“You may say this to Théoden son of Thengel: open war lies before him… None may live now as they have lived, and few shall keep what they call their own.”— Aragorn, speaking to Éomer on the eve of the War of the Ring; from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Two Towers
A month ago, my wife attended a town meeting here in Hadley, Massachusetts, concerning prevention of war with Iran. The meeting was sponsored by a number of local organizations, including the Order of the White Oak. Given the events in the last few weeks, which appear to be bringing us closer and closer to war, we felt it essential to distribute this information as widely as possible.
These are the notes my wife took at the meeting.
Imagine trying to revive the Latin language. Imagine speaking it at home, teaching it to your children, seeking out Latin translations of modern works, and using it instead of English whenever you could. What would your friends and neighbors think? Do you think lots of people would jump on the bandwagon with you? Do you think that the revived Latin movement — “Neolatinism” — would have much of a future in your society? There are no celebrities speaking Latin on TV. There are no government officials speaking Latin in press conferences. Latin is stigmatized as a dead language with no future; why would anyone want to learn it?
, a book by Frank MacEowen that struck my life with great force a year and a half ago. Frank’s message came to me at just the right time, and I found that it resolved a lot of issues with the direction of my spiritual path, as well as laying down rich soil for growth. Perhaps the most profound gift the book gave me was a deepening of my sense of comfort and rightness in the label ‘druid’, which I had adopted as my own just a few months before, and the path circumscribed by that term.
, is vastly different from 