“But the first principle is given clearly by Isaiah: Call the Sabbath a delight (Is. 58:13). And even this verse is abused whenever truncated, narrow, and parsimonious Sabbath observance is substituted for the real thing. The cranky Sabbatarian, who ‘cooks kids in their Sabbath milk,’ does not limit this destructive behavior to one day in …
And They Make the Classroom A Cauldron
“Moses required that the Israelites refrain from seething or boiling a kid in its mother’s milk (Deut. 14:21). The placement of this law in Deuteronomy is right at the beginning of Moses’ exposition of the fourth commandment, the Sabbath law. This insignificant law has many applications, which ostensible friends of the Sabbath need to learn. …
The Central Problem With Pragmatism
“We do not want to live in accordance with the dictates of pragmatism, which can be hung with its own rope. Pragmatism doesn’t work. At the same time, commitment to something more important than immediate success often as the side benefit of immediate success” (The Case for Classical Christian Education, p. 142).
Our Minds Are Not Shoeboxes
“We tend to think of our students’ minds as finite shoeboxes, and we then think we must take special care not to put anything in there if we do not want it to remain there for life. But the brain is more like a muscle. A student who learns one language, such as Latin, is …
Just Microwave It
“The reason mental discipline is difficult is that we live in a fallen world, and God has cursed the ground so that thorns and thistles grow there. Laziness and sin both make people want to coast downhill. Chesterton once said that Satan fell by the force of gravity. We like to relax our Latin standards …
Good Old Latin
“In arguing for a return to the disciplined study of Latin, we do not do so mindlessly, simply because Latin is old. Some things improve with age, like wine, but other things do not, like pizza. I want to argue that Latin is in the former category” (The Case for Classical Christian Education, p. 139).
History Is A River
“In our individualistic times, we tend to think of previous generations or eras as tthough they were a series of ponds. We used to live around a pond that everyone called ‘the fifties.’ Then later we lived aroaund another pond called ‘the nineties.’ But this is not how the Bible encourages us to think about …
History is Organic
“We must also recover a doctrine of generations. Our children grow. They do not grow up in a detached way, as though the twig were unrelated to the branch, which in turn is unrelated to the tree. Our children are not interchangeable ball bearings, able to be placed in different machines across the world; they …
The History of the Church Is the Center of World History
“In the providence of God, the kingdom of God was preached in the Greco-Roman world, and Christianity spread, for the most part, north and west. The direction of this movement has changed recently but only in the last century or so. Now the kingdom of God is not to be identified with Western culture, but …
Keeping An Edge On Our Kitchen Knives
“At this point, all Christian educators must know that clear thinking is a moral issue. Blurry thinking is one of the great sins of the age. To teach the dialectical stage without a constant grounding in the ethical absolutes of Scripture is worse than folly. Learning to distinguish rightly, learning to evaluate, is the meaning …