Explore the vast range of titles available.

The only cars passing by these days are those heading up Skyline Drive to the top of the mountain, where an observation center offers views in all directions of hills and valleys with few signs of habitation» Once in a while members of a monk's family turn left halfway up the mountain, drive another half mile, and park beside a small structure outside the monastery walls where they may visit a son or brother who has joined the order and committed to silence» Such visits may happen only a few days per year» St» Bruno, who founded the Carthusians in 1084, was clear about the eremitic way; the Statutes of the order insist on isolation and silence» At all times, they say, monks must \"diligently keep themselves strangers to all worldly news»\" They cite the model of Jacob, who didn't see God face to face until he had sent his retinue forward and walked alone» Moses, Elijah, and John the Baptist also sought solitude, while the prophet Jeremiah advised: \"It is good for a man to await the salvation of God in silence»\" Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert for forty days, making him, the Statutes continue, \"the first exemplar of our Carthusian life.\" Pope Benedict himself asserted in a 2011 homily delivered in Serra San Bruno, the monastery where St» Bruno died in noi, \"by withdrawing into silence and solitude, human beings, so to speak, 'expose' themselves to reality in their nakedness » » » in order to experience instead Fullness, the presence of God»\" The Carthusians own the road to the summit» An outside management team hired by the monastery charges cars $25 to enter, which thousands do, especially in the fall when leaves are turning» Like the twenty-one other Charterhouses around the world, the Transfiguration house has to sustain itself» Only at the Mother House is the famed Chartreuse liqueur made and sold (130 Alpine herbs and flowers go into the four-hundred-year-old recipe, which is known by only two monks at any given time)» In Vermont, the Carthusians allow a local firm to tap ten thousand maple trees at an annual charge» They also sell excess electricity produced by a small dam on the property, donating another portion of its output to a school nearby» It is, indeed, silent here-no traffic noise, no voices in the hallway» Snow blankets the mountainsides today» The only sound I hear outside the room during our first interview, which lasts three hours, is a bell at the end calling us to Vespers» While we speak in a reception parlor just inside the gate, the rest of the fathers are in their cells praying» The Carthusian brothers may have work assignments at that hour of the day-cooking, cleaning, repairing-but they finish them in silence, then return to pray in their own cells» My hosts take me to a cell, pointing out an empty cabinet installed in the wall to the right of the portal before we go inside» The door to the cabinet is open, and I can see that in the back of the space is a matching door» It's a delivery system. Everything else he needs is already there: a cot, woodstove, oratory, and a shelf that holds Scripture, the Statutes, and books of the monk's choice taken from the monastery's library, which offers theology, history, philosophy, literature, art, tales of the Desert Fathers and the saints, reflections on monasticism (I spotted an entire shelf of Thomas Merton), and lots of \"Carthusiana.\" Dorn André Poisson, Prior of the Grande Chartreuse a generation ago, declared the cell \"an extraordinarily efficacious instrument,., the vehicle of grace, so long as we give ourselves up to it,\" The cell has two \"countenances,\" the monks in Vermont tell me: the Tender Mother and the Harsh Teacher, When a \"retreatant\" arrives for an initial trial, a honeymoon phase begins, The retreatant has been accepted after undergoing a physical and psychological appraisal done by a professional sympathetic to the ways of the order, Only genuine candidates for vocational discernment are admitted; the Carthusians do not run de-stressing furloughs for wound-up professionals, One of the fathers tells me that an implicit question hangs in the air: \"Are you prepared to be useless?\" (A habit and hair shirt are given only at the later novice stage,) When he steps inside and the door shuts, every secular thing he wished to flee is gone-other people, too, which may have been the worst part of life outside, or at least the most distracting, If it is escape from the world that has motivated him to enter, the cell answers with a resounding silence, and he relaxes, The Tender Mother gives protection and comfort, Hours pass, days and weeks, relief deepens, but a change is inevitable, The routine is set:

[...]what can one do when minority groups lack civil rights, Western nations conduct \"police actions\" in former colonies, and the hyperconcentration of political-economic power blocks effective dissent? Under the rule of monopolistic media-themselves the mere instruments of economic and political power-a mentality is created for which right and wrong, true and false are predefined wherever they affect the vital interests of the society. Critics of systems have all the evidence they need to assert their unjust mechanics-namely, disparate outcomes. Since the results are there, the causes must be, too-but they're invisible, which is why wholesale change is necessary. People naturally assume \"the so-called 'psychological' view,\" Hegel states, which attributes actions to individual motive and ignores the \"cunning of reason\"-Hegel's famous term for the paths civilization takes quite apart from the intentions of its prime agents (kings, prophets, inventors, thinkers).

[...]that is, educators in the mid-twentieth century decided that memorization was just a mechanical activity. In education theory, the most influential model of such acts of thinking has been Bloom's Taxonomy, a pyramid of learning objectives produced around 1950. Western Civilization and Great Books got the same treatment, as did the Founding and Plymouth Rock and other cornerstones of traditionalist thinking. Here is an incomplete list of what still hasn't undergone critical thinking in mainstream circles: the anti-war movement; communists in Hollywood and government; the sexual revolution; anti-colonialism; the Black Panthers; postmodern irony.

Why should this unexceptional town twenty miles west of Boston with no natural sublimity or intellectual history, no great universities or popular theaters or bustling coffeehouses, no patrons or publishers, have produced such a lasting body of writing in so brief a time, the first real cultural movement in America that counted in the worlds eyes? True, too, that when the Transcendentalists were there, the town had a proud historical claim as the site of \"the shot heard round the world\"-an episode at the center of Gross's previous book, The Minutemen and Their World (which won the Bancroft Prize for 1976). Since the mid-twentieth century, social history and cultural studies have explicitly renounced \"Great Man\" models of the past and aimed to track the course of things \"from the bottom up,\" that is, through the real lives of regular people, their jobs and finances, social habits and consumer goods, leisure preferences and sexual mores. Talk of Great Men and Great Books was for right-wing characters such as Thomas Carlyle (On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History) and Ezra Pound, who wrote, in The Spirit of Romance, \"The history of an art is the history of masterwork, not of failures, or of mediocrity. .