tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34317485839881679652024-02-19T16:40:42.261-08:00Didaktikon: A Blog on Classical Lutheran EducationEducation Resources from the Wyoming District (LCMS) Education Chairman | διδακτικόν: able to teach (1Tim 3:2; 2Tim 2:24)
revpaulcainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16771205236443124884noreply@blogger.comBlogger43125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3431748583988167965.post-73764296759988004612016-02-11T14:14:00.001-08:002016-02-11T14:14:17.862-08:00Classical Teaching: Ten Daily Exercises at the Heart of 16th Century P...<a href="http://www.classicalteaching.com/2016/02/ten-daily-exercises-at-heart-of-16th.html?spref=bl">Classical Teaching: Ten Daily Exercises at the Heart of 16th Century P...</a>:<br /><br />
Ten Daily Exercises at the Heart of 16th Century Protestant Classical Schools Johann Sturm was a highly influential German educat...revpaulcainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16771205236443124884noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3431748583988167965.post-58913341458824241322016-02-06T11:18:00.001-08:002016-02-06T11:18:42.520-08:004 leadership lessons from Rosa Young on leaving a lasting impact<div class=WordSection1><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><table class=MsoNormalTable border=0 cellspacing=3 cellpadding=0><tr><td style='padding:.75pt .75pt .75pt .75pt'><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif'><img width=275 height=200 id="_x0000_i1025" src="http://blogs.lcms.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/rosa-showings-RPT.jpg" alt=rosa-showings-RPT><o:p></o:p></span></p><div><p><span style='font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif'>During Black History Month, we celebrate the life and work of pivotal leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks. However, few may know that before Rosa Parks, there was Rosa Young.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p><span style='font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif'>I recently attended a showing of <em><span style='font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif'>The First Rosa: Teacher, Confessor, Church Planter</span></em>. Produced by LCMS Communications in conjunction with LCMS Black Ministry, this 42-minute documentary gives a historical look into the life and work of Rosa Young, a strong, compassionate, determined leader who loved the Lord and valued His children.<span style='color:#1F497D'><o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif;color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p><span style='font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif'><img width=300 height=133 id="_x0000_i1026" src="http://blogs.lcms.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/rosa-showings-IN-300x133.jpg" alt=rosa-showings-IN><o:p></o:p></span></p><p><span style='font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif'>The film depicts Young's life of service to the glory of God and her ability to enable others to have the same. Among her many accomplishments, Young taught more than 2,000 students quality, Christian education during a time when education for children of sharecroppers in the South was limited. Many of these students went on to enter professional church work as pastors and teachers because of Young's influence. <a href="https://www.lcms.org/thefirstrosa">Read more about her life and accomplishments here.</a><o:p></o:p></span></p><p><span style='font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif'>Young is a leader of our church body whom I deeply admire. As I watched <em><span style='font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif'>The First Rosa</span></em> and read about her story, four key leadership principles on leaving a lasting impact stand out to me.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p><span style='font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif'>Here's what I've learned from Rosa Young:<o:p></o:p></span></p><p><strong><span style='font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif'>1. You don't have to be a pastor to make a lasting impact in the church</span></strong><span style='font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif'>. In fact, you don't even have to be born and raised a Lutheran! Young was born the daughter of a Methodist minister and wasn't connected to the LCMS until Booker T. Washington advised her to write the LCMS Mission Board when she was in need of financial assistance because the cotton boll weevil had brought economic hardship among the families of her students. Young wrote the board, and a partnership was born.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p><span style='font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif'>Furthermore, Young was an African American woman in an economically poor area of the South during the early 1900s. The odds were not exactly in her favor to create an educational powerhouse for Lutheran education. Yet, that is exactly what she did. I admire Rosa's boldness and courage to faithfully pursue the good work God had prepared in advance for her to do despite the hard realities she faced.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p><strong><span style='font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif'>2. Think and live outside the box. Sometimes help and new partnerships come from unexpected places. </span></strong><span style='font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif'>I wonder what Young thought as she wrote the LCMS Mission Board for financial assistance. She had no ties to the LCMS or anything to give her sway. How easy would it have been for the Mission Board to blow off her letter, a letter from a non-LCMS woman down in Alabama requesting financial assistance? And yet the Mission Board took her request seriously, went down to meet Young and toured her school. They saw the work taking place and the vision Young had. As a result, they agreed to fund the school, pay Young's salary and allow her to expand her vision by opening up additional schools. All while, they took the time to train Rosa and teach her the Lutheran faith.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p><span style='font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif'>This is a challenge and encouragement to me to seriously consider the requests of people in need and of people with whom I have no connection. It also makes me evaluate my current network of colleagues and consider what new partnerships may be beyond my current reach just waiting to be formed.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p><strong><span style='font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif'>3. Value Christian education.</span></strong><span style='font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif'> Young recognized the value of Christian education. Her mission from day one was to provide quality Christian education to those for whom none was available. Something I celebrate among our church body is its ongoing investment in Lutheran education. As a product of a Lutheran grade school and university, I have seen firsthand the benefits of attending Lutheran institutions and its impact on my life as a follower of Christ.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p><span style='font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif'>I wonder where today there are youth with limited access to quality Christian education. How can we individually and collectively help make Lutheran education a viable option for these students? How can we continue to value and invest in our existing Lutheran grade schools, high schools, universities and seminaries?<o:p></o:p></span></p><p><strong><span style='font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif'>4. Value young people. </span></strong><span style='font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif'>Young recognized the value of young people. The film included interviews with some of her students. Now fully grown and graying themselves, many of them shared a similar story of Young seeing something inside of them they hadn't yet recognized in themselves. She inspired boys and girls almost willing them to continue their schooling and become pastors and teachers and leaders in the church.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p><span style='font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif'>We can learn from Young's life that the way to leave a lasting legacy is by investing in the next generation. As parents, teachers, pastors, youth workers, coaches, etc., we have the opportunity to greatly influence the next generation of youth inspiring them to grow in becoming the men and women God has created them to be. We have the opportunity to greatly influence the next generation of youth inspiring them to pursue careers in professional church work. We have the opportunity to invest in the next Rosa Youngs.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p><span style='font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif'>For more information on Rosa Young and the film, <em><span style='font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif'>The First Rosa</span></em>, visit <a href="https://www.lcms.org/thefirstrosa">https://www.lcms.org/thefirstrosa</a>. <em><span style='font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif'> </span></em><o:p></o:p></span></p></div><p class=MsoNormal><span class=topcat><span style='font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif'>Leader Blog</span></span><span style='font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif'><o:p></o:p></span></p><div><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif'>Tags: <a href="http://blogs.lcms.org/tag/black-ministry">Black Ministry</a>, <a href="http://blogs.lcms.org/tag/concordia-university-system">concordia university system</a>, <a href="http://blogs.lcms.org/tag/leadership">leadership</a>, <a href="http://blogs.lcms.org/tag/rosa-young">rosa young</a>, <a href="http://blogs.lcms.org/tag/school-ministry">School Ministry</a>, <a href="http://blogs.lcms.org/tag/the-first-rosa">the first rosa</a>, <a href="http://blogs.lcms.org/tag/youth-ministry">Youth Ministry</a><o:p></o:p></span></p></div><div><ul type=disc><li class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto;mso-list:l0 level1 lfo1'><span style='font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif'><a href="http://blogs.lcms.org/category/leader-blog">Leader Blog</a><o:p></o:p></span></li><li class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto;mso-list:l0 level1 lfo1'><span style='font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif'><a href="http://blogs.lcms.org/category/leader-blog/lutheran-education-leader-blog">Lutheran Education</a><o:p></o:p></span></li><li class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto;mso-list:l0 level1 lfo1'><span style='font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif'><a href="http://blogs.lcms.org/category/leader-blog/youth-and-families-leader-blog">Youth and Families</a><o:p></o:p></span></li></ul></div></td></tr></table><p><span style='font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif'><br><a href="http://blogs.lcms.org/2016/4-leadership-lessons-from-rosa-young-on-leaving-a-lasting-impact">View article...</a><o:p></o:p></span></p></div>revpaulcainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16771205236443124884noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3431748583988167965.post-87024014767452322782016-01-19T12:26:00.004-08:002016-01-19T12:26:33.828-08:00Themes and Dates for National Lutheran Schools Week 2016-2022<br />NLSW 2016 – Life Together (January 24-30, 2016) <br /><br /> <br /><br />NLSW 2017 – On This Rock (January 22-28, 2017) <br /><br />NLSW 2018 – It’s Still All About Jesus! (January 21-27, 2018) <br /><br /> <br /><br />NLSW 2019 – LCMS National Youth Gathering Theme TBD (January 27 – February 2, 2019) <br /><br /> <br /><br />NLSW 2020 – Theme TBD (January 26 – February 1, 2020) <br /><br />NLSW 2021 – Theme TBD (January 24-30, 2021) <br /><br /> <br /><br />NLSW 2022 – LCMS National Youth Gathering Theme TBD (January 23-29, 2022) <br />revpaulcainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16771205236443124884noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3431748583988167965.post-16334441142285117112015-09-08T10:58:00.002-07:002015-09-08T17:22:33.530-07:00Transition Time: from CCLEBLOG to DIDAKTIKON<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: small;">Howdy from Wyoming.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">Since the <a href="http://www.ccle.org/" target="_blank">Consortium for Classical Lutheran Education</a> is blessed with a blog built into the new website, this blog site will be repurposed and retitled.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">President John Hill of the Wyoming District recently appointed me to be the new District Education Executive. This will be our new home online.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">You may also visit us at <a href="http://wylcms.org/edu.html">http://wylcms.org/edu.html.</a> </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">Here is our new theme:</span><br />
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<span class="greek3" style="font-size: small;"><b>DIDAKTIKON</b></span></div>
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<span class="greek3" style="font-size: small;"><b>διδακτικόν</b>: </span><span class="itali" style="font-size: small;">able to teach</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>1 Timothy 3:2;</b><b> 2 Timothy 2:24</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"> Education Resources from the Wyoming District (LCMS) Education Chairman</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b><span style="font-family: times new roman,times;">The Education (schools) Chairman shall:</span></b></span></div>
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<li><span style="font-size: small;"><b>work closely with the Teachers/Educators Conference <br />to develop programs and professional growth opportunities for the workers;</b></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><b>study and understand issues, programs, expansion efforts <br />related to schools in our district and assist them;</b></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><b>develop knowledge and resources from Synod <br />and make the same available to schools <br />or congregations wishing to start schools within our district.</b></span></li>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b><span style="font-family: times new roman,times;">Wyoming District Bylaw 3.401e</span></b></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1XjuffNy7Xb6nEQdefhtZuG9HTQ5fVINdPE7nHBxZbF-aSM3JrUEMPvSjN-0qJlGyWbizlutljY3xbd28e_GFH6oxdRDLG6Y_TM1lIG_9KQlB7x5zUKvbL2rJ5llKo_LhM5Zy4Nj_09fn/s1600/LBR.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="94" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1XjuffNy7Xb6nEQdefhtZuG9HTQ5fVINdPE7nHBxZbF-aSM3JrUEMPvSjN-0qJlGyWbizlutljY3xbd28e_GFH6oxdRDLG6Y_TM1lIG_9KQlB7x5zUKvbL2rJ5llKo_LhM5Zy4Nj_09fn/s320/LBR.png" width="320" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: times new roman,times; font-size: small;">You will also be able to read more education-related book reviews at our sister site, <a href="http://lhplbr.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Lutheran Book Review</a>.</span><span style="font-size: small;"><b><span style="font-family: times new roman,times;"> </span></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b><span style="font-family: times new roman,times;">Rev. Paul J Cain</span></b></span></div>
revpaulcainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16771205236443124884noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3431748583988167965.post-54163838993410853372014-02-15T18:12:00.001-08:002014-02-15T18:12:17.540-08:00FW: Great Stuff — The Good News About Classical Lutheran Education<div class=WordSection1><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'>Reposted by Friends…<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><div><div style='border:none;border-top:solid #B5C4DF 1.0pt;padding:3.0pt 0in 0in 0in'><p class=MsoNormal><b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif"'>Feed:</span></b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif"'> Steadfast Lutherans<br><b>Posted on:</b> Saturday, February 15, 2014 7:08 AM<br><b>Author:</b> Norm Fisher<br><b>Subject:</b> Great Stuff — The Good News About Classical Lutheran Education<o:p></o:p></span></p></div></div><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><table class=MsoNormalTable border=0 cellspacing=3 cellpadding=0><tr><td style='padding:.75pt .75pt .75pt .75pt'><p><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Great article by Erika E. Mildred found over on <a href="http://www.ccle.org/the-good-news-about-classical-lutheran-education/" target="_blank">CCLE.org's website</a>:<o:p></o:p></span></p><p><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'> <o:p></o:p></span></p><p><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><img border=0 width=300 height=510 id="_x0000_i1025" src="http://steadfastlutherans.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Mildred-cover.jpg" alt=Mildred-cover>Slowly but surely, for the past few decades, the discussion of "Classical" education has re-entered formal and informal conversation among Christian educators and parents. Lutherans as well have joined in this debate, and those in favor of implementing what Dorothy Sayers called the "lost tools of learning" have founded Classical Lutheran schools, have organized Classical Lutheran education conferences, and have chosen to homeschool their Lutheran children using Classical curricula and methodology. However, even with this growing presence, misconceptions abound, especially for those Lutherans whose exposure to Classical Lutheran education has been minimal.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Below are twelve truths about Classical Lutheran education today and what is actually taking place in our Classical Lutheran classrooms and homes all across the country.<o:p></o:p></span></p><ol start=1 type=1><li class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto;mso-list:l8 level1 lfo1'><b><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Classical Lutheran education is for all students, regardless of ability.</span></b><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></li></ol><p><i><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>As the subtitle of Cheryl Swope's new book Simply Classical articulates, Classical Lutheran education is truly a "beautiful education for any child." Acquiring knowledge through the application of the Trivium (Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric) for every subject allows students of all abilities to engage in classical education. The very stages of the Trivium build confidence and increase a student's drive to dive more deeply into the subject matter. Classical Lutheran education tells children, "You can do this!" and then gives them the very tools they need to succeed. A Classical Lutheran education can help any child reach his or her full potential, not merely an artificial external standard of being "on grade level." Ironically, it was the development of the progressive model of education in the late 1890's and early 1900's in the United States that removed a Classical model of education from the lives of some students, deeming them to be better suited for trade-specific training. The best educational track became reserved for the country's best and most promising, while the remaining students were trained in skills necessary to develop an able workforce in the boom of the American Industrial Revolution. However, this tracking approach both subtly and overtly tells students that they are not all capable and deserving of a rich, well-rounded education. Classical Lutheran education says all children deserve to learn what is good, true, and beautiful, to learn each subject in a logical and orderly way using the tools of the Trivium and Quadrivium, and to develop all of their God-given abilities and talents for His glory.</span></i><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></p><ol start=2 type=1><li class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto;mso-list:l11 level1 lfo2'><b><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Classical Lutheran education enables academic prowess and mastery by having students learn Latin, memorize facts and figures, and drill all subjects to mastery, but it also equally addresses the students' heart and soul.</span></b><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></li></ol><p><i><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>While it is true that Classical Lutheran education develops a student's intellect and provides a student with all the "skills" needed for higher-level learning and the workforce, this is not the primary goal or purpose of such an education. As students develop beyond the grammar and logic stages to the rhetoric stage, the facts, figures, memorizing, and conjugating lay the groundwork for the deepest understanding of life's most essential questions from a Lutheran worldview: Who am I? How did I get here? Where am I going? How will I get there? Why is life worth living and worth living well? In Classical Lutheran education, we do not drill for its own sake nor do we drill to produce "super students"; rather, we lay the foundation of knowledge within students in order to build upon this foundation. We seek to help them learn, discover, and expound upon what it means to be human, to be Christian, to be Lutheran, to be a saved child of God, to be alive and here on this earth to serve God's purposes to those around us. As students grow from childhood into adulthood, those existential questions arise, and our students are prepared to give and defend their answers and to walk through this post-modern, relativistic world confidently and clinging to the hope we have through the redemptive work of Jesus Christ.</span></i><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></p><ol start=3 type=1><li class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto;mso-list:l9 level1 lfo3'><b><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Many students LOVE drill work and memorization!</span></b><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></li></ol><p><i><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Our younger students (through 3rd or 4th grade) are equipped with minds that are eager to memorize. God designed the growing human brain to thrive on grammar-level work in the early years of life. This is why children of 1st-generation Americans will often learn English as well as their parents' native tongue more quickly than their parents and why many schools are now including foreign language in the elementary years. And, older students do not mind memorization and drill work if they are provided with sound reasons why or how the memorized information will help them or is useful. After all, these students are entering the Dialectic/Logic stage of learning, and their demand that the drills be for of some good use is valid. Classical Lutheran teachers have mastered ways to make drill work and memorization effective; chanting, clapping, actions/movement, visualization techniques, and the like all help the students achieve grammatical mastery of subjects, allowing them to transition easily into higher-level thinking activities as they develop. If teenagers and adults at a basketball game can be emotionally moved by the repetitive cheer of "You say, 'Win!' I say, 'Tonight!' Win…tonight!" then certainly our students can enjoy the drills that will propel them into academic excellence and a well-trained mind.</span></i><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></p><ol start=4 type=1><li class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto;mso-list:l5 level1 lfo4'><b><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>The Classical Lutheran classroom can be characterized by stimulating lecture with enthusiastic repetition, passionate discussion between teacher and students, and creative applications.</span></b><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></li></ol><p><i><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Teacher-led instruction (sometimes labeled "lecture" with an assumed negative connotation) is at the heart of imparting knowledge in a Classical Lutheran classroom. Classical Lutheran educators and homeschoolers believe that the teacher is the expert. Like a football coach, a piano teacher, or a pastor giving a Sunday sermon, we expect our teachers to impart knowledge to our students. To characterize this activity as tedious, sterile, or monotonous is to place these adjectival descriptions upon the teacher himself or herself. One only needs to see classrooms at our Classical Lutheran schools or homeschools to know this is not the case. We teach with chants; we teach with song; we teach with passion and excitement. Moreover, what we teach is important. We don't just have children memorize for its own sake (although this activity in and of itself is a worthy endeavor for cognitive development). We as Classical Lutheran educators know that having God's Word and faithful interpretations of that Word "imprinted on their heart," having Latin vocabulary at their disposal, having multiplication tables and unit conversions available without a calculator, and having dates and major events throughout Western Civilization traveling with them as they experience life all allow our students to fully participate in the Great Conversation, to discover what is true, good, and beautiful in God's orderly creation, and to defend their faith.</span></i><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></p><ol start=5 type=1><li class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto;mso-list:l0 level1 lfo5'><b><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Latin is a "dead" language, but this is a good thing!</span></b><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></li></ol><p><i><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>From a purely definitional sense, this statement is not a misnomer. Latin is a "dead" language, simply meaning it is a language that is no longer spoken in a region of the world today as a modern language. This is one of the chief reasons that Latin should be taught to all our students at a very young age. A dead language is fixed. It is permanent. It does not change due to the usage of modern speakers. This consistency makes it a very easy language for students to study and to understand. (Just think of all the "exceptions" English contains in spelling, usage, punctuation, grammar, and the like, and you can quickly conclude that a language that does not change can be a welcome relief to students trying to learn it.) In addition, studying the vocabulary and the grammar of Latin aids students immensely in learning English synonyms, antonyms, prefix and suffix meanings, vocabulary, and grammatical structure and syntax. It is also a language of the early Church, which allows Classical Lutheran schools and homeschools to teach the Faith to our children during language lessons. Indeed, as Cheryl Lowe says, "Latin is not dead; it is immortal!"<o:p></o:p></span></i></p><ol start=6 type=1><li class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto;mso-list:l10 level1 lfo6'><b><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Classical, Lutheran educators are joyful servants of our Lord.</span></b><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></li></ol><p><i><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Like non-Classical, Lutheran counterparts, Classical Lutheran educators teach in our schools and at home because they love the children whom they serve. Classical Lutheran schools and homeschools strive to instill into our children a love of learning and a heart to see what is good, true, and beautiful in the world God created. That joy, passion, and love for learning and for education pours out of our Classical Lutheran teachers and homeschool parents on a daily basis.</span></i><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></p><ol start=7 type=1><li class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto;mso-list:l7 level1 lfo7'><b><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Cooperative learning, self-guided learning, and inductive learning methods are not superior to the teacher-centered instruction found in Classical Lutheran education.</span></b><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></li></ol><p><i><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Supporters of Classical education believe that students are best served when they can learn from the wisdom of those more knowledgeable and experienced than they. The Classical Lutheran educator is the expert in the subject matter itself, in the understanding of scope and sequence regarding the material and what precedes and follows it, and in the assessment of knowledge that is gained and skills that are mastered in any subject area. To put these responsibilities upon the students themselves inappropriately places a burden upon them. It can cause increasing disdain for the subject matter, place additional stress upon students (who are themselves still understanding the material) to disseminate their own knowledge to peers, and cause added conflict and tension between students as they compare themselves to each other rather than keeping their focus on doing their best with all that God has given them. The students' job at school is to learn, to be a good "disciple." The teacher's job is to teach.</span></i><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></p><ol start=8 type=1><li class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto;mso-list:l6 level1 lfo8'><b><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Many students LOVE academics and the discipline of learning.</span></b><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></li></ol><p><i><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>The "great conversation" that occurs in our Classical Lutheran schools and homeschools is interesting, valuable, and important in its own right. Young people enjoy being successful, mastering material, and achieving goals. This is not to say that Classical Lutheran educators do not make education "come to life" for our students. Neither, however, do we apologize for the rigor and discipline that is required of our students. Moreover, we have seen students thrive within these rigorous activities, and when they find success, the price they paid makes their academic victories that much sweeter. </span></i><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></p><ol start=9 type=1><li class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto;mso-list:l12 level1 lfo9'><b><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Classical Lutheran education is a growing, vibrant movement in Lutheran schools and homeschools in America.</span></b><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></li></ol><p><i><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Classical education is nothing new. It has been revitalized and re-introduced into American Christian education. In the past several decades, Lutherans have promoted Classical education by establishing Classical Lutheran schools, providing training for educators through conferences and certification programs, and developing resources to share the vision of Classical education to other Lutherans and Christians in post-modern America. The Consortium for Classical and Lutheran Educators (CCLE) was founded in 2005 and offers a summer conference each year to equip pastors, principals, teachers, and homeschool families. Currently there are 25 Classical Lutheran schools affiliated with CCLE across the country. Each year, more Lutheran schools inquire about Classical education and the possibility of retrofitting their school to a Classical curriculum. Currently, 171 Lutheran homeschool families across the country participate in the CCLE Email Discussion Group.</span></i><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></p><ol start=10 type=1><li class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto;mso-list:l1 level1 lfo10'><b><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Mathematics, the sciences, and the arts are also a vibrant part of Classical curricula. </span></b><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></li></ol><p><i><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>The Seven Liberal Arts of Western Culture can be found within the Trivium (Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric) and the Quadrivium (Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, and Astronomy). While the Trivium deals with the study and art of verbal language, the Quadrivium applies study to the theory and language of numbers: numbers in space, numbers in time, and numbers in space and time (to paraphrase Boethius). The Quadrivium plays an important role in our Classical Lutheran schools and homeschools as well, helping children think linearly, analytically, and creatively.</span></i><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></p><ol start=11 type=1><li class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto;mso-list:l2 level1 lfo11'><b><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>The Classical Lutheran educational movement is here to stay.</span></b><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></li></ol><p><i><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Classical education is the education of Socrates, Aristotle, St. Augustine, Luther, Galileo, our country's founding fathers, and many other great minds throughout the history of Western Civilization. It is a way of teaching that has been tested to determine its ultimate value to the individual and to society. </span></i><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></p><ol start=12 type=1><li class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto;mso-list:l4 level1 lfo12'><b><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Classical Lutheran education can be adopted and implemented in established Lutheran schools.</span></b><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></li></ol><p><i><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>With the help of established Classical Lutheran schools, the CCLE, and Lutheran homeschool families, any Lutheran school can make the transition into a Classical curriculum and methodology. It will take work on the part of the pastor, principal, teachers, parents, and students, but the results from this change in educational philosophy and pedagogy will far outweigh the labors to transition the school into a Classical one. We believe this is the future of Lutheran education in America! The major pitfalls facing all of our American schools (students' failing to meet minimum standards, the minimization of the fine arts, student apathy, teaching of assertions such as evolution, and the removal of God from our schools and communities) can all be addressed with Classical Lutheran education. </span></i><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></p><p><i><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'> Whether you are a principal of a Lutheran grade school, a pastor of a Lutheran church, a Lutheran teacher, or an interested parent, we encourage you to join us in the "great conversation." Here are some ways to get started:</span></i><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></p><ul type=disc><li class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto;mso-list:l3 level1 lfo13'><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Visit <a href="http://www.ccle.org/" target="_blank"><i>ccle.org</i></a><i>. Explore our posts. Listen to recent webcasts. Check out our FAQ. Visit webpages of our Classical Lutheran schools. Join the conversation of our Homeschool group.</i> <o:p></o:p></span></li><li class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto;mso-list:l3 level1 lfo13'><i><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Attend CCLE summer conferences annually. (Check </span></i><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><a href="http://www.ccle.org/" target="_blank"><i>ccle.org</i></a><i> for our next conference.) </i><o:p></o:p></span></li><li class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto;mso-list:l3 level1 lfo13'><i><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Read, read, read! </span></i><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'> <o:p></o:p></span></li><ul type=circle><li class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto;mso-list:l3 level2 lfo13'><i><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>A Handbook on Classical Lutheran Education</span></i><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'> (available at <a href="http://www.ccle.org/" target="_blank">www.ccle.org</a>)<o:p></o:p></span></li><li class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto;mso-list:l3 level2 lfo13'><i><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>The Classical Lutheran Education Journal</span></i><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'> (formerly <i>The Classical Education Quarterly</i>) (available at <a href="http://www.ccle.org/" target="_blank">www.ccle.org</a>)<o:p></o:p></span></li><li class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto;mso-list:l3 level2 lfo13'><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>The CCLE Resource Guide (available at <a href="http://www.ccle.org/" target="_blank">www.ccle.org</a>)<o:p></o:p></span></li><li class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto;mso-list:l3 level2 lfo13'><i><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Classical Education: The Movement Sweeping America (Studies in Philanthropy)</span></i><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'> by Gene Edward Veith, Jr. and Andrew Kern<o:p></o:p></span></li><li class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto;mso-list:l3 level2 lfo13'><i><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Simply Classical: A Beautiful Education for Any Child</span></i><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'> by Cheryl Swope<o:p></o:p></span></li><li class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto;mso-list:l3 level2 lfo13'><i><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Wisdom and Eloquence: A Christian Paradigm for Classical Learning</span></i><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'> by Robert Littlejohn and Charles T. Evans<o:p></o:p></span></li><li class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto;mso-list:l3 level2 lfo13'><i><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>The Lost Tools of Learning</span></i><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'> by Dorothy Sayers<o:p></o:p></span></li><li class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto;mso-list:l3 level2 lfo13'><i><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Lutheran Education: From Wittenberg to the Future</span></i><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'> by Dr. Thomas Korcok<o:p></o:p></span></li></ul><li class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto;mso-list:l3 level1 lfo13'><i><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Visit a Classical Lutheran school. Be prepared to be amazed!</span></i><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></li><li class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto;mso-list:l3 level1 lfo13'><i><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Contact CCLE for more information: </span></i><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><a href="mailto:revpaulcain@gmail.com" target="_blank" title="webmaster@ccle.org">webmaster@ccle.org</a>.<o:p></o:p></span></li></ul></td></tr></table><p><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><br><a href="http://steadfastlutherans.org/?p=35401">View article...</a><o:p></o:p></span></p></div>revpaulcainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16771205236443124884noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3431748583988167965.post-34159534714969211672013-11-14T13:29:00.001-08:002013-11-14T13:29:43.554-08:00FW: "Why Classical Schools Just Might Save America"<div class=WordSection1><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'>Consider…<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><div><div style='border:none;border-top:solid #B5C4DF 1.0pt;padding:3.0pt 0in 0in 0in'><p class=MsoNormal><b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif"'>Feed:</span></b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif"'> Blog<br><b>Posted on:</b> Thursday, November 14, 2013 9:51 AM<br><b>Author:</b> brianp<br><b>Subject:</b> "Why Classical Schools Just Might Save America"<o:p></o:p></span></p></div></div><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><table class=MsoNormalTable border=0 cellspacing=3 cellpadding=0><tr><td style='padding:.75pt .75pt .75pt .75pt'><div><div><div><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><a href="/blog/why-classical-schools-just-might-save-america"><span style='text-decoration:none'><img border=0 width=290 height=115 id="_x0000_i1025" src="http://www.circeinstitute.org/sites/default/files/styles/blog_medium/public/field/image/blog_post/sunset.jpg?itok=I2aFBmeh"></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></p></div></div></div><div><div><div><p><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Owen Strachan recently made some interesting observations about the relationship between classical education and freedom. And, while the original post seems to be experiencing some technical difficulties, Dr. Gene Edward Veith has reposted it for us on his own blog, <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/geneveith/2013/11/why-classical-schools-just-might-save-america/"><em><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Cranach</span></em></a>. Thanks to you both, gentlemen!<o:p></o:p></span></p><p><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>By Owen Strachan, originally in <em><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><a href="http://spectator.org/archives/2013/11/05/why-classical-schools-just-mig">The American Spectator</a>:</span></em><o:p></o:p></span></p></div></div></div><div><div><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Category: <o:p></o:p></span></p></div><div><div><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><a href="/taxonomy/term/5">Blog Posts</a><o:p></o:p></span></p></div></div></div></td></tr></table><p><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><br><a href="http://www.circeinstitute.org/blog/why-classical-schools-just-might-save-america">View article...</a><o:p></o:p></span></p></div>revpaulcainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16771205236443124884noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3431748583988167965.post-33627585251301569912013-09-05T08:13:00.001-07:002013-09-05T08:13:53.135-07:00FW: Classical Christian Education and Public Witness<div class=WordSection1><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'>Consider…<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><div><div style='border:none;border-top:solid #B5C4DF 1.0pt;padding:3.0pt 0in 0in 0in'><p class=MsoNormal><b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif"'>Feed:</span></b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif"'> The Imaginative Conservative<br><b>Posted on:</b> Wednesday, September 04, 2013 11:06 PM<br><b>Author:</b> Stephen Turley<br><b>Subject:</b> Classical Christian Education and Public Witness<o:p></o:p></span></p></div></div><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><table class=MsoNormalTable border=0 cellspacing=3 cellpadding=0><tr><td style='padding:.75pt .75pt .75pt .75pt'><div><div id="attachment_26781"><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><a href="http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/girl-in-classroom.jpg"><span style='text-decoration:none'><img border=0 width=192 height=300 id="_x0000_i1025" src="http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/girl-in-classroom-192x300.jpg" alt="A Young Girl in the Classroom by Charles Sillem Lidderdale"></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=wp-caption-text><em><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>A Young Girl in the Classroom</span></em><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'> by Charles Sillem Lidderdale<o:p></o:p></span></p></div><p style='text-align:justify'><em><b><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>by Stephen Richard Turley</span></b></em><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>The emergence of classical Christian education over the last few decades has thrown into relief the question of the relationship between public education and Christian witness. With ninety-percent of children in the U.S. attending public schools, the modern pulpit appears generally indifferent on the issue of private vs. public education for its parishioners; indeed, one might say pastors are generally supportive of public education. Perhaps the most common rationale for such support is that Christian students have the opportunity–indeed, the obligation–to be "salt and light", to be "in but not of' the world". But what does a faithful Christian witness in public life demand of us when it comes to schooling?<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>It is essential to understand that the public-private school dichotomy which prevails in our social arrangements and discourse is extremely misleading. This is because <i>all education is public</i>: all education seeks to cultivate within students an appreciation of shared values that constitute the common good of a community. There is simply no such thing as an education that is entirely private. There is, however, education that is coercively funded and non-coercively funded; an education system that depends on the compulsory nature of the state versus one that depends on the voluntary tuition paid by willing participants. The real question, then, that emerges is not whether we are going to support public education, but whether we are going to support the kind of public promoted by state-financed education.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>In a word, the defining attribute of that public order perpetuated by state-funded education is <i>secular</i>. It is claimed that a secular society is one that neither favors not discriminates against any particular religion. Religion and politics simply do not mix in a modern secular society. While variant religions remain highly significant for people, this significance is maintained and expressed in the private sphere of life. By privatizing faith, it is suggested that all peoples are able to participate equally in economic, political, and sociological life without religious discrimination. And tax-funded schools, as an extension of this vision of the public, have carved out neutral space so as to allow people of all religions to come together and learn facts and data common to everyone.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Now, this certainly sounds reasonable. The public promoted and perpetuated by the secular state neither favors nor discriminates against any particular religion. But what if it turns out that it was in fact the secular state that <i>redefined</i> religion this way? What if our understanding of faith and religion as that which belongs in one's private life rather than in the public square is itself the social invention of the secular state? What if religion has been redefined by the very institution that claims to "protect" it?<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>In contrast to our modern religious sensibilities, classical Christianity understood the church as offering to the world an alternative public distinct from that offered by the Jewish and Greco-Roman worlds. The church was a civilization, the city-state of the New Jerusalem. In fact, Augustine goes so far as to call the church a 'republic' in his <i>City of God</i>. Indeed, the term <i>ekklesia</i>, the Greek word for 'church', was not what we would call today a 'religious term' such as <i>thiasos</i> (worship of a particular deity); <i>ekklesia</i> was in fact a political term that designated the assembly of adult citizen males who had the ultimate decision making power in a city-state. Hence, the gospel was not a promise of personal and private salvation; the gospel was instead a declaration announcing that the entire cosmos has been incorporated into Christ's transformative life, death, and resurrection, which was expressed in shared life: mutuality, self-giving, and fellowship. As such, the 'truth of the gospel' was considered a thoroughly public truth. Truth was not merely personal persuasion; truth was in fact a revelation of reality which was socially recognized as absolute and unquestionable.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>By the third-century, educational institutions were considered integral to this public witness of the church. In cities such as Alexandria and Antioch, Christian education adopted the frames of reference of classical education which sought to cultivate within the student a sense of what classical scholars call 'cosmic piety': every person born into the world is born into a world of divine obligation. Classical education thus sought to instill within students the transcendent values embedded in the created order, namely, the True, the Good, and the Beautiful as they configured around Christ the Logos. It was believed that by embodying these cosmic values, students cultivated a virtuous soul. Classical Christian education was therefore a project by which the student was initiated into a public order that materialized or substantiated a cosmic piety, which in turn enabled the student to fulfill his or her divine purpose and thereby become truly human. This vision of education remained normative up to the end of the nineteenth-century.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>However, by the beginning of the twentieth-century, things had changed rather dramatically. A few centuries earlier, the Treaty of Westphalia in effect consigned the church to an organ of the state, which concentrated unprecedented power around local regents. As nation-states started to emerge in Europe, the burden on universities was to produce more civil servants than clergy, a process that Perry Glanzer has labeled the "nationalization of the universities". This transformation of the university into a servant of the nation-state led to a redefinition of knowledge that privileged science at the exclusion of the church. Consequently, there emerged a whole new definition of <i>religion</i>: religion was no longer a public expression of cosmic piety and social obligation. Instead, religion was simply something that one personally believed but could not know; it was that by which one cultivated a sense of private meaning and existential satisfaction, but religion had no public, that is objective, value <i>at all</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>With the advent of the industrial revolution in the nineteenth-century and social democracies throughout Europe after World War I, there is in effect a massive recalibration of the totality of social and economic life around the state. And it is here that secularism plays a key role, for it is through secularization that the state is able to perpetuate and protect its monopolization over the public square. And the primary mechanism by which such monopolization is maintained is the redefinition of religion and the consequent marginalization of the church to the private sphere of life. The state effectively marginalizes the church (or any other competing vision of the public) by <i>re-inventing our conception of faith and religion</i> in accordance with secular norms: faith and religion are little more than instrumental means by which individuals find personal meaning and purpose for their lives.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Hence, the role of education in a public defined by secular norms is to maintain the state's monopolization over the public square by perpetuating a dichotomy between the public and the private, science and religion, fact and faith, knowledge and belief; in short, state-funded education perpetuates and promotes the secularization of society. It is this public-private dichotomy that is profoundly detrimental to the witness of the church, for it in effect denies the church its distinctly <i>public</i> witness. The church's unique vision for a humane society is reduced to merely one of innumerable options for private recreation: yoga class on Saturday, youth group on Sunday. Because the church has been consigned to private belief rather than public knowledge, it has been stripped of the distinctly public frames of reference by which its truth claims are demonstrated to be more trustworthy than any other competing private belief. Consequentially, objective Christian commitments embodied in the shared life of the church collapse, and the integrity of the gospel is inexorably compromised. Hence, the practice of being "salt and light" is reduced to little more than anecdotes of personal persuasion.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Moreover, by insisting upon this dichotomy between science and religion, modern education must <i>by definition</i> turn students away from the classical vision of cosmic piety, cutting them off from encountering the cosmic values of the True, Good, and Beautiful. Indeed, today, both in our schools and wider society, the True, Good, and Beautiful are now whatever one wants them to be. There is simply no divine obligation apart from that which each person chooses to impose upon his or herself.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>If Christians are to remain faithful to the biblical gospel, we must once again affirm the public witness of the church, particularly in the field of education. For such an affirmation not only awakens the soul to the True, the Good, and the Beautiful, but in embodying the Truth, it exposes the state-financed educational system which denies Truth as what it is: <i>a lie</i>. We cannot teach our students that Truth is relative and expect our politicians to be honest; we can't claim that the Good has been replaced by situational ethics and expect Wall Street executives to ground their business decisions in anything other than profit, greed, and expediency; and we cannot relegate Beauty to personal preference and then feign shock when we encounter a urinal as part of an art exhibit.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Christians will never expose this lie as long as they support and fund it. Classical Christian education offers nothing less than a parallel public, a revelation of Truth that in its social splendor awakens wonder and awe in teacher and student alike, as together they fellowship in Him who is the divine renewal of all things.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><i><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Books on the topic and people related to this essay may be found in The Imaginative Conservative </span></i><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><a href="http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/the-imaginative-conservative-bookstore/" target="_blank"><i>Bookstore</i></a><i>. </i><o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><em><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Stephen Richard Turley (Ph.D., Durham University) is a faculty member at Tall Oaks Classical School in New Castle, DE, where he teaches Theology, Greek, and Rhetoric, and Professor of Fine Arts at Eastern University. He lectures at universities, conferences, and churches throughout the U.S. and abroad. His research and writings have appeared in such journals as <a href="http://www.pepperdine.edu/sponsored/ccl/journal/" target="_blank">Christianity and Literature</a>, <a href="https://internal.calvinseminary.edu/pubs/journal.php" target="_blank">Calvin Theological Journal</a>, <a href="http://www.firstthings.com/" target="_blank">First Things</a>, <a href="http://www.touchstonemag.com/" target="_blank">Touchstone</a>, and <a href="http://www.shu.edu/catholic-mission/chesterton-review.cfm" target="_blank">The Chesterton Review</a>.</span></em><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></p></div><p><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>The post <a href="http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2013/09/classical-christian-education-public-witness.html">Classical Christian Education and Public Witness</a> appeared first on <a href="http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org">The Imaginative Conservative</a>.<o:p></o:p></span></p></td></tr></table><p><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><br><a href="http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2013/09/classical-christian-education-public-witness.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=classical-christian-education-public-witness">View article...</a><o:p></o:p></span></p></div>revpaulcainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16771205236443124884noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3431748583988167965.post-18010212706098670612013-08-27T15:02:00.000-07:002013-08-27T15:03:04.360-07:00QBR and CCLE Review: Logic and Philosophy<div class=WordSection1><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><table class=MsoNormalTable border=0 cellspacing=3 cellpadding=0><tr><td style='padding:.75pt .75pt .75pt .75pt'><p class=MsoNormal align=center style='text-align:center'><span style='font-family:"Georgia","serif"'><a href="http://www.ccle.org/files/16551360692327RaphaelSchoolOfAthensVIVIT.jpg"><br></a></span><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal align=center style='text-align:center'><span style='font-family:"Georgia","serif"'><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfTrMB28W5IGmx9Z7HxvUAybSUwCKR83NRgCcuB66wJGggoSXsTuaFq_RsuU1xmPDhpc6ConmK71tK5J51VaOAHc7zgZG-xx0sHHGSux4jI2afjZjzlD1OTOZIuaMwsmkJ6dDwE8a_XlhJ/s1600/Pbible02.JPG"><span style='text-decoration:none'><img border=0 id="_x0000_i1025" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfTrMB28W5IGmx9Z7HxvUAybSUwCKR83NRgCcuB66wJGggoSXsTuaFq_RsuU1xmPDhpc6ConmK71tK5J51VaOAHc7zgZG-xx0sHHGSux4jI2afjZjzlD1OTOZIuaMwsmkJ6dDwE8a_XlhJ/s1600/Pbible02.JPG"></span></a></span><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal align=center style='text-align:center'><span style='font-family:"Georgia","serif"'><a href="http://www.ccle.org/files/16551360692327RaphaelSchoolOfAthensVIVIT.jpg"><br></a></span><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal align=center style='text-align:center'><span style='font-family:"Georgia","serif"'><a href="http://www.ccle.org/files/16551360692327RaphaelSchoolOfAthensVIVIT.jpg"><br></a></span><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal align=center style='text-align:center'><b><i><span style='font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>This review will be posted both at <br>Liturgy, Hymnody, and Pulpit Quarterly Book Review <br>and the blog of The Consortium for Clasical and Lutheran Education.</span></i></b><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-family:"Georgia","serif"'><br><br><br>Naugle, David K. David S. Dockery, Series Editor. <i>Philosophy: A Student's Guide (Reclaiming the Christian Intellectual Tradition)</i>. Wheaton: Crossway, 2012. 125 Pages. Paper. $11.99. <a href="http://www.crossway.org/">www.crossway.org</a> (N)</span><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><br></span><span style='font-family:"Georgia","serif"'><br>Poythress, Vern Sheridan. <i>Logic: A God-Centered Approach to the Foundation of Western Thought</i>. Wheaton: Crossway, 2013. 733 Pages. Paper. $45.00. <a href="http://www.crossway.org/">www.crossway.org</a> (N)</span><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><br></span><span style='font-family:"Georgia","serif"'><br><br>Ten years ago last month I attended my first Conference on Classical and Lutheran Education. I spent over six of the years following reading, preparing, and praying that I would be a Headmaster someday. That day came in April 2009.</span><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><br></span><span style='font-family:"Georgia","serif"'><br>Here are two titles from Crossway to aid you in Classical Christian Education.</span><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></p><div><p class=MsoNormal align=center style='text-align:center'><span style='font-family:"Georgia","serif"'><a href="http://static.crossway.org/products/medium/9781433531279.jpg"><span style='text-decoration:none'><img border=0 id="_x0000_i1026" src="http://static.crossway.org/products/medium/9781433531279.jpg"></span></a></span><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></p></div><blockquote style='margin-top:5.0pt;margin-bottom:5.0pt'><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><div><p class=MsoNormal><b><span style='font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>David Naugle </span></b><span style='font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>(ThD, Dallas Theological Seminary; PhD, University of Texas Arlington) is distinguished university professor and chair of philosophy at Dallas Baptist University. He is the author of <i>Worldview: The History of a Concept</i>, <i>Christianity Today</i>'s Book of the Year in Theology and Ethics, 2003, and of <i>Reordered Love, Reordered Lives: Learning the Deep Meaning of Happiness</i>.</span><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></p><div><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Georgia","serif"'><br>Philosophy pervades every sphere of life from the defense of the gospel to the formulation of Christian doctrine to the daily decisions we make.</span><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><br></span><span style='font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>In this work, distinguished professor David Naugle gives us a firm understanding of the basic issues, thinkers, and sub-disciplines in the field of philosophy as well as an invitation to engage with the contemporary challenges therein. He discusses the importance of prolegomena (assumptions and methods) and the vocation of Christian philosophers. Naugle also outlines the differences between the Hebrew and Greek mindsets and provides biblical perspectives through an Augustinian approach. Above all, Naugle teaches us how to philosophize in light of God and the gospel.</span><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></p></div><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>(Publisher's Website) </span><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></p></div></blockquote><p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>I am not formally educated in secular or classical philosophy. I've studied theology, of course, and I have read philosophers. I am finding that my experience is relatively common, even in a day where "Could God microwave a burrito so hot He couldn't eat it?" passes for a deep philosophical thought. (By the way, there's faulty logic in it, just to start...)</span><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><br></span><span style='font-family:"Georgia","serif"'><br>In David Naugle's student guide to Philosophy in Crossway's Reclaiming the Christian Intellectual Tradition series, the Incarnation of Christ is essential to any study of philosophy by Christians (55). That is a wonderful place to start! </span><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><br></span><span style='font-family:"Georgia","serif"'><br>Theology has more in common with a Christian studying philosophy than one might think. We're dealing with questions of existence and purpose, of decisions and eternity, and the struggle of daily life. I immediately see connections to Vocation, Physics, Music, and Mathematics. If you have an interest in beginning a study of philosophy, Naugle's <i>Philosophy: A Student's Guide</i> is a great place to start.</span><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><br></span><span style='font-family:"Georgia","serif"'><br><br>Switch to Logic and six hundred pages...</span><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal align=center style='text-align:center'><span style='font-family:"Georgia","serif"'><a href="http://static.crossway.org/products/medium/9781433532290.jpg"><span style='text-decoration:none'><img border=0 id="_x0000_i1027" src="http://static.crossway.org/products/medium/9781433532290.jpg"></span></a></span><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><div><blockquote style='margin-top:5.0pt;margin-bottom:5.0pt'><p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><b><span style='font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>Vern Sheridan Poythress</span></b><span style='font-family:"Georgia","serif"'> is professor of New Testament interpretation at Westminster Theological Seminary, where he has taught for 33 years. He has six earned degrees, including a PhD from Harvard University and a ThD from the University of Stellenbosch. He is the author of numerous books on biblical interpretation, language, and science.</span><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></p><div><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>For Christians looking to improve critical thinking skills, here is an accessible introduction to the study of logic as well as an in-depth treatment of the discipline from a professor with six academic degrees and over 30 years experience teaching. Questions for further reflection are included at the end of each chapter as well as helpful diagrams and charts for use in college and graduate-level classrooms.</span><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><br></span><span style='font-family:"Georgia","serif"'><br>Vern Poythress has undertaken a radical recasting of the study of logic in this revolutionary work from a Christian worldview.</span><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></p></div><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>(Publisher's Website)</span><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></p></blockquote><p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>Of the books by Poythress that I've read and reviewed, this is by far my favorite. I have studied Logic. As Headmaster of MLGS, I've taught two different levels of logic after school hours to junior high students and adults. This text is far more comprehensive than what I've taught. The author continues his inter-book theme of the "God-Centered Approach."</span><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><br></span><span style='font-family:"Georgia","serif"'> </span><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><br></span><span style='font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>This is a text with worldview assumptions favorable to and for Christians: The Ten Commandments and worship of the one true God (97); Scripture, sin, grace, and the Gospel of Christ (83-84); creation and creativity (292).</span><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><br><br></span><span style='font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>I appreciated the author's presentation of Multivalued Logic, logic beyond yes and no (Chapter 63, 474ff). Appendix F2 brings this review full circule: The Role of Logic in Philosophy (645). </span><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><br></span><span style='font-family:"Georgia","serif"'><br>Before I read the rest of Aristotle, I need to re-read Poythress. I am thankful for this volume.</span><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><br></span><span style='font-family:"Georgia","serif"'><br><br>I commend Crossway for helping combat what was called <i>The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind</i> in the previous century with these two releases and encourage them to publish more books I'll use as our school expands beyond the Grammar level to junor high and high school study of logic, philosophy, and rhetoric.</span><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></p></div><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><div><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>The Rev. Paul J Cain is Pastor of Immanuel Lutheran Church, Sheridan, Wyoming, Headmaster of Martin Luther Grammar School, Yellowstone Circuit Visitor (LCMS Wyoming District), a member of the Board of Directors of The Consortium for Classical and Lutheran Education, Wyoming District Worship Chairman, and Editor of <i>QBR</i>. </span><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></p></div></td></tr></table><p><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><br><a href="http://lhplbr.blogspot.com/2013/08/qbr-and-ccle-review-logic-and-philosophy.html">View article...</a><o:p></o:p></span></p></div>revpaulcainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16771205236443124884noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3431748583988167965.post-6906873984323368492013-07-30T12:34:00.001-07:002013-07-30T12:34:53.224-07:00Homeschool Resources on www.cph.org<div class=WordSection1><p class=MsoNormal><a href="http://www.cph.org/searchnew.aspx?SE=0&SearchTerm=homeschool&pagenum=1&pagesize=9999&viewall=Y&cset=1&sortby=Rank%20Desc">http://www.cph.org/searchnew.aspx?SE=0&SearchTerm=homeschool&pagenum=1&pagesize=9999&viewall=Y&cset=1&sortby=Rank%20Desc</a><o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p></div>revpaulcainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16771205236443124884noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3431748583988167965.post-1528783836048899342013-07-30T09:27:00.001-07:002013-07-30T09:27:11.565-07:00FW: Not My Boy, Not My School<div class=WordSection1><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'>Beane on the Handbook…<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><div><div style='border:none;border-top:solid #B5C4DF 1.0pt;padding:3.0pt 0in 0in 0in'><p class=MsoNormal><b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif"'>Feed:</span></b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif"'> Father Hollywood<br><b>Posted on:</b> Monday, July 29, 2013 5:28 PM<br><b>Author:</b> Rev. Larry Beane<br><b>Subject:</b> Not My Boy, Not My School<o:p></o:p></span></p></div></div><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><table class=MsoNormalTable border=0 cellspacing=3 cellpadding=0><tr><td style='padding:.75pt .75pt .75pt .75pt'><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><br><br>Although he makes no reference to this song in the article, I can't help but think of Rev. Dr. Steven Hein's "The Intent and Effect of American Progressive Education" in <i><a href="http://www.ccle.org/handbook/">A Handbook for Classical Lutheran Education</a></i>.<br><br>His essay opens:<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><i><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Very few of us today are aware of the history of education in America. It is commonly thought that whatever innovations have come over the centuries and decades, they have been conceived and implemented with the goal of improving pedagogy to enable the learner to learn more and and to learn more efficiently.... with the goal of improving education for all our children - that is, to make our children better educated. Unfortunately, this is not, and has never been, the case with compulsory, government-administered progressive American education whose beginnings can be traced to the middle 1800s in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia."</span></i><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>And it continues in this provocative and well-documented fashion, with a devastating look at how America went from being almost 100% literate to being pitiful in the area of reading - and this was not a failure, but rather a success, of the architects of progressive education.<br><br>Buy this book!<o:p></o:p></span></p></td></tr></table><p><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><br><a href="http://fatherhollywood.blogspot.com/2013/07/not-my-boy-not-my-school.html">View article...</a><o:p></o:p></span></p></div>revpaulcainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16771205236443124884noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3431748583988167965.post-35558226302322015462013-07-18T06:03:00.001-07:002013-07-18T06:03:49.168-07:00FW: Rehabilitating the Liberal Arts<div class=WordSection1><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'>Consider…<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><div><div style='border:none;border-top:solid #B5C4DF 1.0pt;padding:3.0pt 0in 0in 0in'><p class=MsoNormal><b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif"'>Feed:</span></b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif"'> The Imaginative Conservative<br><b>Posted on:</b> Wednesday, July 17, 2013 11:02 PM<br><b>Author:</b> Louis Markos<br><b>Subject:</b> Rehabilitating the Liberal Arts<o:p></o:p></span></p></div></div><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><table class=MsoNormalTable border=0 cellspacing=3 cellpadding=0><tr><td style='padding:.75pt .75pt .75pt .75pt'><p style='text-align:justify'><strong><i><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><a href="http://i1.wp.com/www.theimaginativeconservative.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/71DkU001yaL._SL1500_.jpg"><span style='text-decoration:none'><img border=0 id="_x0000_i1025" src="http://i1.wp.com/www.theimaginativeconservative.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/71DkU001yaL._SL1500_.jpg?resize=193%2C300" alt="liberal arts"></span></a>by Louis Markos</span></i></strong><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></p><blockquote style='margin-top:5.0pt;margin-bottom:5.0pt'><p><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>A review of Bradley G. Green's <i><a href="http://astore.amazon.com/theimaginativeconservative-20/detail/1433514427" target="_blank">The Gospel and the Mind: Recovering and Shaping the Intellectual Life</a> (</i>Crossway Books, 2011) and Houston Baptist Univeristy's new Core Curriculum<o:p></o:p></span></p></blockquote><p style='text-align:justify'><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>I am in my 22nd year as an English professor at Houston Baptist University, and I have never been so excited! In 2011, we unveiled our new Liberal Arts Core: a carefully constructed and coordinated curriculum that includes classes in literature and foreign language, Christian history and theology, Western and American history, philosophy and logic, government and economics, art and music, and math and science.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>It is not a loose and fashionable cafeteria plan, where students choose whatever strikes their fancy, but a true classical-Christian core, in which students are invited into the Great Judeo-Christian/Greco-Roman Conversation that begins with the Bible and Homer and continues into the twenty-first century. It is not narrowly utilitarian in focus, seeking only to train its charges for a specific skill or career, but broadly liberal, seeking to free the mind from the idols of the marketplace and equip it for critical thinking and creative contemplation. It is conveyed not through textbooks, which seek to bend the past to fit our own modern prejudices and presuppositions, but the actual Books themselves, treated as repositories of the wisdom of the past and vehicles for reaching at transcendent, cross-cultural truths. It is not driven by the social sciences, with their reductive and mechanistic view of man as a product of social-political-economic forces, but by the humanities, with their ennobled yet realistic view of man as a creature made in God's image but fallen and in a state of rebellion. It is not postmodern and multicultural, offering a relativistic view of knowledge that doubts not only the existence of Truth but our ability to know or communicate it, but traditional and holistic, seeking after a unified vision of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. Most of all it is unapologetic in its belief that Great Books and Ideas <i>do</i> exist and that a direct wrestling with such Books and Ideas offers one of the best training grounds for shaping virtuous, morally self-regulating citizens who love God and their neighbor.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>In short, it is cutting edge…for the fourteenth century!<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Imagine, then, my delight when I read Bradley G. Green's <i>The Gospel and the Mind: Recovering and Shaping the Intellectual Life</i> (Crossway, 2010) and found in its pages a powerful Christian-humanist vision of education that complements in the theoretical realm what my university is doing in the practical. No wonder the book features an endorsement from Robert Sloan, the President of Houston Baptist University.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><b><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>The Way out of the Dark Ages</span></b><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Green, associate professor of Christian studies at Union University and co-founder of a Christian liberal arts school appropriately named Augustine School, is a man on a mission. His well-researched and highly-readable book is not content merely to suggest that Christianity and the intellectual life are compatible. Green makes it clear that "the Christian vision of God, man, and the world provides the necessary precondition of the recovery of any meaningful intellectual life." Sever the mind from the gospel, and you eventually end up with the situation that reigns on most college campuses today: a values-free zone with no moral standards to determine that which is good, no aesthetic touchstones to determine that which is beautiful, and no accepted canon—biblical or otherwise—to determine that which is true. Or, as Green so boldly and succinctly expresses it: "As the modern world has jettisoned its Christian intellectual inheritance, there has been a corresponding confusion about the value of the mind, even of the possibility of knowledge at all, whether of God or of the created order."<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Green begins his book with a simple statement of historical fact that has been overlooked, or, to be more accurate, obscured, by the Academy: "wherever the gospel takes hold of a culture, you inevitably see academies, schools, and institutions of learning develop. They develop not only to teach people how to read and understand the Bible, as important and central as that is. But wherever the gospel goes, it seems to generate intellectual deliberation and inquiry." I constantly have to remind my students—and myself, since I too am a product of two-and-a-half centuries of Enlightenment propaganda—that the Catholic Church did not usher in the Dark Ages; quite to the contrary, it was the Church that ushered Europe <i>out</i> of the Dark Ages. It was the Church as well that invented the university and laid the theological, philosophical, and aesthetic groundwork for the arts and sciences.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>True, it was Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle (and their respective disciples and schools) who gave birth to the humanistic ideal of knowledge pursued for its own sake; but it was the Church that not only spread that ideal to a wider audience and institutionalized it, but gave it a firm foundation that it lacked in ancient Greece. Apart from the central Christian beliefs that we were created in the image of a holy, transcendent God who is at once the origin and standard of goodness, truth, and beauty, that history is meaningful and is going somewhere, that though we are fallen God intervened within human history to redeem our hearts, souls, and minds, and that God as Logos guarantees the meaningfulness of language, the intellectual life cannot thrive or even, in the long run, be sustained.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Green makes it the burden of his book to explain why this is the case.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><b><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Chronological Snobbery</span></b><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Perhaps the most shocking aspect of HBU's new Liberal Arts Core is that it requires all students to take four semesters of Western and American history. I call this shocking because, of all the humanistic disciplines, history has perhaps suffered the most. What little "history" our primary, secondary, and college-aged students receive today is more often than not a disguised form of anthropology (studying the rites and rituals of native American Indians), sociology (exploring how political and economic networks of power determine the way people think and behave), or soft Marxism (exposing how minorities and the lower classes have been consistently oppressed by aristocrats, clerics, and the bourgeoisie). Though it is a good thing for students, especially Christian students, to be aware of the injustices in our world and to be encouraged to use their God-given gifts to help alleviate some of those injustices, such "consciousness raising" does little to train students in history. In fact, if truth be told, it generally dismisses, if not altogether obliterates, history <i>as</i> history.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Talk to anyone who has been educated since the 1960's, and you will find that they have very little sense of the shape of history. They may <i>recognize</i> such names as Pericles or Caesar or Charlemagne or Elizabeth, but they lack the ability to place those names into a historical narrative. The rise and fall of kingdoms—and the virtuous and vicious decisions of the great men and women who provoked their rise and fall—has far less resonance in the modern mind than today's stock market figures, or yesterday's political scandal, or the box office records of the latest action film. Mesmerized by a simplistic, evolutionary view of intellectual, aesthetic, and moral progress, we take for granted that we are in the right and they (the unenlightened people of the past) were wrong. Such a view of our tradition and our forebears breeds arrogance—C. S. Lewis called it "chronological snobbery"—and cuts us off from all that we might learn from a full engagement with the past.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>There was a time when our colleges and universities stemmed such arrogance by immersing their students in the Great Books and Ideas of the Western Intellectual Tradition, but that time is long gone. "While the academy used to be a stronghold of love for the past—relishing old books, old languages, old truths—the contemporary academy," Green laments, "seems to have lost its nerve in regard to the importance of the past and often seems little concerned with passing on an intellectual tradition." Why?<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><b><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>The Habit of Remembering</span></b><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Though I intimated above that the great divide is the 1960's, that decade only reaped the pedagogical harvest of the secular humanist field sown during the Enlightenment. When God was removed from the public square in general and the academy in particular—or replaced by a deistic, watchmaker God who is uninvolved in history—the educated elite slowly replaced reverence and gratitude for the past with utopian, progressivist visions for the future. In the absence of a Creator God whose sovereign plans are worked out, in part, through historical events and human agents, the past was eventually reduced to, at best, a curiosity shop for antiquarians and, at worst, a burden to be cast off by those seeking intellectual, spiritual, and aesthetic liberation.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>When the university came to view history, not as an authoritative teacher to turn <i>to</i> for insight and guidance, but as a false path to turn <i>from</i> on the evolutionary road to enlightenment, it lost its faith in the value of history, and, by extension, the value of the liberal arts as the prime training ground for the life of the mind. While Green, backed by the weight of Augustine and the medieval tradition, asserts that "any truly Christian and liberal education will be one in which students are immersed in the central texts of the past—the literature, history, philosophy, and theology of millennia," the majority of American universities, both secular and religious, have traded in their liberal arts core for utilitarian programs that eschew the "central texts of the past" in favor of skill-based classes marked by contemporary relevance.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Historian Thomas Cahill has famously argued that it was a group of isolated Irish monks who helped "save" civilization by preserving the Greek and Roman classics from the barbarian invasions of the Dark Ages. In a similar way, Green calls on Christians to preserve—and, hopefully, revive—the value and centrality of the liberal arts: not though the medium of illuminated manuscripts but by building "pockets of sanity" where the Tradition is actively and creatively remembered. "In an age that does not place a high premium on the past (likely a result of unbelief), Christians must see themselves as countercultural in their emphasis on memory and must be particularly diligent to cultivate and practice the habit of remembering. Remembering is—ultimately—a virtue. And given that our culture discourages this particular virtue, Christians must find ways of intentionally cultivating this practice."<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Although the Church should ever be the primary "pocket" for keeping alive the memory of "the faith which was once delivered unto the saints" (Jude 3), when it comes to that wider historical memory that takes in "the literature, history, philosophy, and theology of millennia," it is the Christian universities—and, increasingly, classical-Christian academies like Green's Augustine school—that are best poised to preserve and promote the remembrance of things past.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><b><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>The Search for Meaning</span></b><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>A base-level commitment to memory is indeed essential if Christian universities are to reclaim and rehabilitative the life of the mind—but it is not enough. Along with acknowledging God's sovereignty over creation and history, we must accept and teach that history is going somewhere: that it not only has an ultimate origin (Greek: <i>arche</i>) but a purposeful end (telos).<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Though modern utopianism, progressivism, and scientism all look to the future, the vision that underlies them is not, at least in the biblical sense, teleological or eschatological. They put their faith in the future that they long to build, but they do not trust that that future has been envisioned by the God of history and hardwired into us by our Creator. "Instead of seeing motion as <i>headed somewhere</i>," Green explains, "modern thinkers came to see motion as simply motion, with no particular goal or end in sight." Or, to put it another way: history can (and should) be manipulated by advances in technology, but that does not mean it is inherently meaningful or is moving toward a mythical appointment with destiny.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>According to Green, "the notion that we are all pilgrims on a journey to the city of God was the default mode of thinking, the cultural consensus of the Christian West." It was simply understood that we, both as a species and as individual human beings, were endowed (that is, gifted) with purpose by our Creator and that, as such, one of the key goals of our lives, our studies, and our careers was to discover and fulfill that purpose. At the highest level, that purpose was to seek after the beatific vision, to behold God, not through a glass, darkly, but face to face. Such was the supreme goal of every individual made in the image of God, a goal whose realization was aided, rather than distracted, by the cultivation of the liberal arts.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>In the heyday of the Christian university, "the liberal arts were <i>not</i> primarily skills or techniques that could be pressed into immediate service in the marketplace or used to advance oneself quickly in the world of commerce. The liberal arts were intentionally useless. They were not first and foremost utilitarian." To the contrary, their benefits were mostly internal: shaping and preparing soul and mind for intrinsic rewards in this life and the next. The liberal arts, writes Green, "were meant to form a certain type of person—wise, virtuous, and eloquent. Even in the temporal realm this person reflected upon—and was marked by attention to—truth, goodness, and beauty. But at the very same time, this person was being prepared for his or her ultimate destiny—the vision and contemplation of God."<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Such was the high goal of the student of the liberal arts. Alas, once this telos, this purposeful end of achieving the beatific vision was abandoned by the public square, "then lost with it were the <i>reasons</i> for doing things that have meaning only in relationship to that larger telos"—things like studying the past through a coordinated, classical-Christian liberal arts core.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><b><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>With Our Understanding Purified</span></b><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>At this point, some of my fellow believers may be afraid that either I or Green is advocating an Enlightenment faith in the primacy of reason and the essential goodness of man. Please let me be clear: neither I nor Green nor Houston Baptist University denies the radical nature of the Fall. All aspects of our being—physical, emotional, volitional, <i>and</i> rational—were subjected to the devastating impact of man's first disobedience. Indeed, one of the key reasons for Green's argument that "the Christian vision of God, man, and the world provides the necessary precondition of the recovery of any meaningful intellectual life" is that the gospel alone has the power to so redeem the will and reorient the mind as to set it back on a God-ward, which is to say Truth-ward, trajectory.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>As he does throughout his book, Green turns first to Augustine for guidance on how faith informs and directs understanding. In his survey of Augustinian insights, he quotes this trenchant sentence from <i>On Christian Doctrine</i> (which work undergirds "Writing for Wisdom," HBU's radically traditional reworking of freshman composition): "unless we walk by faith, we shall never be able to reach the sight which does not pass away but endures, when with our understanding purified we cleave to Truth." Augustine does not here deny the possibility of pre-Christian writers like Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and Virgil touching on real, if limited truths about the nature of God, man, and the universe; rather, he makes plain that the final purpose (telos) of study, to prepare the mind for the beatific vision, cannot be accomplished apart from what Paul refers to as the "renewing of your mind" (Romans 12:2)—and that renewing cannot be accomplished apart from the Cross.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>In order to tease out more fully the teachings of Augustine, Green surveys briefly the writings of Hugh and Richard of St. Victor, focusing in particular on how they "emphasize the moral state of the knower." Study, Green asserts, is not a morally neutral enterprise: "knowledge is difficult, if not impossible, for the person whose will is misdirected, or for the person who is not led by Christ, who is the truth." There is a deep and inextricable link between the love of God and the love of the Good, True, and Beautiful: the one cannot exist without the other.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>One of the current banes of education is the steep rise in incidences of plagiarism among students of all ages. Though it is right and proper for universities to implement strict penalties for plagiarism, such utilitarian solutions are ultimately powerless to change the hearts, minds, and wills of students. Plagiarism will end only when students come to see and understand and feel the intensely moral business which they are about. In Writing for Wisdom, which is required of all HBU freshmen, we hope to drive home this point by introducing students to the educational principles laid down in Augustine's <i>On Christian Doctrine</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Among the many challenges Green issues to Christian educators, this one is, I believe, the most essential: "Christians need to ask how we might construe the intellectual life in ways that are redemptive, holistic, and enduring. The life of the mind, the act of knowing, is not a morally or spiritually neutral endeavor. To truly think God's thought after him, indeed to truly think in terms of a coherent view of the whole, we must think in a way consonant with the reality that this is God's world as understood on God's terms. Christians need not be embarrassed or timid about speaking about the intellectual life in explicitly Christian terms and categories." And, by extension, we need not be embarrassed to speak of professors as stewards of the Tradition and students as disciples whose study of the liberal arts will change not only their thinking but their actions, decisions, and interactions with God and neighbor.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><b><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>The Word Made Flesh</span></b><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Yes, the students who attend our schools are in desperate need of a wake-up call and a reality check, but they won't get it until <i>we</i>—the administrators who run the schools and the faculty who teach the classes—come to see and understand and feel that what <i>we</i> are about is serious business. Too many of us have bought in, perhaps unconsciously, to the postmodern belief that truth is elusive and cannot be contained in a canon of books or a set of doctrinal statements or a grand, overarching story (or metanarrative) that explains why we and our world are in the state that we are.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Green deftly exposes the assumption that underlies this postmodern skepticism: "The contemporary claim (heard, if in a softer form, from some Christian thinkers) that we cannot possess any sort of metanarrative explaining and giving purpose to all of human life is at its heart a rejection of the notion that God has the ability to speak, and humans have the capacity to hear and understand such speech." The Enlightenment, in its goal of refounding all knowledge on rational principles (rather than revelation) and the collection of facts (rather than the journey toward truth), did far more than eject God from the public square: it stilled the divine Voice.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Green argues, along with a number of other critics, that postmodernism (particularly deconstruction), far from rejecting the tenets of the Enlightenment, marks an extension of modernism into the linguistic realm. Once God's Voice was silenced, it was only a matter of time before words (signifiers) became unglued from any type of final transcendent meaning (signifieds). According to Derrida and his deconstructive heirs, the words we use cannot be traced back to any fixed point of reference that is not itself part of our shadowy, relativistic world of signifiers. Or, to put it another way, our words (and the creeds and books and poems that are built upon them) exist in isolation from any ultimate origin (<i>arche</i>) or purposeful end (telos).<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>What this linguistic entropy has meant in the real world of the classroom is that even when the liberal arts are taught, postmodern skepticism over the meaningfulness of language has prevented students from encountering in the Great Books of the Western Intellectual Tradition any absolute form of Goodness, Truth, or Beauty. As a result, their minds are not illuminated, their souls are not convicted, and their wills are not tempered.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>But this need not be the case, at least in Christian schools that believe John's testimony that through the Incarnation of Christ, "the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us (John 1:14). Genesis tells us that God spoke the world into being, and John tells us that apart from the Word (or Logos) nothing was made (John 1:3). Genesis tells us further that we were made in the image of God, and the entire weight of scripture loudly proclaims that the God who made us is a God who speaks, who communicates. Words have meaning not only because God gives them meaning but because God himself <i>is</i> Meaning. And that Meaning has entered physically into our world. The Word made Flesh, in addition to giving history its middle point, baptized words (and images) as potential bearers of divine Presence.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Thus it is that Green can extend his simple but profound thesis even into the daunting realm of postmodern linguistics: "Only the Christian vision of God, man, and the world can explain why words matter. The Christian vision is the only one that can account for the meaningfulness of words." Green is right, of course, and because he is right, the hope remains that we in the twenty-first century can learn, <i>really</i> learn, from the great writers and thinkers of the past. Modernism and postmodernism would imprison our students (and us) in a narrow contemporary box of ideas and images; the classical liberal arts, when energized by a twin belief in the Word made Flesh and the <i>Imago Dei</i>, can free them from that box and set them off on a great voyage of discovery.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><b><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>The Call</span></b><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>In <i>The Voyage of the Dawn Treader</i>, C. S. Lewis introduces us to a chivalrous talking mouse named Reepicheep who joins the crew of the good ship Dawn Treader in hopes that he will encounter a series of small adventures that will prepare him for the <i>great</i> adventure that is the unshakeable goal of his life: to reach Aslan's country (heaven). At one point in the voyage (Chapter XII), the ship sails into an area of darkness that frightens the crew and almost convinces them to turn back. Disgusted by their cowardice, Reepicheep scolds his noble companions for letting a childish fear of the dark prevent them from exploring this strange phenomenon. The captain asks Reepicheep what possible use would be gained by sailing further into the darkness, to which the fearless mouse replies: "Use, captain? If by use you mean filling our bellies or our purses, I confess it will be no use at all. So far as I know we did not set sail to look for things useful but to seek honour and adventures. And here is as great an adventure as ever I heard of, and here, if we turn back, no little impeachment of all our honours."<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Let it not be said that our Christian universities steered away from the honor and adventure that a full engagement with the liberal arts promises because we were blinded by an overly pragmatic (and timid) view of that which is useful. Let us instead do our best to prepare our students for the true goal for which they (and we) were made: to look on Aslan face to face.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><i><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Books mentioned in this essay may be found in <em><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>The Imaginative Conservative </span></em><a href="http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/the-imaginative-conservative-bookstore/">Bookstore</a>. Essays by Dr. Markos may be found </span></i><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><a href="http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/category/tic-authors/louis-markos/#.UZKLeMoU-So"><i>here</i></a><i>.</i><o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><a href="http://www.loumarkos.com/"><i>Louis Markos</i></a><i>, Professor in English & Scholar in Residence at Houston Baptist University, holds the Robert H. Ray Chair in Humanities; he also teaches the freshman classical-Christian curriculum for HBU's Honors College. He is author of </i><a href="http://astore.amazon.com/theimaginativeconservative-20/detail/0830857451"><i>Restoring Beauty: The Good, the True, and the Beautiful in the Writings of C. S. Lewis</i></a><i>, </i><a href="http://astore.amazon.com/theimaginativeconservative-20/detail/1433514486"><i>Apologetics for the 21<sup>st</sup> Century</i></a><i>, and </i><a href="http://astore.amazon.com/theimaginativeconservative-20/detail/0830825932"><i>From Achilles to Christ</i></a><i>. His latest book is </i><a href="http://astore.amazon.com/theimaginativeconservative-20/detail/0802443192"><i>On the Shoulders of Hobbits: The Road to Virtue with Tolkien and Lewis</i></a><i>. <em><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>This essay appeared in <a href="http://www.staustinreview.com/" target="_blank">St. Austin Review</a> and appears here by permission (with small revisions).</span></em></i><o:p></o:p></span></p><p><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>The post <a href="http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/rehabilitating-the-liberal-arts/">Rehabilitating the Liberal Arts</a> appeared first on <a href="http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org">The Imaginative Conservative</a>.<o:p></o:p></span></p></td></tr></table><p><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><br><a href="http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/rehabilitating-the-liberal-arts/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rehabilitating-the-liberal-arts">View article...</a><o:p></o:p></span></p></div>revpaulcainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16771205236443124884noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3431748583988167965.post-18074586102680954932013-07-18T06:02:00.000-07:002013-07-18T06:03:06.669-07:00FW: A handbook for Classical Lutheran Education<div class=WordSection1><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'>Veith on the CCLE new book…<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><div><div style='border:none;border-top:solid #B5C4DF 1.0pt;padding:3.0pt 0in 0in 0in'><p class=MsoNormal><b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif"'>Feed:</span></b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif"'> Cranach<br><b>Posted on:</b> Thursday, July 18, 2013 4:00 AM<br><b>Author:</b> Gene Veith<br><b>Subject:</b> A handbook for Classical Lutheran Education<o:p></o:p></span></p></div></div><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><table class=MsoNormalTable border=0 cellspacing=3 cellpadding=0><tr><td style='padding:.75pt .75pt .75pt .75pt'><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>I'm at the Consortium for Classical & Lutheran Education conference in Ft. Wayne, Indiana. To add to the organization's school accreditation program, we announced a process for teacher certification in this approach. Also announced was a new resource: A Handbook for Classical Lutheran Education. Edited by Cheryl Swope, Steven Hein, Paul Cain, and Tom Strickland,<a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/geneveith/2013/07/a-handbook-for-classical-lutheran-education/"> [Read More...]</a><o:p></o:p></span></p></td></tr></table><p><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><br><a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/geneveith/2013/07/a-handbook-for-classical-lutheran-education/">View article...</a><o:p></o:p></span></p></div>revpaulcainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16771205236443124884noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3431748583988167965.post-44946421218092687172013-07-13T10:29:00.001-07:002013-07-13T10:29:35.365-07:00New Handbook<div class=WordSection1><p style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'>New from CCLE Press!<br><br>A Handbook of Classical Lutheran Education<br>The Best of The Consortium for Classical and Lutheran Education's Journals<br><br>with Foreword by Dr. Gene Edward Veith<br><br>Articles by <br>Dr. E. Christian Kopff<br>Dr. Steven A. Hein<br>Dr. Ross Betts<br>Dr. James Tallmon<br>Rev. John Hill<br>Rev. Stephen Kieser<br><br>and more...<br><br>$14.95*<br><br>*ALL proceeds support the work of the Consortium for Classical and Lutheran<br>Education, <a href="http://www.ccle.org">www.ccle.org</a> <br><br>To "Look Inside," to order, or for more information:<br><a href="http://www.amazon.com">www.amazon.com</a> <br><br>We will bring plenty of copies to CCLE XIII in Ft. Wayne next week, if you<br>would prefer to purchase with no shipping costs.<br><br>Cheryl<br><br>Consortium for Classical and Lutheran Education<br><a href="http://www.ccle.org">www.ccle.org</a> <span style='color:white'><o:p></o:p></span></p></div>revpaulcainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16771205236443124884noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3431748583988167965.post-55887949922530657182013-07-12T17:39:00.001-07:002013-07-12T17:39:59.415-07:00FW: Classical education. . .<div class=WordSection1><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'>Peters…<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><div><div style='border:none;border-top:solid #B5C4DF 1.0pt;padding:3.0pt 0in 0in 0in'><p class=MsoNormal><b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif"'>Feed:</span></b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif"'> Pastoral Meanderings<br><b>Posted on:</b> Friday, July 12, 2013 5:00 AM<br><b>Author:</b> noreply@blogger.com (Pastor Peters)<br><b>Subject:</b> Classical education. . .<o:p></o:p></span></p></div></div><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><table class=MsoNormalTable border=0 cellspacing=3 cellpadding=0><tr><td style='padding:.75pt .75pt .75pt .75pt'><table class=MsoNormalTable border=0 cellspacing=0 cellpadding=0><tr><td style='padding:0in 0in 0in 0in'><p class=MsoNormal align=center style='text-align:center'><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><a href="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51aTxpgfm+L._BO2,204,203,200_PIsitb-sticker-arrow-click,TopRight,35,-76_AA300_SH20_OU01_.jpg"><span style='text-decoration:none'><img border=0 id="_x0000_i1025" src="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51aTxpgfm+L._BO2,204,203,200_PIsitb-sticker-arrow-click,TopRight,35,-76_AA300_SH20_OU01_.jpg"></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></p></td></tr><tr><td style='padding:0in 0in 0in 0in'><p class=MsoNormal align=center style='text-align:center'><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Check it out!<o:p></o:p></span></p></td></tr></table><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>A visit with a shut in ended up talking about education (the person had been involved in education for most of the adult life). It ended up with a lament that too much emphasis is placed on vocational education -- simple training to do a job. Now this person understands the fact that education, especially secondary, has become expensive and often peripheral to job openings and employment possibilities, but this person also insists that a liberal arts education (could we call it "classical" education) should not be allowed to disappear.<br><br>The person spent a life in literature and sadly reflected upon the fact that you can hardly find a book in his kids homes -- even though they are well educated and economically successful. They do not read -- not paper or digital. The shut in found this tragic for the adult children and the grandchildren (some of whom graduated from ivy league schools). They seem oblivious to the great body of literature which has become the hallmark of learning (at least in the past).<br><br>I related a conversation about the movie "Gatsby" in which a twenty something young woman suggested that the movie was so great she wished that it had come out in book form. Duhhhhhh. As a child growing up in pre-politically correct times, even the cartoons were replete with references to great literature, opera, music, and history (cannot forget Bugs Bunny massaging Elmer Fudd's scalp while Rossini's <i>Barber of Seville</i> played in the background). Today it is much more likely that children's videos and programming has little to draw them into the tremendous body of classical literature and music, much less history!<br><br>That led me to a new book by Cheryl Swope called A Beautiful Education for Any Child. According to one reviewer: Classical education is best-known for its powerful academic chops, for its cultural richness, and for its compatibility with the Christian view of the world. You can Google her and the book or <a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/1615382402/ref=as_li_tf_til?tag=cranach-20&camp=0&creative=0&linkCode=as1&creativeASIN=1615382402&adid=1GXFAYMPD2NJZJ9VQGET">buy it here on Amazon</a>. It is a wonderful book -- accessible for the general public, born from a home schooling experience, and addressing the whole way we view education at large.<br><br>Another fan:<br><br><em><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Cheryl Swope ostensibly writes about special education, but she also makes one of the clearest and most compelling cases for classical education in print. The first argument of the book is that academically-challenged students are human beings too, and they deserve an education commensurate with that fact. While current special education doctrine favors compromising on content, Cheryl proposes only to moderate its measure. If a child cannot accommodate the amount or depth of knowledge of most children, it is not less, but more important that what they learn be of the highest quality. She implicitly understands St. Thomas Aquinas' principle that the slightest knowledge of the greatest things is greater than the greatest knowledge of the slightest things. Her second argument is that it <b>has</b> been done and can be done. How many people know that Helen Keller had a classical education? And if a person who was blind and deaf could achieve what she achieved, how much more can a student do who faces less severe challenges? Cheryl shows how, in an important sense, classical education can open the eyes of the blind and unstop the ears of the deaf.</span></em><br><br>I heartily commend it.<em><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'> </span></em><o:p></o:p></span></p></td></tr></table><p><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><br><a href="http://pastoralmeanderings.blogspot.com/2013/07/classical-education.html">View article...</a><o:p></o:p></span></p></div>revpaulcainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16771205236443124884noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3431748583988167965.post-14867658457266974572013-07-04T13:34:00.001-07:002013-07-04T13:34:53.938-07:00CCLE Handbook Now on Amazon!!<div class=WordSection1><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><a href="http://astore.amazon.com/theconsortiumforclassicalandlutheraneducation-20/detail/1490589139">http://astore.amazon.com/theconsortiumforclassicalandlutheraneducation-20/detail/1490589139</a> </span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'> <o:p></o:p></span></p><div><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'> <o:p></o:p></span></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Symbol'>·</span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'> What is Lutheran education? <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Symbol'>·</span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'> What is classical Lutheran education? <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Symbol'>·</span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'> Are these terms the same? <o:p></o:p></span></p><p><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>Explore answers to these questions in A Handbook on Classical Lutheran Education, a unique resource from the Consortium for Classical and Lutheran Education. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>Adapted from the book's <strong><span style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>Foreword by Dr. Gene Edward Veith</span></strong>: <o:p></o:p></span></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal><em><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>"This handbook explains what classical Lutheran education is and why it is needed today. It shows the importance of classical education to Western civilization in general and to the Lutheran tradition in particular. The articles are gleaned from two journals published by the Consortium for Classical and Lutheran Education: The Classical Education Quarterly and The Classical Lutheran Education Journal." </span></em><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></p></div><p><em><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>This collection shows how to teach using this educational approach (e.g., music, history, English, writing). It suggest ways that a classical curriculum can be implemented in different contexts, such as in classical schools, homeschools, homeschool/parochial school hybrids, and special education." </span></em><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'> <o:p></o:p></span></p><div><div><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'> <o:p></o:p></span></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>For more information on classical Lutheran education and the work of the Consortium: <a href="http://www.ccle.org/">www.ccle.org</a>. To read Dr. Veith's thoughts in his Foreword, to support the Consortium, and to discover the many articles contained in this collection, consider:<o:p></o:p></span></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal><strong><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'> </span></strong><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></p></div></div><div><p class=MsoNormal><strong><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>A Handbook on Classical Lutheran Education: The Best of the Consortium for Classical and Lutheran Education's Journals<o:p></o:p></span></strong></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><a href="http://astore.amazon.com/theconsortiumforclassicalandlutheraneducation-20/detail/1490589139">http://astore.amazon.com/theconsortiumforclassicalandlutheraneducation-20/detail/1490589139</a><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p></div></div>revpaulcainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16771205236443124884noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3431748583988167965.post-32869534611901081662013-06-29T18:17:00.001-07:002013-06-29T18:17:45.049-07:00FW: Classical education in the news<div class=WordSection1><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'>Click to read on…<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><div><div style='border:none;border-top:solid #B5C4DF 1.0pt;padding:3.0pt 0in 0in 0in'><p class=MsoNormal><b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif"'>Feed:</span></b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif"'> Cranach<br><b>Posted on:</b> Friday, June 28, 2013 3:25 AM<br><b>Author:</b> Gene Veith<br><b>Subject:</b> Classical education in the news<o:p></o:p></span></p></div></div><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><table class=MsoNormalTable border=0 cellspacing=3 cellpadding=0><tr><td style='padding:.75pt .75pt .75pt .75pt'><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Nice sympathetic piece at the CNN education blog about the Classical Christian education movement. From Julia Duin: In Maryland, a group of students ponder which depiction of the Nativity shows true beauty: A 14th-century Giotto, a 16th-century Barocci or a 20th-century William Congdon. The students are in seventh grade. Outside Houston, second-graders learn Latin amid<a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/geneveith/2013/06/classical-education-in-the-news/"> [Read More...]</a><o:p></o:p></span></p></td></tr></table><p><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><br><a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/geneveith/2013/06/classical-education-in-the-news/">View article...</a><o:p></o:p></span></p></div>revpaulcainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16771205236443124884noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3431748583988167965.post-4368243017977400202013-06-29T18:16:00.001-07:002013-06-29T18:16:56.568-07:00FW: The Humanities in a Digital Age: Online Higher Education<div class=WordSection1><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'>Consider…<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><div><div style='border:none;border-top:solid #B5C4DF 1.0pt;padding:3.0pt 0in 0in 0in'><p class=MsoNormal><b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif"'>Feed:</span></b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif"'> The Imaginative Conservative<br><b>Posted on:</b> Thursday, June 27, 2013 11:03 PM<br><b>Author:</b> Daniel McInerny<br><b>Subject:</b> The Humanities in a Digital Age: Online Higher Education<o:p></o:p></span></p></div></div><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><table class=MsoNormalTable border=0 cellspacing=3 cellpadding=0><tr><td style='padding:.75pt .75pt .75pt .75pt'><div id="attachment_7371"><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><a href="http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/school-of-athens-3495.jpeg"><span style='text-decoration:none'><img border=0 width=300 height=176 id="_x0000_i1025" src="http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/school-of-athens-3495-300x176.jpeg" alt="online higher education"></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=wp-caption-text><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Raphael's School of Athens<o:p></o:p></span></p></div><p style='text-align:justify'><strong><i><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>by Daniel McInerny</span></i></strong><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>The humanities in American higher education are in deep crisis, and <a href="http://www.humanitiescommission.org/" target="_blank">the cry of alarm</a> released on June 18 by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences will probably contribute little to a renaissance.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>How deep is the crisis? Here a few warning signals. According to the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/19/arts/humanities-committee-sounds-an-alarm.html" target="_blank"><i>New York Times</i></a>, a recent report shows that only 20% of undergraduates at Harvard now major in the humanities. And in another report showing statistics for 2010, only 7.6 percent of bachelor's degrees nationwide were awarded in the humanities.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>The <i>Times</i> recalls for us, too, that last fall a task force organized by Florida governor Rick Scott caused a national outcry when it recommended that state universities charge higher tuition to students majoring in fields—like anthropology or English—less likely to lead to jobs.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>As a former academic, I can add my own first-hand experience of the declining role of the humanities in American higher education. Many students simply don't see the need for a course in philosophy (my former field) when all they really want to do is get on with their major and get out into the workforce.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>The humanities themselves, as they are generally practiced throughout academia, surely deserve the lion's share of the blame for the crisis. For decades now they have failed to make a compelling case for their centrality to a happy and productive life. They have indulged a passion for skepticism, materialism, nihilism, and one or two other noxious <i>isms</i> that one can find catalogued and critiqued in Blessed Pope John Paul II's encyclical, <i>Fides et Ratio</i>, and in so doing they have, perhaps unwittingly, consigned themselves to irrelevance.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>So what's going to happen to the humanities in our culture? Will they simply continue their free fall into obsolescence?<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>If I may play futurist for a moment, I'd like to offer a conjecture or two.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>First, those institutions sufficiently self-possessed to continue to offer a curriculum unabashedly centered on the Western tradition of the humanities—that is, an integrated curriculum focused on the search for a truth not reducible to human choice or cultural convention—will, by and large, continue to survive and perhaps even flourish. I believe that those Catholic institutions eager to play the role of happy culture warrior will tend to do best of all, as their understanding of the humanities is the richest and most intellectually coherent. But more and more these institutions will become outliers, though bravery grounded in truth will always inspire a following.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Second, students at mainstream secular institutions, or at religious institutions aping whom they mistakenly take to be their betters, will continue to drift away from the humanities and into more "job friendly" lines of study, or away from academia altogether. Undergraduate education in the United States will become, even more than it is today, elaborate and rather expensive job training. And it will begin to dawn on more and more students, as it has already begun to do, that one can bootstrap a career or business without having to go through the hassle and expense of college.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>So will this mean the end of the humanities for all but a slim minority?<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Perhaps so. And yet, though the humanities will always have to fight for their place within any culture, they fortunately have human nature as their greatest ally. As Horace said, you can throw nature out with a pitchfork, but it will always come running back. Human beings are made for the truth, and that desire will always find expression, in one form or another.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>One form in which that desire is finding expression today is in the growing popularity of online higher education. <i>Money Magazine</i> did a fascinating story in its May issue on the rise of the MOOC, or massive open online course, which is generally a free course offered by an elite institution or private company that can draw as many as tens of thousands of students.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>There are pedagogical problems with MOOCs, of course, notably the lack of student-teacher interaction and low percentage of students who actually complete such courses. But they signal a trend that will only, I believe, keep picking up steam. Digital technology puts tremendous and attractive power in the hands of individuals. A chief feature of that attractiveness is the ability to enjoy more experiences cheaply and on demand, whether that experience be a movie or the study of history. A future in which more and more students are engaging in intellectual pursuits, including the humanities, via laptops and smart phones seems inescapable.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>This does not mean, however, that every online offering must take the form of the MOOC. But neither does it mean that every online course must be offered for credit—think of the kind of theological and cultural formation that Father Robert Barron is doing with his hugely popular <i>Word on Fire</i> ministry. Yet whatever the structure of the course, I predict that in a not-too-distant future more students will be studying the humanities via digital devices than in brick-and-ivy institutions. The great conversation will transfer in large part to what John Paul II called the "Areopagus" of modern digital media.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Purists may blanche at the prospect. But it is well to keep in mind where the humanities in the Western tradition more or less got started: with Socrates asking questions of his fellow citizens, not around a seminar table, but in familiar places like a market, a banquet, or a gymnasium.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>That is, wherever folks happened to congregate.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><i><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Books mentioned in this essay may be found in <em><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>The Imaginative Conservative </span></em><a href="http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/the-imaginative-conservative-bookstore/" target="_blank">Bookstore</a>. Essays by Dr. McInerny may be found </span></i><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><a href="http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/author/daniel-mcinerny/" target="_blank"><i>here</i></a><i>.</i><o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='text-align:justify'><i><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Daniel McInerny is author of the darkly comic thriller, </span></i><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><a href="http://astore.amazon.com/theimaginativeconservative-20/detail/B007VC2UGM" target="_blank"><i>High Concepts: A Hollywood Nightmare</i></a><i>, as well as the founder and CEO of Trojan Tub Entertainment, a children's entertainment company featuring his humorous Kingdom of Patria stories for middle grade readers. A native of South Bend, Indiana, he holds a PhD in philosophy and taught for many years at various universities in the United States. He now lives in Virginia with his wife Amy and three children, Lucy, Rita, and Francis. He blogs on the craft of storytelling at </i><a href="http://thecomicmuse.com/" target="_blank"><i>The Comic Muse</i></a><i>.</i><o:p></o:p></span></p><p><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>The post <a href="http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/the-humanities-in-a-digital-age-online-higher-education/">The Humanities in a Digital Age: Online Higher Education</a> appeared first on <a href="http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org">The Imaginative Conservative</a>.<o:p></o:p></span></p></td></tr></table><p><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><br><a href="http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/the-humanities-in-a-digital-age-online-higher-education/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-humanities-in-a-digital-age-online-higher-education">View article...</a><o:p></o:p></span></p></div>revpaulcainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16771205236443124884noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3431748583988167965.post-79865272105624955582013-06-27T14:52:00.000-07:002013-06-27T14:53:02.684-07:00FW: Parents, Education, the Church, and the State<div class=WordSection1><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'>Phillips…<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><div><div style='border:none;border-top:solid #B5C4DF 1.0pt;padding:3.0pt 0in 0in 0in'><p class=MsoNormal><b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif"'>Feed:</span></b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif"'> Historia et Memoria<br><b>Posted on:</b> Thursday, June 27, 2013 3:51 PM<br><b>Author:</b> Matthew Phillips<br><b>Subject:</b> Parents, Education, the Church, and the State<o:p></o:p></span></p></div></div><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><table class=MsoNormalTable border=0 cellspacing=3 cellpadding=0><tr><td style='padding:.75pt .75pt .75pt .75pt'><p><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>"The right of the Church to have schools is entirely in concord with the right of parents to educate their children. What is incumbent upon the parents in all questions of natural life is incumbent upon the Church with regard to the supernatural life. <strong><i><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'> Parents are prior to the state, and their rights were always and still are, acknowledged by the Church. </span></i></strong> The prerogative of parents to educate their children cannot be disputed by the state, since it is the parents who give life to the child. They feed the child and clothe it. The child's life is, as it were, the continuation of theirs. Hence it is their right to demand that their children are educated according to their faith and their religious outlook.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p><strong><i><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>It is their right to withhold their children from schools where their religious convictions are not only disregarded but even made the object of contempt and ridicule.</span></i></strong><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'> It was this parental right which German parents felt was violated when the Hitler government deprived them of their denominational schools. The children came home from the new schools like little heathens, who smiled derisively or laughed at the prayers of their parents.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>You Hungarian parents will likewise feel a violation of your fundamental rights if your children can no longer attend the Catholic schools solely because the dictatorial State closes down our schools by a brutal edict or renders their work impossible." Josef Cardinal Mindszenty, "Statement given on May 20, 1946," in <em><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>The Heritage of World Civilizations</span></em>, 8th ed. Vol.2, p. 1022. [Emphasis added]<o:p></o:p></span></p><p><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Josef Mindszenty, a Roman Catholic priest, became Primate of Hungary and then Cardinal in the mid-1940s. He spoke against Communist oppression of the Roman Catholic Church and their Socialist expropriation of Church schools in the 1940s. The Communist officials imprisoned him from 1948 to 1956. During the Hungarian Revolution he was released, but he sought asylum in the US Embassy in Budapest where remained for 15 years.<o:p></o:p></span></p></td></tr></table><p><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><br><a href="http://wp.cune.edu/matthewphillips/2013/06/27/parents-education-the-church-and-the-state/">View article...</a><o:p></o:p></span></p></div>revpaulcainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16771205236443124884noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3431748583988167965.post-92212670563379986712013-06-05T08:20:00.001-07:002013-06-05T08:20:54.391-07:00Highly Recommended!<div class=WordSection1><p class=MsoNormal>New from Cheryl Swope (with a recommendation and Foreword by Dr. Veith):<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/geneveith/2013/06/the-best-book-on-classical-education/#more-15661">http://www.patheos.com/blogs/geneveith/2013/06/the-best-book-on-classical-education/#more-15661</a><o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>The Rev. Paul J Cain<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><a href="mailto:revpaulcain@gmail.com">revpaulcain@gmail.com</a> <span style='font-family:"Trebuchet MS","sans-serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal>Pastor, Immanuel Lutheran Church (LCMS)<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Headmaster, Martin Luther Grammar School (CCLE)<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Sheridan, WY <o:p></o:p></p></div>revpaulcainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16771205236443124884noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3431748583988167965.post-28696311774605253782013-06-03T13:53:00.001-07:002013-06-03T13:53:03.469-07:00FW: New MP Book: Simply Classical<div class=WordSection1><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'>Simply Classical…<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><div><div style='border:none;border-top:solid #B5C4DF 1.0pt;padding:3.0pt 0in 0in 0in'><p class=MsoNormal><b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif"'>From:</span></b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif"'> Memoria Press [mailto:magister=memoriapress.com@mail15.wdc01.mcdlv.net] <b>On Behalf Of </b>Memoria Press<br><b>Sent:</b> Monday, June 03, 2013 2:36 PM<br><b>To:</b> Rev. Paul J Cain<br><b>Subject:</b> New MP Book: Simply Classical<o:p></o:p></span></p></div></div><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><table class=MsoNormalTable border=0 cellspacing=0 cellpadding=0 width="100%" style='width:100.0%;background:white'><tr><td valign=top style='padding:.75pt .75pt .75pt .75pt'><div align=center><table class=MsoNormalTable border=0 cellspacing=0 cellpadding=0 width=600 style='width:5.0in'><tr><td style='padding:0in 0in 0in 0in'><table class=MsoNormalTable border=0 cellspacing=0 cellpadding=0 width=600 style='width:5.0in'><tr><td style='background:#FFFFCC;padding:0in 0in 0in 0in'><div><p class=MsoNormal align=center style='text-align:center;line-height:200%'><span style='font-size:7.5pt;line-height:200%;font-family:"Verdana","sans-serif";color:#663300'>Email not displaying correctly? <a href="http://us1.campaign-archive1.com/?u=bcf10ed4c83f36b57403fbd09&id=175125ba83&e=33ff928fde"><span style='color:#663300;text-decoration:none'>View it in your browser.</span></a> <o:p></o:p></span></p></div></td></tr><tr><td style='background:white;padding:0in 0in 0in 0in'><p class=MsoNormal align=center style='text-align:center'><span style='font-size:22.5pt;font-family:"Verdana","sans-serif";color:#333333'><a href="http://MemoriaPress.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=bcf10ed4c83f36b57403fbd09&id=06a1aec739&e=33ff928fde"><span style='text-decoration:none'><img border=0 width=600 height=64 id="_x0000_i1025" src="http://gallery.mailchimp.com/bcf10ed4c83f36b57403fbd09/images/MP_logo_text.1.1.png" alt="Memoria Press"></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></p></td></tr></table><p class=MsoNormal><span style='display:none'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><table class=MsoNormalTable border=0 cellspacing=0 cellpadding=0 width=600 style='width:5.0in'><tr><td valign=top style='background:white;padding:15.0pt 15.0pt 15.0pt 15.0pt'><p style='line-height:150%'><span style='font-size:9.0pt;line-height:150%;font-family:"Verdana","sans-serif";color:#333333'><a href="http://MemoriaPress.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=bcf10ed4c83f36b57403fbd09&id=ec42edff40&e=33ff928fde" target="_self"><span style='text-decoration:none'><img border=0 width=103 height=154 id="_x0000_i1026" src="http://gallery.mailchimp.com/bcf10ed4c83f36b57403fbd09/images/Simply_Classical_web.gif" alt="Simply Classical: A Beautiful Education for Any Child"></span></a><strong><span style='font-family:"Verdana","sans-serif"'>New book from Memoria Press: <a href="http://MemoriaPress.us1.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=bcf10ed4c83f36b57403fbd09&id=3aa833589c&e=33ff928fde" target="_self"><span style='font-weight:normal'>Simply Classical: A Beautiful Education for Any Child</span></a></span></strong><br>Cheryl Swope's new book, <a href="http://MemoriaPress.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=bcf10ed4c83f36b57403fbd09&id=d3d21672a8&e=33ff928fde" target="_self">Simply Classical: A Beautiful Education for Any Child</a>, is ostensibly about special education. She writes about her own experiences with two adopted special needs children she taught classically, but she also makes one of the clearest and most compelling cases for classical education in print.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:150%'><span style='font-size:9.0pt;line-height:150%;font-family:"Verdana","sans-serif";color:#333333'>The first argument of the book is that academically-challenged students are human beings too, and they deserve an education commensurate with that fact. While current special education doctrine favors compromising on content, Cheryl proposes only to moderate its measure. If a child cannot accommodate the amount or depth of knowledge of most children, it is not <i>less</i>, but <i>more </i>important that what they learn be of the highest quality. She implicitly understands St. Thomas Aquinas' principle that the slightest knowledge of the greatest things is greater than the greatest knowledge of the slightest things.<br><br>Her second argument is that it <i>has <em><span style='font-family:"Verdana","sans-serif"'>been </span></em></i>done and <i>can <em><span style='font-family:"Verdana","sans-serif"'>be </span></em></i>done. How many people know that Helen Keller had a classical education? And if a person who was blind and deaf could achieve what she achieved, how much more can a student do who faces less severe challenges? Cheryl shows how, in an important sense, classical education can open the eyes of the blind and unstop the ears of the deaf.<br><br>Want a sneak preview? Click <a href="http://MemoriaPress.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=bcf10ed4c83f36b57403fbd09&id=894dabef8b&e=33ff928fde" target="_self">here</a>.<o:p></o:p></span></p><div class=MsoNormal align=center style='text-align:center;line-height:150%'><span style='font-size:9.0pt;line-height:150%;font-family:"Verdana","sans-serif";color:#333333'><hr size=3 width="100%" align=center></span></div><p style='line-height:150%'><span style='font-size:9.0pt;line-height:150%;font-family:"Verdana","sans-serif";color:#333333'><a href="http://MemoriaPress.us1.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=bcf10ed4c83f36b57403fbd09&id=fb129ab1c7&e=33ff928fde" target="_blank"><span style='text-decoration:none'><img border=0 width=236 height=56 id="_x0000_i1028" src="http://gallery.mailchimp.com/bcf10ed4c83f36b57403fbd09/images/conference2013_banner.jpg" alt="Classical Education Conference 2013"></span></a><strong><span style='font-family:"Verdana","sans-serif"'>Memoria Press Summer Conference: Less than 50 spots left!</span></strong><o:p></o:p></span></p><div><p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:150%'><span style='font-size:9.0pt;line-height:150%;font-family:"Verdana","sans-serif";color:#333333'>Just imagine this scenario: You are sitting at your dining room table sipping your morning coffee on Wednesday, June 11. You see the advertisement for the <a href="http://MemoriaPress.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=bcf10ed4c83f36b57403fbd09&id=1892f647cd&e=33ff928fde" target="_self">MP Classical Ed Conference</a> from June 12-14 in <a href="http://MemoriaPress.us1.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=bcf10ed4c83f36b57403fbd09&id=bc28de4fac&e=33ff928fde" target="_self"><em><span style='font-family:"Verdana","sans-serif"'>The Classical Teacher</span></em></a> magazine (which you read religiously every morning) and realize that you have <em><span style='font-family:"Verdana","sans-serif"'>completely </span></em>forgotten about it.<br><br>You buy plane tickets. You pack your bags and bolt out of the house in a panic.<br><br>You blow through airport security, run to your gate, hop on the plane, and anxiously tap your fingers on your tray table to the severe annoyance of the passenger in the seat in front of you. Once you land, you mow down the passengers in the forward rows who have the temerity to get in your way. You get a rental car and reach speeds so fast the police can't even see you.<br><br>You arrive at the registration desk, out of breath, and realize ... YOU FORGOT TO REGISTER. There are no more spots available. No New American Cursive Workshop. No First Form Latin Workshop. No Traditional Logic Workshop. And you completely missed the Classical Composition Seminar on Wednesday.<br><br>Bummer.<br><br>In reality, we might just let you in anyway because we admire your spunk. But don't risk it! <a href="http://MemoriaPress.us1.list-manage2.com/track/click?u=bcf10ed4c83f36b57403fbd09&id=3e30da7eeb&e=33ff928fde" target="_self">Register now!</a><o:p></o:p></span></p><div class=MsoNormal align=center style='text-align:center;line-height:150%'><span style='font-size:9.0pt;line-height:150%;font-family:"Verdana","sans-serif";color:#333333'><hr size=3 width="100%" align=center></span></div><p style='line-height:150%'><span style='font-size:9.0pt;line-height:150%;font-family:"Verdana","sans-serif";color:#333333'><a href="http://MemoriaPress.us1.list-manage2.com/track/click?u=bcf10ed4c83f36b57403fbd09&id=0c2e66df14&e=33ff928fde"><span style='text-decoration:none'><img border=0 width=106 height=112 id="_x0000_i1030" src="http://gallery.mailchimp.com/bcf10ed4c83f36b57403fbd09/images/MP_Logo_Blue_text.jpg" alt="Memoria Press Online Academy"></span></a><strong><span style='font-family:"Verdana","sans-serif"'>Online classes are filling up fast!</span></strong><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:150%'><span style='font-size:9.0pt;line-height:150%;font-family:"Verdana","sans-serif";color:#333333'>Don't get left out in the educational cold!<o:p></o:p></span></p><div><p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:150%'><span style='font-size:9.0pt;line-height:150%;font-family:"Verdana","sans-serif";color:#333333'><br>The list of <a href="http://MemoriaPress.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=bcf10ed4c83f36b57403fbd09&id=882989fcf7&e=33ff928fde" target="_self">online classes</a> that are full is getting longer: Sections in AP American History, Classical Studies I, AP American History. Others are filling up. We are able to open new sections of some of these classes, but some of them will be closing for good.<br><br>The good news is that we still have many open classes in <a href="http://MemoriaPress.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=bcf10ed4c83f36b57403fbd09&id=7da1a0a1cf&e=33ff928fde" target="_self">Latin</a>, <a href="http://MemoriaPress.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=bcf10ed4c83f36b57403fbd09&id=399a89636a&e=33ff928fde" target="_self">Logic</a>, <a href="http://MemoriaPress.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=bcf10ed4c83f36b57403fbd09&id=675648d2d4&e=33ff928fde" target="_self">Composition</a>, and <a href="http://MemoriaPress.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=bcf10ed4c83f36b57403fbd09&id=036b22eabf&e=33ff928fde" target="_self">Classical Studies</a>. We've even added more classes from one of our most popular instructors: Brandon Nygaard. But they're still filling up!<br> <o:p></o:p></span></p></div><p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:150%'><span style='font-size:9.0pt;line-height:150%;font-family:"Verdana","sans-serif";color:#333333'>Our Summer Logic Camp is full and spots in our <a href="http://MemoriaPress.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=bcf10ed4c83f36b57403fbd09&id=0f55024fd0&e=33ff928fde" target="_blank">summer literature seminars</a> are also getting increasingly hard to come by. <a href="http://MemoriaPress.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=bcf10ed4c83f36b57403fbd09&id=606b87054a&e=33ff928fde" target="_blank">Dickens' <em><span style='font-family:"Verdana","sans-serif"'>Bleak House</span></em></a> (with Martin Cothran) and <a href="http://MemoriaPress.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=bcf10ed4c83f36b57403fbd09&id=32ae6299ff&e=33ff928fde" target="_blank">Steinbeck's <em><span style='font-family:"Verdana","sans-serif"'>Grapes of Wrath</span></em></a> (with Paul Cable) are filling up and there are only nine more spots in <a href="http://MemoriaPress.us1.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=bcf10ed4c83f36b57403fbd09&id=a41f703a13&e=33ff928fde" target="_self">Dostoevsky's </a><em><span style='font-family:"Verdana","sans-serif"'><a href="http://MemoriaPress.us1.list-manage2.com/track/click?u=bcf10ed4c83f36b57403fbd09&id=6078e6ea34&e=33ff928fde">Crime & Punishment</a> (Blake McKinney)</span></em>. <br><br><a href="http://MemoriaPress.us1.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=bcf10ed4c83f36b57403fbd09&id=15ed4f61ff&e=33ff928fde" target="_self">Enroll Now.</a><o:p></o:p></span></p></div></td></tr><tr><td valign=top style='background:#CCCCCC;padding:15.0pt 15.0pt 15.0pt 15.0pt'><div><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:7.5pt;font-family:"Verdana","sans-serif";color:#333333'>You are receiving this email because you contacted us at www.memoriapress.com<br><br><a href="http://MemoriaPress.us1.list-manage2.com/unsubscribe?u=bcf10ed4c83f36b57403fbd09&id=072ad3909f&e=33ff928fde&c=175125ba83">Unsubscribe</a> revpaulcain@gmail.com from this list | <a href="http://us1.forward-to-friend1.com/forward?u=bcf10ed4c83f36b57403fbd09&id=175125ba83&e=33ff928fde">Forward to a friend</a> | <a href="http://MemoriaPress.us1.list-manage.com/profile?u=bcf10ed4c83f36b57403fbd09&id=072ad3909f&e=33ff928fde">Update your profile</a> <br><strong><span style='font-family:"Verdana","sans-serif"'>Our mailing address is:</span></strong><o:p></o:p></span></p><div><p class=MsoNormal><span class=org><span style='font-size:7.5pt;font-family:"Verdana","sans-serif";color:#333333'>Memoria Press</span></span><span style='font-size:7.5pt;font-family:"Verdana","sans-serif";color:#333333'><o:p></o:p></span></p><div><div><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:7.5pt;font-family:"Verdana","sans-serif";color:#333333'>4603 Poplar Level Rd<o:p></o:p></span></p></div><p class=MsoNormal><span class=locality><span style='font-size:7.5pt;font-family:"Verdana","sans-serif";color:#333333'>Louisville</span></span><span style='font-size:7.5pt;font-family:"Verdana","sans-serif";color:#333333'>, <span class=region>KY</span> <span class=postal-code>40213</span><o:p></o:p></span></p></div><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:7.5pt;font-family:"Verdana","sans-serif";color:#333333'><br><a href="http://MemoriaPress.us1.list-manage.com/vcard?u=bcf10ed4c83f36b57403fbd09&id=072ad3909f">Add us to your address book</a><o:p></o:p></span></p></div><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:7.5pt;font-family:"Verdana","sans-serif";color:#333333'><br><em><span style='font-family:"Verdana","sans-serif"'>Copyright (C) 2009 Memoria Press All rights reserved.</span></em><o:p></o:p></span></p></div></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></div></td></tr></table><p class=MsoNormal><img border=0 width=1 height=1 id="_x0000_i1031" src="http://MemoriaPress.us1.list-manage.com/track/open.php?u=bcf10ed4c83f36b57403fbd09&id=175125ba83&e=33ff928fde"><o:p></o:p></p></div>revpaulcainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16771205236443124884noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3431748583988167965.post-34177609234086683342013-04-18T07:16:00.001-07:002013-04-18T07:16:14.352-07:00FW: Book Review: The Art of Freedom - WSJ.com<div class=WordSection1><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'>On Classical Education…<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><div><div style='border:none;border-top:solid #B5C4DF 1.0pt;padding:3.0pt 0in 0in 0in'><p class=MsoNormal><b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif"'>From:</span></b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif"'> revpaulcain <br><b>Subject:</b> Book Review: The Art of Freedom - WSJ.com<o:p></o:p></span></p></div></div><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323701904578276400317744968.html">http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323701904578276400317744968.html</a><o:p></o:p></p><div><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p></div></div>revpaulcainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16771205236443124884noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3431748583988167965.post-4567121332827080662013-04-11T09:58:00.001-07:002013-04-11T09:58:07.185-07:00FW: Building my brain furniture through the classics<div class=WordSection1><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'>Classical Education in WORLD magazine…<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><div><div style='border:none;border-top:solid #B5C4DF 1.0pt;padding:3.0pt 0in 0in 0in'><p class=MsoNormal><b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif"'>Feed:</span></b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif"'> WORLDmag.com<br><b>Posted on:</b> Thursday, April 11, 2013 10:53 AM<br><b>Author:</b> Chelsea Kolz<br><b>Subject:</b> Building my brain furniture through the classics<o:p></o:p></span></p></div></div><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><table class=MsoNormalTable border=0 cellspacing=3 cellpadding=0><tr><td style='padding:.75pt .75pt .75pt .75pt'><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>An old roommate told me that if one walks late into a conversation, one should listen for 15 minutes before speaking. The principle serves as a good metaphor for education, much as I hate to admit it. Because getting educated means preparing to join a very old, very big conversation. It takes patience. I met this peculiar thing called "classical education" my senior year of public high school, just about the time I was teaching myself to paint and to love classic rock 'n' roll. <o:p></o:p></span></p></td></tr></table><p><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><br><a href="http://www.worldmag.com/2013/04/building_my_brain_furniture_through_classical_education">View article...</a><o:p></o:p></span></p></div>revpaulcainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16771205236443124884noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3431748583988167965.post-6301951542041417572013-03-11T08:42:00.001-07:002013-03-11T08:42:28.248-07:00FW: Steadfast in Education: Why Lutheran Schools and Why Lutheran Teachers?<div class=WordSection1><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'>Pr. Hinton…<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><div><div style='border:none;border-top:solid #B5C4DF 1.0pt;padding:3.0pt 0in 0in 0in'><p class=MsoNormal><b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif"'>Feed:</span></b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif"'> Steadfast Lutherans<br><b>Posted on:</b> Saturday, March 09, 2013 7:36 AM<br><b>Author:</b> Pastor Daniel Hinton<br><b>Subject:</b> Steadfast in Education: Why Lutheran Schools and Why Lutheran Teachers?<o:p></o:p></span></p></div></div><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><table class=MsoNormalTable border=0 cellspacing=3 cellpadding=0><tr><td style='padding:.75pt .75pt .75pt .75pt'><p><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><a href="http://steadfastlutherans.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/rose-e1362819743687.jpg"><span style='text-decoration:none'><img border=0 width=300 height=300 id="_x0000_i1025" src="http://steadfastlutherans.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/rose-300x300.jpg" alt=rose></span></a>Why do we need Lutheran schools? Why do Lutheran schools need Lutheran teachers? Though these are simple questions, their answers get at the whole reason that the extensive system of Lutheran schools exists in the first place. Lutherans in North America have been school-builders from the beginning. In fact, the opportunity to establish schools apart from the purview of the State was at least as enticing to these first Lutheran immigrants from Europe as freedom from a state religion.</span><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></p><p><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>But why? After all, schools are a lot of work. All the planning, budgeting, instruction, assessment, recordkeeping — operating a school requires immense sacrifice of time and money on the part of the congregation. Yet in spite of all that, Lutherans (especially those most interested in a confessional identity) have insisted upon operating schools all across the country. So what drove them to establish all these and work tirelessly to keep them open?<o:p></o:p></span></p><p><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Put simply, <strong><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>it's all about the gospel</span></strong>. Lots of other sorts of schools can teach lots of different things. Any school can teach children to behave and to be good boys and girls. Any school can dig deep into the wisdom of the ancient Greeks — in fact, there is much we all could learn from the founders of Western civilization. Any school can teach citizenship and character and morality. But all of that is of the Law, and we Lutherans know better than anyone that while the Law is good and wise, it lacks the power to save.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>It is wise for us to ask the question "What problem is the school designed to solve?" Naturalists like John Dewey would say that the primary problem that a school is designed to solve is that of ignorance of the world. We Christians, in contrast, might concede that a child ought to know something of the world, but that knowledge is of secondary importance when compared to the gospel, which alone can save us from death. In fact, ignorance is not the greatest problem facing man — death is. All worldly knowledge cannot fix death. Only the gospel of Jesus Christ saves sinful man from sin and death. Lutheran schools do teach math, grammar, and history — and many of them do so quite well. But above all, Lutheran schools proclaim this gospel — that Jesus Christ has taken away death and sin and hell by His atoning death. Many students in Lutheran schools don't get to hear that on Sunday morning. Many of the children in Lutheran schools are members of the congregation who attend the Divine Service faithfully — but they still need to hear what God has done for them in Christ.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Lutheran schools are in the business of preparing young people for the Last Day when the dead are raised and the saints in Christ stand with Him in eternal peace and bliss. The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews asks, "How shall we escape if we neglect such a great salvation?" Christians must contend with fallen flesh, the world, and the devil — all of whom would snatch the precious gift of eternal life from us were it not for the Spirit's work through this gospel to keep us firm in the faith until that Day.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>But why Lutheran? After all, there are lots of other Christian schools and Christian teachers. Why does Lutheran identity matter? Simply put, it is when Lutheran schools are staffed with Lutheran teachers that the gospel has the best chance of being proclaimed in its purity. (For the record, the word "Lutheran" here refers more to one's actual confession than simply on which roster one's name appears.) To be sure, there are lots of Christian schools and Christian teachers and they are dedicated and sincere. But any adulteration of the gospel runs the risk of the Christian doubting — or worse, in causing him to trust someone or something other than Christ for his eternal salvation. The world thinks this is unloving, but it's why Lutheran schools ought to be for Lutheran teachers. No one else confesses justification the same as the Fourth Article of the Augsburg Confession. No one else's theology is designed to reflect salvation by grace alone through faith alone in all its articles. No other theology ought to be taught in our schools, and the way to ensure this is twofold: First, the pastor ought to oversee the theological curriculum and instruction of the school (if not outright do all the instruction himself). Second, teachers ought to hold to the confession of the Evangelical Lutheran churches (and remain diligent in the study of that confession) so that any time theological matters are discussed in class, students can be directed to the saving gospel of Jesus Christ.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>They seem like simple questions, and they are. But like so many simple questions, they matter a lot. Lutheran schools, at their best, deliver the gospel to students and strengthen them for the Last Day when the dead are raised and the saints stand with the Lord. And it's precisely for that reason that Lutheran schools ought to care about an unapologetically Lutheran identity.<o:p></o:p></span></p></td></tr></table><p><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><br><a href="http://steadfastlutherans.org/?p=27928">View article...</a><o:p></o:p></span></p></div>revpaulcainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16771205236443124884noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3431748583988167965.post-29745712330849337102013-02-23T20:09:00.001-08:002013-02-23T20:09:55.842-08:00The Consortium for Classical and Lutheran Education :: XIII<a href="http://www.ccle.org/index.php?cID=90#.USmSaEx-XQJ.blogger">Register and pay online for CCLE XIII</a><br />
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revpaulcainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16771205236443124884noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3431748583988167965.post-1320963248470382162013-02-14T13:01:00.001-08:002013-02-14T13:01:25.719-08:00FW: [ClassicalLutheranHomeschoolers] Issues, Etc<div class=WordSection1><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'> <o:p></o:p></span></p><div><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>Tomorrow, Feb. 15, Issues, Etc. will feature Rev. Dr. Steven Hein on classical Lutheran education @ 4pm CST.<o:p></o:p></span></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'> <o:p></o:p></span></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal><em><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>Consortium for Classical and Lutheran Education</span></em><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'><a href="http://www.ccle.org/">www.ccle.org</a> <o:p></o:p></span></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'> <o:p></o:p></span></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'> </span><span style='color:white'><o:p></o:p></span></p></div></div>revpaulcainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16771205236443124884noreply@blogger.com