Mar 15, 2015 | Uncategorized
If you’ve been white lately, you have likely been confronted with the idea that to be a good person, you must cultivate a guilt complex over the privileged status your race enjoys.
It isn’t that you are doing, or even quite thinking, anything racist. Rather, your existential state of Living While White constitutes a form of racism in itself. Your understanding will serve as a tool … for something. But be careful about asking just what that something is, because that will mean you “just don’t get it.”
–John McWhorter, “The Privilege of Checking White Privilege”
Mar 13, 2015 | Uncategorized
In one way, Christian classical education is the new kid on the block. Classical education has been around for millennia, obviously since ancient Greece and Rome, and Christians through much of Western history embraced classical learning. But with the rise of progressive education in the early 20th Century, and it’s promoters like John Dewey, the classical model went dormant (Henry T. Edmondson III had written an excellent book on the baleful influence of Dewey on American education). By the 1980s almost everyone agreed that American education wasn’t doing well, even if they wouldn’t specifically blame the progressive model. (more…)
Mar 12, 2015 | Uncategorized
Thanks in no small part to [John] Dewey, much of what characterizes contemporary education is a revolt against various expressions of authority: a revolt against a canon of learning, a revolt against tradition, a revolt against religious values, a revolt against moral standards, a revolt against logic–even a revolt against grammar and spelling. In many classrooms, the concern is whether sufficient authority exists simply to guarantee physical safety and survival. Dewey’s revolt has carried American education to the place where he himself admitted he had arrived late in life: “I seem to be unstable, chameleon-like, yielding one after another to many diverse and even and imcomparable influences; struggling to assimilate something from each and yet striving to carry it forward.”
Henry T. Edmondson III, John Dewey & The Decline of American Education
Mar 9, 2015 | Uncategorized
Mary McCleary is Regent’s Professor of Art Emeritus at Stephen F. Austin State University, where she taught from 1975 to 2005. Born in Houston, Texas in 1951, she received her B.F.A., cum laude in printmaking/drawing at Texas Christian University and her M.F.A. in graphics from the University of Oklahoma. Since 1970 she has participated in over 250 one-person and group exhibits in museums and galleries in 24 states, Mexico, and Russia. These venues include the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., MOBIA in New York City, the Grey Gallery at NYU, the Boston Museum of Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Contemporary Art Museum in Houston, the San Antonio Museum of Art, and the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City. She is also a recipient of a Mid-America Arts Alliance/National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship. Her work has been regularly reviewed or featured in the Houston Post, Houston Chronicle, Austin American Statesman, Dallas Morning News, and other Texas newspapers, as well as in national publications: Art in America, Art News, Image: A Journal of the Arts and Religion, Art Papers, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Art Week, Artspace, Texas Homes, New American Paintings, and Contemporanea International Arts Magazine.McCleary’s work is in many public collections including those of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, the El Paso Museum of Art, the San Antonio Museum of Art and the Art Museum of Southeast Texas in Beaumont.
Mar 7, 2015 | Uncategorized
I became a Christian when I was 18, well before I was to get married and had to think about having children. When I did, like many conservative protestants, I uncritically accepted birth control and the family planning mentality; I saw having children as something of a choice for Christians, not unlike my secular neighbors. A few times over the years this mindset was challenged, but certainly not from within the evangelical community. Our seriously orthodox Catholic brothers and sisters would point out that life is a gift from God, and that God’s gifts must not be lightly rejected. Yet evangelicals continue to have their 2.2 kids like most Americans, and never question whether their embrace of the modern cultural norm is at all biblical.
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