“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 …
But What If Metaphor Is Ultimate Truth?
“But, at the same time, no one should nervously imagine that this critique of the Enlightenment proceeds from any relativistic postmodern nonsense. The modernist and postmodernist share this one thing in common: They both hold, at bottom, that metaphor is meaningless. The modernist goes off to find meaning somewhere else, suitably formulaic, and the postmodernist …
Metamorphing
“In our entertainment-crazed times, we have to take care not to use stories that have been transformed into something else. I call the process ‘metaphor-morphing,’ or ‘metamorphing’ for short. In this process the basic metaphors of story built into the world by God are reversed. For example, the serpent in the Garden was a dragon, …
Imagine That
“The Christian imagination is not icing for the cake of education. A true understanding of the imagination is at the center of all true education . . . Works of imagination are not the dessert of educaqtion; they are the meal. We have to get the students to master some basic details so that they …
Truth Has A Face
“However, the biblical story is pretty unwieldy and remains storylike despite our best efforts. But over the course of the last 350 years, we have risen to the occasion and have trained ourselves to think of the story as just so much external baggage carrying around the internal, timeless truths. Depending on how the story …
Mystical Ratios
“There are many cultural reasons why we fall into this confusion about grading, many of them having to do with the lust for scientific precision that came out of the Enlightenment. Now it makes sense, for example, if the children are taking a vocabulary test of 100 words, and one of the kids misses thirteen …