The Fallen Dove of Critical Theory
The Monk Among the Critics, Part II
From Chesterton’s “Dumb Ox”
Yes; in spite of the contrasts that are as conspicuous and even comic as the comparison between the fat man and the thin man, the tall man and the short: in spite of the contrast between the vagabond and the student, between the apprentice and the aristocrat, between the book-hater and the book-lover, between the
We Don’t Get It, Part II: Why Speakest Thou in Parables?
Last time I wrote I considered how Jesus was, by contemporary standards, a bad teacher. His disciples didn’t always immediately “get it,” and at times his public lecturing seemed to drive away more students than it attracted. His ability to properly “motivate” students could potentially come under scrutiny as well. And Jesus seems quite content
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We Don’t Get It, Part I: Good Teacher, Fix My Student
Meditations on Jesus as Teacher
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Grades and the end of the quarter
You knew it was coming. It comes every quarter. But predictability doesn’t make it any easier. Every time we approach grades, I often end up asking myself existential questions. Why? What’s it all for? What do grades mean anyway? The wherefore hits home when one considers that although we classical educators philosophically oppose scienticism and
The Rhetoric of Homer: Finding the Bard in the Poetry
We moderns seem to question the identity of all the bards. Shakespeare. The scop of Beowulf. Or the skáld of the Eddic sagas. But the question of Homer’s identity seems to be a field of study all to itself. We shouldn’t be surprised to find academic journals entirely devoted to positing new theories of who
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Shame involves the Other
We often hear childhood described as a “time of innocence.” But it would be misleading to compare Adam and Eve’s situation with that of children. The words of Genesis 2:25, “they felt no shame,” don’t express a lack development, but a fullness. They indicate that Adam and Eve had a full understanding of the meaning
Christopher Hitchens was right about the King James Bible
Personally, I am not a KJV-only-person, especially not out of some sectarian commitment. But in the midst of a myriad of publishers seeking to market the Scriptures and amid the theological concerns for accuracy and psychological concerns regarding ease, Christopher Hitchens offers insight especially helpful for our task as educators, especially those of the Rhetoric
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Crede ut Intelligas: Love, Belief, Sight and Poetic Knowledge
Seeing is believing. Or so the maxim goes. But the senses can fail you too, as anyone who’s ever dreamed dreams knows. He who doubts the creation cannot himself be a creator. This is why Descartes could never have been a poet. Even if he had been visited by the muse, most likely the results
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“The Higher Naiveté” and the Revolution of Modern Learning
At the end of last school year, Joshua Gibbs suggested some of the benefits to our technological age. In a lecture on the Dark Ages of Greece, Yale professor Donald Kagan explains his gullibility towards the ancients: …Well, prior to the late eighteenth century when German scholars began to look at the Homeric poems specifically,
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Credulitas, Part III: Children, Belief, and the Medicine of Faith
It is true that we are to “take all thoughts captive to the obedience of Christ.” But sometimes this injunction seems to mingle all too easily with Modern skepticism. Christians, for instance, will readily acknowledge “belief” in God; some of them can perhaps even articulate those beliefs in the creeds. But the willingness to believe
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