As night hours lengthen in the northern hemisphere and the stars seem brighter this month, we’re entitled to stare up in awe.  We see the brilliance of the heavens and the glory of shooting stars.  Should we also stare up in fear?  After all, 65 million years ago a massive meteor (six to nine miles wide) sped through the atmosphere, crashed into earth, and took out all the dinosaurs.  Ten years ago, a sixty-pound asteroid plummeted to earth from space, crashed into Russia, and injured 1500 people in its path.  What if a planet-killer ever headed our way? Could we somehow deflect it or are we defenseless?  Fortunately for us earthlings, smart people at NASA and Johns Hopkins Applied Physics lab have been thinking about this.  The Planetary Defense Coordination Office at NASA (surprise – there is one!) has been hard at work.

On November 24, 2021, just a year ago, they launched a bold probe, sending a $325 million space craft the size of a refrigerator on a path to collide with an asteroid the size of a pyramid.  The idea was not to explode the asteroid, but to nudge it off course.  “Like throwing a tennis ball at a 747,” said NASA’s lead engineer Elena Adams.  Use the momentum of the crash to give it a shove, and make it change orbit.  Would it work? The asteroid selected, Didymos, was no threat to earth but it was conveniently located for a test, and it had a moonlet, named Dimorphos, that would serve as the target body to change the asteroid’s orbit.   This “Double-Asteroid Redirection Test” or DART was a historic first: human beings were attempting to modify the orbit of a heavenly body. On September 26, just eight weeks ago, DART hit its target.  A dramatic bullseye.  It worked!   

In I Survived Hurricane Katrina, ten-year-old Barry dreams of being a superhero. His alter-ego “Akivo” accesses his superpowers through his pinkie and a star that sends special energy to guide him.  When the young boy is swept away from his parents in crushing flood waters, he clings to an oak tree, a dislodged house, a grateful dog, and ultimately, to his hope of being reunited with his family. But he does more than cling: he shimmies up the oak, makes a leap for the house, unchains a whimpering dog tied inside, seeks out a dry patch of roof, and with the dog (named Cruz) waits for rescue. Barry’s is a fictional odyssey set during 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, which took the lives of more than a thousand New Orleanians.  Lauren Tarshi tells the story well, and in persevering, the child comes to recognize both his own strength and what it means to have companions for the journey.  He doesn’t go it alone. He literally embraces his cross (Cruz) and finds his way to safety and family.

Before drinking lemonade on the deck, we are reposting our most popular July blog (2019).

Philosopher Josef Pieper wrote Leisure: The Basis of Culture in 1948, and seventy years later his insights still reward us.  In a culture that enshrines work over play, we are tempted, Pieper said, to reduce all life to purposeful activity energetically pursued.  But human flourishing requires not just effort and socially useful action, but the ability to marvel, behold, and spiritually celebrate.  Leisure is a step beyond the work-a-day world and feeds a quiet wellspring from which we live. 

Watching the sunset in a sea both violet and amber, listening to the distant caw of gulls and waves lapping the shore, drinking in a star-studded sky at the park as a symphony swells  around us, fishing in a quiet pond, meeting the dew in your garden in an early morning walk, waking in a tent on a mountain summit.  Or reading poetry beneath an old oak tree, dancing unobserved, reveling in the cool breeze through an open window as you gaze on a beloved cityscape. 

June is a month of commencements, and on June 30, 2022 we at Core Virtues will celebrate ours! With pats on the back for work well done and eyes trained on the future, the Core Virtues Foundation joyfully announces new stewardship for the Core Virtues program.  We are delighted to transition our work of nearly thirty years to the University of Dallas (UD), where Professor Jeffrey Lehman will be spearheading its ongoing development and implementation. 

This transfer is borne of mutual admiration, great synergy, and months of conversation. UD is the only university in the country to offer a Master’s degree in Classical Education. The Core Virtues program (piloted in 1992) predates the burgeoning classical school movement, but shares many of its goals.  Classical schools are distinguished for their commitment to academic rigor and virtues-based character education.  The University of Dallas, through its Saint Ambrose Center and its Center for the Arts of Liberty, is a robust resource for classical schools and assists a network of K-12 schools that share these goals. Now part of the university’s educational toolkit, the Core Virtues program will offer K-6 schools in their network and beyond an intentional and uplifting approach to character education. 

We at the Core Virtues Foundation sought out and welcomed this opportunity for the future of Core Virtues. We have strong confidence in the talents of key people at the University to advance this work.  In the years ahead, we foresee an army of energetic faculty and graduate students at UD, working to expand both the reach of the program and the range of its literary offerings.

Core Virtues schools and teachers, who rely on the regularly updated Core Virtues website, should fear no loss.  The website will be strongly supported and advanced in its new stewardship, and eventually will be fully integrated into the U.D. platform. Until such time, however, the website will maintain its current address, configuration and accessibility. All the resources you’ve come to rely on will still be found here, and key members of the Foundation will be working with UD to assist in a smooth transition.

This springboard program, building character “one story at a time” as our tagline announces, is designed to inspire all children to know and love the good through the structured reading of quality literature. Our new home will ensure that Core Virtues lives on. We hope you’ll join us in tossing hats in the air at this Core Virtues-University of  Dallas commencement. ​

“Some men see things as they are and ask why?
I dream things that never were, and ask why not?" 
​Bobby Kennedy, 1968

This May in the Core Virtues program we feature (for the first time) the virtue of “imagination” – the flight of fancy required to step outside the world we inhabit and form a new or different “image” of what the world could be.  Imagination can be used for good or evil but is a virtue when in service of a higher good (truth, goodness, or beauty). It remains the trait that unites great writers, scientists, filmmakers, musicians, engineers, artists, and just about anyone who asks bold, wildly speculative questions and comes up with answers. 
 
Could human beings fly? Might computers be made small enough to become personal devices? Could we produce enough food to feed 8 billion people?  Might we speak timeless truths of good and evil through a family of rabbits in the English countryside?  Or find them “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away”? Or could we bring eighteenth-century triumphs to light using modern rap?  All of those questions, answered now in the affirmative, were daring dreams of the imagination just decades ago. The Wright brothers, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, Norman Borlaug, Beatrix Potter, George Lucas, and Lin Manuel Miranda all share a root excellence:  imagination.
 
In each case, their imaginative work was grounded in a strong knowledge base.  Albert Einstein once famously said “imagination is more important than knowledge.”  Poet Derek Walcott observed that Einstein earned the right to say that, because he had spent much of his life accumulating a vast storehouse of knowledge upon which to apply his imagination. As had the Wright Brothers before him.  As did Steve Jobs and Lin Manuel Miranda after him. But we should still take Einstein’s point:  imagination creates steppingstones to new knowledge.
 
So how do we encourage children to use and enjoy their imaginations? First, continue to delight them with a strong knowledge base.  Wonder and imagination feast upon genuine understanding:  of the physical world, of the human past, of world literature, of mathematical truths, of the fine arts.  Children long to encounter real wonders and see the connections from different realms.
 
Second, in this busy world, parents should not forget that children need time for imaginative play.  Kids need unstructured time, outdoor time, and on-their-own time.  Free time to make up their games, to create their characters, and plan their projects – whether they are building a fort or exploring a stream or making a town of their own or going to a galaxy far, far away.  We need to resist the temptation to schedule every minute of a child’s day. 

On January 14, 2022, North Las Vegas police officer Nicholas Quintana answered a dispatch call that changed his life.  A child called 911 to report her parents fighting.  Then four shots announced a tragic end.  Twenty-seven-year-old Quintana, who was on his lunch break, felt “this abrupt urge” to answer the call, and he raced to the scene with other cops.   There they found not just a fatally shot man, but five children.  Police arrested the forty-year-old mother for killing her ex-husband. 

The couple’s children, ranging in ages from six to seventeen, were now without parents. “So, are they going to split us up?” one of the distraught children kept asking. Quintana felt he was there for a reason.  His own father had been killed by a relative when he was young.  He knew what it was like to be both fatherless, and to carry a toxic burden of hatred toward a family member who had been responsible. On the scene, as the youngest child wailed and the children anguished over their probable separate futures in child protective services, he confided to a fellow officer that he wanted to make a home for all five children.  He went home that night heavy-burdened.

Quintana and his twenty-six-year-old wife Amanda did not yet have children.  Nicholas shared his over-sized hope with his wife.  “Is this a dream?” she asked.  She was “understandably  … absolutely reluctant towards it… I was like ‘Well listen, hun, just meet the kids, just meet them, because you might fall in love with these kids. Just meet them.’”  They drove the next day to the city’s Child Haven, and hearts melted. “All of us?” the seventeen-year-old had asked wide-eyed, when Amanda and Nicholas proposed their plan.  “Every single one of you,” the Quintanas responded.  Two days later they were driving back to their three bedroom, two-bath home as a family of seven.  They were a new family, embarked on a challenging new journey. 

What motivates this largeness of heart?  Quintana speaks openly about feeling called to this, about wanting to be for the children the father they need and the one he never had.  He worries that he might fail because he had no modeling, but the experience of his father’s murder taught him an important lesson that he wants to share with the children.  He told them: “I want you to promise me that you’ll learn to forgive. It’s impossible to forget things…Especially things that hurt us the most,” but he found in his own life that he was released from the burden of toxic anger only when he could say “I don’t this hold against you anymore. I love you…That took a long time to happen, a while to happen.”  

The fact that it did happen, for him and for others, has huge ripple effects – many of them empirically verifiable. Twenty years of psychological research now supports Quintana’s conviction that forgiveness is freeing and conduces to human flourishing.  In study after study “spiritually motivated forgiveness” is linked to improved psychosocial wellbeing, mental health, and improved physical health outcomes.  It is linked to lower risk of depression.  Books with titles such as The Psychology of Forgiveness (M.E. McCullough, et al.; 2000), Forgiveness and Health (L.L. Toussaint, et al., 2015), The Handbook of Forgiveness (E.L. Worthington, et al.; 2020) and many others point to this virtue as a path to emotional and physical wellness. 
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There are no words to describe the sort of real-life heroism of Nicholas and Amanda Quintana.  This month, as Christians remember Jesus forgiving his own crucifiers from the cross, that is the lesson he wants to share with his children. And it’s not simply a religious one.

​Mary Beth Klee

Our March virtues have special resonance in March 2022.  What do compassion, faithfulness, and mercy mean when a small, free nation suffers an unprovoked invasion by its aggressor neighbor? The world watches in horror as Ukrainian civilians flee Russian bombs, missiles, and tanks. Rockets level not only centuries-old municipal buildings but opera houses and concert halls. They strike a maternity clinic, the Holocaust Memorial, orphanages, and schools. Women and children separate from husbands and fathers who remain to defend their homeland.  More than a million refugees surge across Ukraine’s borders as their cities fall, and a forty-mile enemy military caravan snakes toward their capital. 

What do we teach our children as our hearts are breaking? First, we should not ignore this moment in history.  We should speak with our young students about dictators and thugs who use their power to enslave others. Assuring them that we ourselves are not in peril at this moment, we should reflect that there are those who regard compassion and mercy as weaknesses. Students in Core Knowledge schools or in classical schools, students who study history, realize that this theme (conquest, tyranny) is not new.  They have met Rameses II, Qin Shi Huang Di, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, Adolph Hitler, and Josef Stalin. And there are many more.

Many adults in the post-World War II West have come to regard international peace as our right and the norm, but the last eighty years have been a fortunate historical anomaly.  History teaches that there are always dictators among us. When unchecked, they re-emerge to teach us that freedom isn’t free. Oppression characterizes history more often than liberty. So go ahead: get out a map and talk to students about this moment when liberty is in peril.  It’s a lesson worth teaching the young.

But how do we channel and allay children’s (and our own) fear and helplessness in the face of international affairs few of us control?  If you are a person or a school of faith, the indisputable first answer is prayer.  But for any person or school, part of the answer is in figuring out how – in their adult life and in the present—they can become helpers.

American historian David McCullough is fond of closing commencement remarks by challenging students to “do something for your country.”   He invokes the spirit of John F. Kennedy, Jr., whose 1960 inaugural address urged Americans to “ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” 
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In an age when we are increasingly encouraged to consider ourselves “citizens of the world,” and when many elementary school curricula include units on “global citizenship,” how relevant is love of country anymore? McCullough, who has dedicated a lifetime to telling America’s stories, would say: very.  We are still a planet of sovereign nation-states – 195 of them by last count.  We pass our laws, inherit our mores, formulate our aspirations, shape our futures, and realize our daily potential in the context of a national framework and heritage.  We flounder or flourish in that context, and ours is worth knowing. 

McCullough has worked for over five decades to reveal America to herself.  Indeed, in 1968, when Simon and Garfunkel “walked off to look for America,” so did McCullough, publishing his first major work, The Johnstown Flood. With drama, suspense, and a storyteller’s compass, McCullough told the tale of the nation’s worst flood disaster and introduced a new genre:  narrative non-fiction.  His novel-like read was spectacularly successful, spotlighting the foibles, missteps, heroism, and lessons to be learned, as well as earning him accolades as the nation’s leading social historian.  (Much to the chagrin of academic historians.)

Whether spurred by the spirit of adventure or the pursuit of an ideal, we are often able to exercise courage when something meaningful rallies us to move beyond fear. But what about when courage is required simply “to continue,” as Churchill had it?

The pandemic affords us a new opportunity to exercise courage:  courage to go into the classroom, courage to go the grocery store, courage to go to a doctor’s appointment, courage to get on a bus or an airplane….  We look at this January 2022 Courage List and are tempted to laugh out loud.  Or shake our heads.  This is a Baby Courage List.   But so be it. 

Let’s take our baby steps and do (as Eleanor Roosevelt suggested) one thing that scares us every day.   Let the spirit of adventure take us to a restaurant.  Let the pursuit of an ideal lead us back to church or synagogue or the classroom or the theater or the museum.  Let the will to live well triumph over the temptation to cower.  And let the words of Henry Ford inspire us as we continue an uphill slog: “When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it.”   
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Mary Beth Klee