ABOUT ME: I am a tall, lanky, 6'3" preppy schoolteacher with a golden retriever and a weakness for peanut butter. I love to travel, went to 11 countries in Europe(summer '00), and here at FR, I get a lot of questions about my name. Yes, it is from the book and film(s) of the novel Goodbye Mr. Chips. Like the character in the novel, I am also a Latin teacher. I also teach History and English Lit. I attended the University of the South, in Sewanee, TN in the early 80's, and ended up teaching in four different boarding schools, where I also coached and dormed. I now teach in a private day school. After obtaining my M.A. in History in '97, we lost my mother in '98, and I have been living in Savannah since then, taking care of my father.

Be warned: education is always my favorite soapbox. I think the public schools have gone to Hell, and I tend to wax violent on the subject of educationism and "certified inferiority". I converted from Anglicanism to Catholicism at Easter, 2000, and find it terribly sad to see so many Catholic schools mimicking their public school counterparts. Still, hope lives.

My favorite film should be obvious, but my favorite novel is Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird, although I have also read all of Jane Austen. My favorite poets are the Romantics, although I am not one, at least intellectually. My favorite artists are the 17th century Dutch, but I am something of a Medievalist and am fond of the works of Breugel. My favorite music, aside from the sublimity of religious requiems and monastic chant, is surprisingly modern: Sibelius' 5th, Shostakovich's 7th, Gorecki's 3rd.

Politically I am one of those "used to be a Democrat" guys. I was influenced by an older brother in the post-Vietnam era. But then, at about the same time that the FICA guy started tampering with my first paychecks, I began to think, and to read. Some of the major influences upon me were religious men like C.S. Lewis, T.S. Eliot, G.K. Chesterton. I think many religious people are conservative because, for one thing, God speaks to them in one way or another, and for another, a belief in the Absolute leads them to a belief in absolute values, unchangeable values, and to objectivity (whereas liberals are wholly subjective and solipsistic). My conservative conversion came along just about the time Reagan was shot. It suddenly made me like him, I suppose, and within a year or two everything had fallen into place. I am more conservative than is President Bush, but I am also a pragmatist and support him because I think he is a good and decent man who can get some good things done. I try not to be a cynic. But I also despise almost all Democrats and everything they stand for. They must be stopped . . . at almost any cost. I suppose I am not a true capitalist, though. While I am a loyal Southerner who loathes big government, I also distrust big corporations. I'm into people, simplicity, localism, and anything that helps foster individual initiative, although I am not a libertarian. George F. Will's Statecraft As Soulcraft was just the book for me, and I recommend it. Well, enough said. That's me. If you want to correspond, just to write me.