We ring in the new year in this January issue of Position Papers with Margaret Hickey’s review of a rather heartening book How to Raise Conservative Kids In a Woke City. The book’s message is quite simple, but no less important for that: parents have the power to form children who can withstand the influence of wokist indoctrination in school. And perhaps parents do need constant reminding of their uniquely influential position in the lives of their children, especially in the face of the ideological capture of so many of their children’s schools. They should not be diffident about using this influence. Margaret Hickey points out that:
The authors make it clear that parents themselves are “the program”. Their example, their expertise, their confidence, their interpersonal skills and, not by any means least, their availability offers their children the map they must follow if they are to hold their heads high in a hostile culture.
But attached to this is the warning that parents must get in there early: “Parents must ‘get to the children first’ by shaping their view of the world and particularly of the family, as historically understood.” The book makes particular mention of the importance of stories in the formation of young people: “Stories about (American) history and the progress of thought, stories about the saints and biblical stories all serve to ground developing consciousness in the values parents wish to transmit.”
(And a resource which might be useful to parents in this regard is Vigen Guroian’s Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child’s Moral Imagination reviewed this month by David Gibney.)
In this issue, James Bradshaw brings the somewhat forgotten work of the late Desmond Fennell to our attention in the hope of recovering the significant contributions Fennell made on matters concerning Irish life, in particular in his analysis of the baneful effect of liberal individualism on Irish community life, on the plight of the Nationalist population in the North, and on an already weakened Irish Catholicism. Already in the 1980s Fennell was predicting the vacuum that would be left by the waning of Catholicism, though it is hard to imagine that he foresaw the degree to which the vacuum would be filled with drugs like cocaine (Ireland has the highest usage of cocaine in the European Union according to the European Drug Report 2023), and no doubt Irish towns cities will soon resemble the opioid ravaged cities of Canada, a country which Ireland appears to resemble in so many ways.
As promised last month, I have produced a review of an interesting book recently published by Rialp in Spain, Antonio-Carlos Pereira’s La Sociedad del Delirio: Un análisis sobre el gran reset mundial in which the author essentially makes the claim that our world has gone stark raving mad – and like never before in history. And unfortunately he makes a strong argument in favour of his thesis.
Finally, this month’s issue includes a short piece by George Weigel in which he examines Fiducia Supplicans (FS), the controversial new Declaration from the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF), and shows how a significant failing of the Declaration is its failure to take into account of the cultural context of the societies it addresses. There has been much ink spilt taking the document to task and there is no need to rehearse these criticisms, especially since there is the real danger of disunity with the Pope. While it is now evident that the release of FS has not been the Vatican’s finest moment, it is enough to acknowledge this, move on, and keep untarnished our filial affection for the Pope.