The Christendom Review

A magazine readers may want to know about: The Christendom Review . The magazine, all of whose contents seem to be available online,  describes itself as “a literary journal dedicated to the Diaspora of Christendom, that remnant of people who either deliberately or intuitively subscribe to the Judeo-Christian and ancient Greek traditions of the West.”

Among the articles in the latest issue is an interesting reflection on what makes a leader , using T. H. White’s The Once and Future King . It begins:

In one of the prep schools where I taught in the southern U.S., we were asked every year to identify students whom we believed possessed “leadership qualities.” Such qualities were never specified, but I had the general impression that these promising young people were to be culled from the ranks of the over-achievers, those at the top of the academic heap, the team captains, or those gregarious souls who could hold their peers rapt with natural charm. The quiet, bookish sorts who never volunteered for anything became invisible when I scanned my classroom for the potential leaders of the school.

Of course, as with so many other aspects of modern education, this method of identification was not merely wrong—it directly contradicted all that history has had to show us regarding true leaders. I could make a fairly long list of great men and women whose early lives were unremarkable; it would include Winston Churchill and Mahatma Gandhi. In fact, if I were to pose a question to anyone who works with young people – “What happens when you tell a child that he or she is inherently privileged and will someday lead his peers?”—the answer would invariably come back: “You’ll end up with a spoiled brat.”