When I served in law enforcement, I often testified in court that my identification of contraband was based on “my training and experience.” What I say below derives from my training and experience as a graduate student in English at a… Continue Reading
What should Christian Classical schools do in order to prepare students most effectively for higher education? At one level, the answers are obvious and have already been given many times. Classical schools often, for example, have staff… Continue Reading
Western liberal democracy has been the most successful political system the world has produced, but what began with Magna Carta and progressed to elections by all the adult electorate has also developed new features. In particular, the… Continue Reading
Calvin College In his collection of essays entitled What are People For? Wendell Berry envisions a responsible, contemplative living ethos that connects community, sustainability and place. When we work to understand what people are for we… Continue Reading
A very good teacher and administrator I know has a stack of four or five good books in perpetual company on the night stand. Each demands to be read now, but at the end of a long day of teaching, paper grading, and preparation for the next… Continue Reading
The three “absolutes,” according to classical thought, are the true, the good, and the beautiful. Postmodernists say “there are no absolutes,” insisting that truth, goodness, and beauty are all relative. Christians and cultural… Continue Reading
If the too obvious, so straight branches of Truth and Good are crushed or amputated and cannot reach the light – yet perhaps the whimsical, unpredictable, unexpected branches of Beauty will make their way through and soar up to that very… Continue Reading
Beauty in Music Genesis 2:7 “and the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and he became a living soul.” Rhythms, melodies, harmonies speak to us of immaterial things. The modern… Continue Reading
Ask anyone involved in classical education about the importance of the arts and you will likely meet enthusiasm of a sort usually reserved for pep rallies. But then ask the same person which direction Vermeer’s Geographer is facing… Continue Reading
In the early 1960s, Flannery O’Connor addressed a group of English teachers concerning the aims and methods of teaching fiction. She said that she (as a novelist) and the teachers “should be able to find ourselves enjoying a mutual… Continue Reading
There is a story going on around us. It began before time and reaches to infinity. And it is a story: a sequence of events, not random, but full of meaning. Man plays his part through action; his deliberate movements influence, change, and… Continue Reading
Perhaps the most helpful acknowledgment toward understanding the very real challenges that we face with technology is that our schools are governed and managed by Boomers II and Gen X who hire Gen X and Gen Y educators to teach Gen Z… Continue Reading
