“On the question of athletics, the true extremes are worship of the body and contempt for the body. These views come quickly into play when a school board is deciding whether the school should field a football team or build a gymnasium or sponsor a girl’s volleyball team. One contingent maintains that the school was …
Aesthetic Relativism
“Among conservative believers we at least have a concept of resistance to relativism in the areas of truth and ethics. We reject the idea that something can be true on Tuesday but false on Friday. We also reject the notion that sins in the first part of the week gradually lose their sinfulness by the …
Poetry is the Point
“We do not have them master the grammar and the dialectic so that they can chop logic for the rest of their dreary lives. They should grow up into wisdom, rhetoric, glory, and again, poetry” (The Case for Classical Christian Education, p. 160).
Can”t Imitate Abstractions
“Abstractions can be true and can be affirmed, but they cannot be imitated. This is why many schools are filled with children who learn various biblical abstractions and can repeat them back, but there is nothing there to imitate. Children from other denominational traditions repeat back a different set of abstractions. The lives of the …
Distance Learning
“Incidentally, this is one reason why all forms of cyber-education will necessarily be second best. Certain learning can be acquaried at a distance, and in one sense every book ever written is a form of ‘distance learning.’ Consequently, what can be place on a page and withdrawn from that page many years later can also …
Foundational Gratitude
“A biblical aesthetic requires that true creativity be built upon an inheritance. Perpetual revolution is as destructive to the arts as it is to civil order” (The Case for Classical Christian Education, p. 158).
Not That Long Ago
“We live our lives like fruit flies, measuring everything by the length of our own little span, which isn’t that long. We then assume that ancient history really was a long time ago, but it was not. No doubt somewhere in your town lives a person who is 100 years old. When that person was …
Learning Respect At Home
“[Y]ou cannot teach children to appreciate other cultures by teaching (by default) contempt for your own. As I have said before, a man who dearly loves his own mother will understand (fully) why another man regards his mother so highly. But a man who has contempt for his own mother will hardly rise to the …
Silence Can Err Also
“We also have to tell childre n the history of their people. We must be careful here because we do not have the protections of inspiration. But silence does not really help because we do not have the protection of inspired silence either. We must speak or not speak as fallible persons, and the best …
Reading the Bible, Straight Up
“We need to take special care to tell stories that are ‘not suitable’ for modernists. The Bible contains dragons, giants, principalities, satyrs, and unicorns. Invariably, these get cleaned up in translation so that modernist evangelicals are not embarrassed by them. In such instances, the liberal is often to be trusted with the text of Scripture …