My husband wanted me to apply to Radcliff college soon after we were married. The application required me to write a short essay on the following topic: Imagine, Laura Ingalls Wilder met Maria Von Trapp in the train and they became very good friends. What can you say about their shared tastes, sensibilities, historic and cultural roots and anything that can bind their relationship? Do you come from a family that shares the values of Maria Von Trapp and Laura Ingalls Wilder? If both were your aunts, what will you learn from them? Do you believe Radcliffe women today cherish those traits? What would be your cultural and social identity today if you were a Radcliff graduate who was influenced by their lives? I found that topic to be a truly rich and evocative prompt — one that calls for a thoughtful blend of imagination, historical empathy, and personal reflection, rooted in the emotional and cultural worlds of Maria von Trapp and Laura Ingalls Wilder. It was on a long, cross-cou...

Dawn breaks like a hymn over the hills. The rooster crows and the golden light creeps through gingham curtains. Laura’s already up, kneading dough with gentle hands, flour dusting her apron like snow. Michael’s chopping wood out back—his laughter rising with the crack of the axe, telling a story to the youngest as the dog chases chickens in joyful chaos. The kettle whistles. Glen’s picking out soft chords on his guitar by the window— his voice warm as sun on old barnwood: "Like a rhinestone cowboy..." It drifts into the air, and Kenny joins in from the porch, mug in hand, singing about the gambler who knew when to hold ‘em. Sigrid rides in just before breakfast, reins in one hand, a bundle of wildflowers in the other. She smells of leather and eucalyptus. Her stories are of winding trails and starry camps, as we sit around a table built by calloused hands and mended with love more than nails. The day is honest work—fences to mend, songs to sing, letters to write in loop...

My beloved sons, As you grow into the fullness of your lives, I want to offer you something more lasting than advice—a light by which to walk, when the world around you grows dim or distracted. When I was your age, I came to America hoping to sit at the feet of giants. I imagined her universities as temples of wisdom, her libraries as cathedrals of memory. I thought I would find in lecture halls what I had glimpsed as a child in Florence, Assisi, Jerusalem—a civilization that remembered who it was. But I arrived in the 1990s to find something else. Professors mocked the past. Students chased credentials. The great books gathered dust, while fashionable ideologies were recited like mantras. I felt out of place—not because I lacked knowledge, but because I hungered for it too deeply. The very soul of the West seemed to have gone silent. And then, I found a voice: Allan Bloom. His Closing of the American Mind said what I could not. Later, Charles Sykes named the betrayal I felt but ...

I was born in Assissi, spent my childhood in Florence, spent time in Jerusalem and Jeddah and moved to Aix-en-provence. I was a apprentice at the Abbaye Notre-Dame de Senanque for few years before crossing the Atlantic for postgraduate studies in Classical, Medieval and Renaissance studies. In the Nineteenth century and the early 20th century, until the 1950s, Harvard University used to be an elitist conservative, vintage university of New England for Boston brahmins many of whom have their origins in the Puritan times of John Winthrop. They held dearly European values and created a New England out of their own culture that epitomozed John Harvard's Harvard University. However, since the 1960s, Harvard has become over liberalized like the University of California Berkeley, embracing a counter European culture and deconstruction by embracing wholesale multiculturalism and putting in leadership position people of non-western origin who lack western and European values. How and w...