“Because I could not stop for death, he kindly stopped for me.” These words are perhaps so familiar to us that we might miss the offense it bears against the meaning of Easter. (A meaning we should still contemplate in the Paschal season.) For Emily Dickinson death actually turns out to be quite the gentlemen, […]
Like it or not, a kind of Lent has greeted everyone this season, albeit in the forms of forced social-distancing and the compulsory self-denial of certain goods or activities. (Blessed are they who have trampolines?) For Christians who don’t observe the historic church practice, consider it a forced Lent. For those who do observe Lent,
A dialogue with a parent, regarding the practice of confessing sins at Morning Prayer (the form of which is taken from the Book of Common Prayer). It’s early. Sunlight pours into the riparian valley on which the campus of the classical Christian school sits. The Rhetoric School begins to gather at the doors of the
What grievous sin have students committed by 8 o’clock in the morning? Read More »
In That Hideous Strength, C.S. Lewis tells the story of Mark Studdock, a servile man who ironically comes to realize his true freedom in the limitation of a jail cell. However unpleasant it may be, we have it on good authority that “being at close quarters with death” can actually be good medicine for the
Why Leisure Can Save You from Hell (Or, Don’t Go to Lunch Just Yet) Read More »
So your students can give the right answers with deference and aplomb. They can promote with articulate clarity the correct worldview. And when they graduate, top of the class, their erudition will no doubt attract the most selective colleges. But what about their habits and tastes? What happens when our students end up listening only
The Real and the Fake (Or Why Rhetoric Schools Matter) Read More »
It’s sometimes easy to smile cynically at the Romantics of the nineteenth century, to dismiss their desire to receive the “greatest delight which the fields and woods minister.” But there were plenty who even over a century ago felt the need to slow down, to go into the woods, “live deliberately,” and “drive life into
Where Augustus commanded everyone in the antique Roman world to be enrolled into the city of man, the New Testament authors turn this idea toward a higher civilization.
Blessed are they who cannot easily explain their child’s classical education
Without a transcendent or even Platonic vision of the Good, modern science can become a modern séance.
