On April 27 in Poway, Calif., a young man with an AR-15 rifle entered a synagogue during a Passover service and began shooting. He wounded three people and killed one before two attendees at the service rushed him. Later, authorities identified the alleged shooter as a lifelong church member, the son of an Orthodox Presbyterian elder, who was homeschooled until ninth grade. How could this happen?

You’ve probably heard the Mark Twain quote: “When I was a boy of fourteen my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he’d learned in seven years.”

Years ago, on an episode of Focus on the Family, I heard the story of an experimental school for young children. The school’s founders wanted to challenge the students to tap into their natural curiosity and boldness, so they knocked down the playground fences to allow the kids to explore beyond their prescribed boundaries. Instead of free-ranging all over the neighborhood, however, the children hardly ventured beyond the schoolhouse door. Moral: Kids need boundaries so they can feel secure while tapping into their natural curiosity and boldness.  

The luxury liner was steaming through a calm, star-studded night when it happened. Fast asleep after days of rough weather and turbid fog, passengers were thrown from their beds by a violent shuddering and noise like an explosion. The prow of an iron-hulled sailing vessel had rammed them amidships and split the hull. Passengers who were not killed in the crash crowded the deck and swarmed the lifeboats. Many were crushed under the collapsing mainmast.

What could be more genteel than a meeting of academic classicists? Imagine scholars in tweed jackets subtly correcting each other’s Greek as they compare translations of Thucydides and debate the political implications of Sappho. The expectations of Mary Frances Williams, an independent (i.e., not attached to a university) classics scholar, were not so clichéd. Still, she had no idea when she registered for the 2019 Annual Meeting of the Society for Classical Studies (SCS) what a wild ride it would be. 

Alienated America, by Tim Carney, is the latest book (following Bowling Alone in 2000 and Coming Apart in 2013) about our culture’s loss of community bonds. That loss could be the endgame of one of the great conflicts in human history. The conflict has taken many forms: the one and the many (philosophical), the pluribus and the unum (political), the id and the other (psychological).

“Don’t tell me a Christian should never need psychiatric treatment. In my opinion, a Christian may need treatment even more than an unbeliever, because the life Christ asks us to lead is so fundamentally opposed to the way the world works.”