Coming from Northern California, where my beloved Pacific Ocean is often a murky green or fathomless purple-gray, I always found the “wine-dark” seas of Homer resonant, fitting; until I remembered that Homer was writing about the sparkling blue gemstone that is the Mediterranean, set within its circlet of land. Wine-dark? Simple scansion cannot account for […]
My husband and I have spent more time walking in our neighborhood together since March of 2020, when much of our city shut down. Rooting ourselves more deeply to home and place has been an unexpected blessing. The streets in our corner of the neighborhood are named after people and places from The Lord of
Tolkien, Rowling, and Homer: Something Worth Living For Read More »
I am reading Homer. Each day, I pick up the book and think of a beautiful thing I share with all people who read Homer: time to read Homer. Several things are needful for a contemplative life, and all of them plague me with guilt. For a quiet place, a quiet mind, and a worthy
A common theme I encounter in conversations with other home educators each spring, and often into the summer months, concerns preparation for the upcoming year. I’ve been classically homeschooling for over twenty-five years, and the liturgy of this assessing and planning season is an integral part of my own life, too—as fundamental to it as
Inside the Outside: Tactical and Strategic Planning Read More »
We often get asked about the best books on education. So I asked around the office a bit. Here’s what some of the folks on our team had to say. Classical Q&A: What Are the Best Books on Education? from CiRCE TV on Vimeo.
My students often blush at the irony of the image of Odysseus’ marriage bed for Odysseus himself hardly deserves the appellation “faithful” – but is there more to it than meets the eye?
This generation, with all its access and opportunity, advocates destruction rather than creation, and erases its past rather than building upon it. So what should do?
It is not hard to sympathize with Simone Weil’s famous claim that “the true hero . . . of the Iliad is force.” The Prologue announces the action of the poem to be Achilles’s “wrath” and its repercussions, which include myriad d’algea—a “myriad of pains”—heaped on the heroes. And there are, indeed, a myriad of
What Should We Do with the Violence in the Iliad? Read More »
We need models. We need teachers to show us how to live. And some of the best teachers are those which have never breathed, have never taken on flesh, have never had the urgency of a real death. Some of our best teachers are fictional characters. This is what Leland Ryken means when he says
Advent Like Telemachus: Homeric Lessons for Celebrating Advent Read More »
