of weeks ago I argued that Sarah Palin was offering a much-needed challenge to the over-educated “wonks” who think themselves entitled to rule. In the Weekly Standard, the great Reagan biographer Steven Hayward writes that Jefferson could have made much the same argument:

American political thought since its earliest days has been ambiguous or conflicted about the existence and character of a “natural aristocracy” of governing talent. If the ghosts of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams are watching the storm over Palin, they must surely be revisiting their famous dialogue about America’s governing class. Adams’s widely misunderstood argument that there should perhaps be an explicit recognition and provision for an aristocratic class finds its reprise in the snobbery that greeted Palin’s arrival on the scene. It’s not just that she didn’t go to Harvard; she’s never been on Meet the Press; she hasn’t participated in Aspen Institute seminars or attended the World Economic Forum. She hasn’t been brought into the slipstream of the establishment by which we unofficially certify our highest leaders.

The issue is not whether the establishment would let such a person as Palin cross the bar into the certified political class, but whether regular citizens of this republic have the skill and ability to control the levers of government without having first joined the certified political class. But this begs an even more troublesome question: If we implicitly think uncertified citizens are unfit for the highest offices, why do we trust those same citizens to select our highest officers through free elections?

In his reply to Adams, Jefferson expressed more confidence that political virtue and capacity for government were not the special province of a recognized aristocratic class, but that aristoi (natural aristocrats) could be found among citizens of all kinds: “It would have been inconsistent in creation to have formed man for the social state, and not to have provided virtue and wisdom enough to manage the concerns of the society.” Jefferson, moreover, trusted ordinary citizens to recognize political virtue in their fellow citizens: “Leave to the citizens the free election and separation of the aristoi from the pseudo-aristoi, of the wheat from the chaff. In general they will elect the really good and wise.”

Today’s establishment doubts this. The establishment is affronted by the idea that an ordinary hockey mom–a mere citizen–might be just as capable of running the country as a long-time member of the Council on Foreign Relations. This closed-shop attitude is exactly what both Jefferson and Adams set themselves against; they wanted a republic where talent and public spirit would find easy access to the establishment.

Here’s an awful story about a Colorado newspaper that, in the race to be the first on a story, stationed a reporter at the funeral of a three-year-old girl and had him post details of the event live on the Internet:

In what some are saying is the result of the newspaper’s undying desire to be the first to report on local news, it Twittered the live events at the funeral instead of waiting to report on it after it was over. The decision to Twitter the funeral was called into question by most in the Colorado press and elsewhere who claimed it wasn’t the right place, nor the right time to use a real-time social tool to discuss the events of the service. . . .

The reporter, Berny Morson, still has his Twitter feed active and the live events of the funeral are still included in his timeline. His coverage of the funeral begins with a description of the casket and mourners filing in and ends when “family members shovel earth into [the] grave.”

Last week, it wasn’t through a phone call but through Facebook that I learned that two of my high school friends had died in a car accident. The horrible news was announced almost immediately on the popular social-networking website, sandwiched between two other people declaring that their weekend hadn’t lived up to their expectations.

Terry Mattingly at GetReligion.org calls our attention to this report from a Christian news source, of Christian martyrdom in Saudi Arabia :

Reports are coming in of increasing persecution of Christian believers in the Saudi Arabia. A Saudi man recently cut the tongue of his daughter and burned her to death for converting to Christianity, according to a report by the United Arab Emirates-based Gulf News. The victim frequently wrote on various Web site blogs about her conversion from Islam. It is believed that she converted to Christianity after learning about the faith on the Internet and through Christian media.

The girl’s father is an employee of Saudi Arabia ’s Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice–the arm of the government that enforces the nation’s prohibition of Christianity and conversion to Christianity. Sources close to the victim said that the father was being investigated for “honor killing” rather than murder, Gulf News reported. Shariah-ruled Saudi Arabia , where all Christian worship is forbidden, is ranked No. 2 on Open Doors’ 2007 World Watch List of nations where Christians are persecuted for their faith.

Under the kingdom’s strict interpretation of Islamic law, apostasy is punishable by death if the accused does not recant.

Even though it originated with mainstream-media sources in the region, the only place Mattingly could find a mainstream reference was in a column titled, “War on Christians in the Middle East Must be Stopped” by Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, president of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews. Eckstein writes:

An Islamic court in Shiraz, Iran has just convicted two men of being infidels. Their crime? Converting to Christianity. The possible sentence? Death. Not too far away in Saudi Arabia, an outraged father recently hacked his own daughter to death for the same “abomination.”

In the daily drumbeat of Mideast news, there is one story of historic proportion that goes nearly unreported: the persecution and systematic destruction in the Islamic world of some of the world’s oldest Christian communities.

But this, too, Mattingly says, is an advocacy piece. “Why,” he asks, “is this a conservative” news story? Why is this hellish subject not worth mainstream attention?”

If children are encouraged to act and dress like adults, then why can’t adults act like children?

In my experience, the modern elite university is an intellectual wasteland. Most students are just trying to get job security, and insofar as they can be said to have ethical or philosophical views, they are uncritical “preference” utilitarians of a decidedly scientistic cast of mind.

But there are very significant exceptions among students and faculty. It is thanks to them that, despite the depressing general standard, I cherish my time at college as a period of tremendous intellectual growth.

Many of my most valuable interlocutors were liberals who managed to transcend the ambient liberal preconceptions and take conservative critiques with full seriousness. Yet, despite their honesty and rigor, it soon became clear that they would never change their mind on any basic conclusion of ethics or policy. They would tolerate no bad arguments for their conclusions, but would accept anything that would have to be true for their conclusions to make sense. There was no bullet that they would not bite, no view of man or society so unattractive or counterintuitive that they wouldn’t accept it, provided it could get them to gay marriage and an unlimited abortion license.

This attitude towards the conclusions of mainstream liberalism is, interestingly, comparable to Thomas Aquinas’ attitude towards the revealed truths of Christianity. He rejected bad arguments for any Christian position, but ultimately never doubted the doctrines, and he would accept anything that would have to be true for these doctrines to make sense.

How odd that a tradition historically dominated by proud rationalists now has advocates who treat it like a revealed religion.

I know it’s the middle of Pentecost/Ordinary Time, but I’ve been itching for some spice to the liturgical season. Yesterday I noticed that I was humming “Sing ye to the Lord,” a marvelous piece of English choral music by Sir Edward Bairstow. Here’s a recording from Easter 2008 at St. Clement’s, Philadelphia (my old parish) with small orchestra, choir, and organ.

The triumphal beginning with the Song of Moses (”Sing ye to the Lord”) gives way to a verse from “At the Lamb’s High Feast We Sing:”

Mighty Victim from the sky,
Hell’s fierce powers beneath Thee lie;
Thou hast conquered in the fight,
Thou hast brought us life and light;
Now no more can death appall,
Now no more the grave enthrall;
Thou hast opened Paradise,
And in Thee Thy saints shall rise.

The music starts small and quiet, then swells and diminishes at the end before a final triumphant alleluia. Just the kind of thing for Easter Day, or another Monday in Ordinary Time.

Ryan’s post on the Cristo Rey Jesuit High School reminded me of another flourishing initiative in Catholic education: Notre Dame’s A.C.E. program. Now fifteen years old, the Alliance for Catholic Education teaches the teachers–training more than 1,000 college graduates, since 1993, and placing them at under-resourced rural and inner-city Catholic schools for two years of educational service.

In last week’s National Review Online, Notre Dame professor and FT contributor Rick Garnett reflects on A.C.E.’s lasting impact–for the schools, the teachers, and the communities they serve:

What started as a single teacher-training program at a single University has not only been replicated at 15 other Catholic universities and colleges but has also produced a leadership-training program for Catholic-school administrators and principals, a consulting enterprise that assists schools and dioceses in planning and operations, and a Christian lay movement of former A.C.E. teachers who are eager to continue reflecting on the spiritual dimension of the vocation to teaching.

Should non-Catholics care? Sure, the success of A.C.E. might prove a consolation in these hard times for fans of the Fighting Irish, but does it really matter?
. . .

America’s Catholic schools represent perhaps one of the most dramatic donations of time, talent, and treasure to the political community’s common good that the nation has ever seen. . . . We hear a lot these days about “social capital,” and about the anchoring institutions that are so important to the health of communities and the formation of character. It is important to a free society that non-government institutions thrive. Such institutions enrich and diversify what we call “civil society.” They are like bridges and buffers that mediate between the individual and the state. They are the necessary infrastructure for communities and relationships in which loyalties and values are formed and passed on and where persons develop and flourish. In our history, few institutions have played this role like Catholic schools.

Garnett concludes by quoting from A.C.E. founder Fr. Tim Scully’s address to the White House Summit on Inner-City Children and Faith-Based Schools: “In the end, the crisis we currently face is a crisis of imagination and of will—and that’s good news, for we lack neither. Together, we cannot and will not fail. We know the dark statistics and the gloomy trends—it’s important we know them if we’re going to right them. But let us not get so used to looking at the darkness that we allow it to cover up the light: signs of hope abound if we have the imagination and will to see them.”

It looks like politicians are the same in Australia too.