Nov 14, 2018 | Theology
The pastor of the church we attend recently said these words, and because I’ve been slowly reading and writing through the gospels, I found them spot on. It’s amazing to me, but not surprising, that Jesus is the most misunderstood person in history. Amazing because when you read the gospels carefully, Jesus is nothing like the popular cultural conception of him; not even close. Not surprising because the real Jesus is threatening. This is a major apologetics point to imprint on our children: the Jesus of the gospels could not be a figment of human imagination. Sinful, self-centered people don’t make this stuff up.
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Nov 11, 2018 | Culture, Explanatory Power
Given this is ostensibly a blog about parenting, and that I soon have a book about parenting to be published, and we live in the 21st century, I can’t escape commenting on homosexuality. As you know it is ubiquitous in our culture, and if you have children you won’t be able to escape addressing it with them either. We’re confronted with it all the time. Just recently we were watching a new TV series called Manifest. It’s interesting because it has a Lost-like premise, and it’s always good when mystery is inserted into popular culture, but the writers just had to introduce homosexual characters into the plot. I turned it off. The same happened with the Amazon show Man in the High Castle, and off that went as well. Yes, I know, that’s narrow-minded and judgmental of me, but I serve a narrow-minded, judgmental Savior (just read the gospels carefully, and you’ll see lovey-dovey, affirm everyone Jesus is a figment of wishful thinking, and popular cultural imagination).
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Nov 4, 2018 | Parents and Family
Classical education as I’ve described it in previous posts is the antidote to secular progressive education. Too many Christians think that if they add religious words and concepts onto the progressive education model, that will make all the difference. It’s better than doing nothing, but it won’t address the fundamental challenge to Christian families in our rabidly secular age. We are, as I’ve argued, in a battle of worldviews that are in every way mutually exclusive. The basic assumptions about the nature of reality are what’s at stake, and who determines those for our children: the culture or us.
For Christians, and Americans in general, the assumptions and teachings of classical education are a necessary corrective to the postmodern, relativist influences that threaten to daily drown us. Just reading our Bibles and going to church will not protect us or our kids from the pernicious, evil influence (the idea of plausibility structures I discuss in the book) of these ideas. Most Christians, as shown in a recent survey, think much the same way as their secular fellow citizens. That is tragic in so many ways. Classical education could keep this from happening, but most Christians are educated in government schools, and it shows.
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Oct 28, 2018 | Parents and Family
In my first post on classical education I explored modern progressive education, and why it’s a disaster. In my second, I shared how I came to not only appreciate classical education, but have become an evangelist for it. Here I want to give a brief introduction to exactly what classical education is, and why it’s so important for Christians to embrace it.
As I said previously, classical education is rooted in history, specifically the history and ideas of the classical world, both Greek and Roman. This became infused with the Jewish and Christian worldview through the Middle Ages as Christian thinkers who took the ideas of the ancients, and wrestled with them through the lens of Christianity. It was in fact the Christian influence that systematized and humanized (as in, for example, man is made in God’s image and worthy of infinite value) classical thought. Part of that systematizing came in what’s called the Trivium, and that is the model of K-12 classical education. What is it? (more…)
Oct 20, 2018 | Parents and Family
In my previous post, Take 1, I didn’t relate that I was late getting on the classical education bandwagon. I’ve always been a fan of the liberal arts, the humanities and such, but the term “classical education” meant little to me even into my 50th year. I was so clueless that when my wife insisted that our youngest son was not going to our public junior high school, I thought she was being irrational. We survived a public school education, I told her, and turned out fine. Our older daughter and son did as well. And we couldn’t afford that Christian classical school she was so excited about anyway. What an idiot I was. When family stepped up to help us afford it, I resented it, that it might inconvenience me. It so happens that God’s providence (and mercy), and results, intervened to enlighten me.
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