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The Leaky Bucket, by Anthony Esolen – Brown Pelican Society of Lousiana

The Leaky Bucket, by Anthony Esolen

Fr. Shenan J. Boquet: The Role of the Family and Parental Rights

The Once and Future Christendom, by Darrick Taylor

family silhouette.. Image: Jude Beck/Unsplash.com

By Anthony Esolen, American Greatness, June 7, 2024

If you do not have the family, your bucket has been punched full of holes. Not all the water in the world can fill it, because it leaks out as soon as you pour it in.

I have spent many years reading, writing, and thinking about family life and what kinds of things are good and innocent, healthy and soul-building, in the day of a child. One of the responses I typically get is that I am “romanticizing” a way of life that was peculiar to white people in the United States shortly after the second World War, ignoring all the evils which were attached to that way of life, such as racism, the exploitation of workers, and so forth. The response is unjust, since my views on family life have come from looking at a broad range of human cultures spanning several millennia.

In fact, I have written about what it was like, for example, to play in the ice-covered streets of New York as the eyewitness and participant Jacob Riis described it, or to roam the shores of Cape Cod when the schoolmaster was feeling under the weather, as the boy Horatio Storer—later to become the father of gynecology in America—described it in his letters home to his parents. I cannot help but notice the practical liberty that the children enjoyed and the social bonds that made such liberty possible. …

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