Kash

Apparently, the University of Michigan’s College of Literature, Science, and the Arts has determined not to count letter grades toward its freshmen’s GPAs during their first semester, starting in 2027. The reason given is that this move will address the growing mental health crisis among young people. Nothing could be further from the truth. It will, in fact, exacerbate the crisis. Across cultures, one can discern a common pattern in the initiation rituals of primal peoples. The elders of the tribe rip a young person from the comfort of his home during the night. He is then scarified or otherwise physically marked in some way—a tooth is knocked out or his face is cut—in order to impress upon him that life is difficult. Then he is introduced to the lore and history of his people, and finally he is taken to the edge of the wilderness, given a few simple provisions, and told to make his way for an extended period of time. The entire purpose of the exercise is to break him free from the dominance of his self-regarding feelings and to orient him to the achievement of objective goods. Plato famously compared the soul to a horse-drawn chariot. The animals represent the passions, which provide energy for the vehicle, and the driver represents intelligence and refined moral consciousness. As long as the charioteer is in place, the chariot makes its way purposefully. But if the charioteer is kicked out, the horses will run amok. Our “suicidally empathetic” culture, which consistently privileges feeling over objective value, has produced armies of dangerously uninitiated young people. In terms of Plato’s metaphor, it has given rise to lots and lots of chariots with no sense of direction, crashing into one another. Electing not to count first-semester grades toward students’ GPAs in order to spare the delicate emotions of eighteen-year-olds is, spiritually speaking, about as dumb a move as a university could make.

Friends, I had the opportunity today to meet with President Trump at the White House in connection with my work on the Presidential Religious Liberty Commission. I want to share a few thoughts about our conversation and why the defense of religious liberty matters for believers and nonbelievers alike.

It is highly dangerous to be a Christian today in North Korea.  In May of 2023, an entire family, including a two-year-old child, was condemned to life imprisonment for the crime of possessing a Bible.  That same month, a man already incarcerated in a detention camp was beaten nearly to death for the crime of quietly praying.  Please pray for our Christian brothers and sisters in North Korea, and pray that the light of religious liberty may reach even the darkest corners of our world.

It was with real sadness that I learned that the monks of the Abbey of La Trappe in Normandy are considering closing down their operation. As the name suggests, this monastery is the mother house of the Trappist Order, a reform of the Cistercian movement and a particularly intense form of Benedictine life, famous for its austerity and silence. I came to know of La Trappe through Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk of the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, whom I read with great passion when I was a young man. La Trappe shaped Merton, who in turn opened so much of the spiritual life to me. Founded over nine hundred years ago, La Trappe has survived the Black Death, the Hundred Years' War, the Protestant Reformation, the French Revolution, and the world wars of the twentieth century. That this venerable monastery cannot find enough vocations to keep it alive is, in my judgment, a sign of the spiritual disaster that has befallen Europe in the last hundred years: an ideological secularism that is rotting the soul of the West. Let's redouble our prayers that the monks of La Trappe might find a way to preserve their great Abbey. It is needed especially now.