Send us Fan Mail Sleepy Hollow isn’t just a scary story, it’s a portrait of how a place can shape the mind. I’m Jesse Cope, and for a couple episodes I’m taking a break from our normal approach to do an October reading of Washington Irving’s classic American ghost story, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Along the way, we touch on why Irving matters to American history and heritage, and I also point you toward the Arthur Rackham illustrations if you love old book art as much as I do. We start in ...
1 Oct 2026
Firsthand Portraits Of Christopher Columbus
Send us Fan Mail Columbus gets talked about like everyone already knows the whole story, but most of what we hear is filtered through modern politics rather than firsthand history. We take a different approach and read descriptions of Christopher Columbus from people who actually knew him, including his son Ferdinand Columbus and the priest Bartolome de las Casas. The goal is not to pretend Columbus was perfect, but to replace lazy certainty with evidence, context, and a little humility. Alo...
17 Sept 2026
The Bible As A School Book
Send us Fan Mail A law can mandate lessons about communism’s atrocities, but it can’t answer a deeper question: what kind of people are our schools forming when Scripture is absent? We start with Deuteronomy’s charge to place God’s words in daily life and teach them to children, then trace how that ancient instruction collides with a modern public education system that often treats moral and spiritual formation as off-limits. From there, we read Benjamin Rush’s 1798 letter defending the Bibl...
3 Sept 2026
Why Benjamin Rush Wanted The Bible Taught In Classrooms
Send us Fan Mail Florida passed a law requiring schools to teach the history and atrocities of communism and that sparks a bigger question we can’t dodge: who decides what “truth” looks like in a classroom, and what happens when an education system quietly removes the Bible from the center of a nation’s story? We start with Scripture, reading Deuteronomy’s command to fix God’s words in our hearts and teach them to our children in everyday life. Then we shift to the modern curriculum fight, a...
20 Aug 2026
Prayer That Held The Constitution Together
Send us Fan Mail Benjamin Franklin didn’t just debate at the Constitutional Convention, he called the room to its knees. When weeks of argument produced more heat than progress, Franklin warned that human wisdom was failing and asked why the delegates had not “humbly” sought help from the “Father of Lights.” That single motion for daily prayer reframes how we think about the founding of the Constitution and what the leaders in that room believed they needed most. We walk through Frankl...
6 Aug 2026
Are You Building A Home Or Tearing It Down
Send us Fan Mail If you’ve ever felt like modern marriage advice is built to make you feel good instead of helping you get better, we’re going back to a standard that doesn’t bend. We start with 2 Timothy’s warning about “itching ears,” then ask a hard question: are we letting culture, social media, and friends shape our view of marriage more than Scripture does? We connect the dots from marriage to family values to national strength, including Ronald Reagan’s reminders that the family teach...
23 Jul 2026
Why A Nation Rises Or Falls With Marriage
Send us Fan Mail A single image can cut through your excuses. I start with a photo tied to the Holodomor, the Stalin-era famine that shows what happens when evil ideologies like communism are tolerated and truth is traded for comfort. It’s a sobering reminder that there are things worse than war and death, and it forces a personal question: if others endured horrors beyond imagining, what am I doing with the blessings God has given me? From there, I pivot to the backbone of a healthy country...
9 Jul 2026
Christian Roots Of American Education
Send us Fan Mail America didn’t stumble into Christian language in education by accident. When you read the founding purposes of early colleges and universities, you find direct, unapologetic goals: train ministers, form character, teach “good letters and manners,” and spread the gospel of Jesus Christ. I walk through several non Ivy League schools that rarely come up in today’s debates, including the College of William and Mary, Rutgers (originally Queen’s College), Washington and Lee’s earl...
25 Jun 2026
How Ivy League Schools Began With Christ At The Center
Send us Fan Mail Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Penn, Brown, Dartmouth. These names get treated like symbols of modern prestige, but their original mission statements read like something else entirely: Christian formation, biblical truth, and the training of ministers and leaders. We dig into founding mottos, seals, and purpose statements to show how early American higher education openly tied learning to God and Jesus Christ, and why that’s a major piece of America’s Christian heritage ...
11 Jun 2026
Harvard’s 1642 Rules And The Bible-First Model Of American Schooling
Send us Fan Mail “Values neutral” education sounds fair, modern, and safe, but we think it’s a comforting myth. We take a hard look at early American education and argue that every classroom, policy, and lesson plan points students toward a moral foundation, whether that foundation is Christ or something else. If you’ve felt like schools can’t even agree on what truth is anymore, this conversation gives you a historical lens for why that drift happens. We walk through Harvard’s Rules and Pre...
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