Feb 23, 2019 | Gratitude, Parents and Family
We had the incredible privilege last weekend of enduring the traumatic experience of hosting our daughter’s wedding. Until one actually does such a thing, you have no idea the insanity of such an undertaking, but the blessings and memories among the all the craziness are priceless. You get to spend time with family and friends you rarely see, or haven’t seen for a very long time, and giving your only daughter away to an incredible young man before them is worthy of all the tears. Not to mention that everyone together gets to witness one of the most profound mysteries of human existence: the marriage of one man and one women “till death us do part.” (more…)
Feb 4, 2019 | Parents and Family
I grew up as I think of it as a typical Catholic of the 60s and 70s. We attended Mass every Sunday, I went to Catechism, and did my first Communion and Confirmation. Otherwise, our faith was not particularly relevant to the rest of our lives. But my mother did pray with me when I was a child, and I very well remember the “Now I lay me down to sleep” prayer. In 2019 America this might be considered child abuse, so completely has our culture abandoned its Christian roots. Here is the first part of the prayer, and the part I remember praying:
Now I lay me down to sleep.
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake,
I pray to God my soul to take.
If I should live for other days,
I pray the Lord to guide my ways.
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Jan 12, 2019 | Parents and Family
All the secular left-wing isms of our day (feminism, progressivism, liberalism, cultural Marxism, secularism, etc.) have culminated in a phrase so oxymoronic it must have been invented by Satan himself: “toxic masculinity.” To be masculine in the fevered, relativistic imagination of the secularist is poison. To our cultural elites this is simply axiomatic, so obvious only irrational religious people deny it. But true masculinity is never toxic, and in fact necessary for true human flourishing. (The popularity of Jordan Peterson with young males is one encouraging signs that the lies of the isms are possibly exhausting themselves.)
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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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