One way to think about Western civilization is to think of it as consisting of three cultures: those of Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem. It is the fusion of these three cultures, historically tied together and intimately linked, that is this civilization we are passing on in classical Christian education. These three cultures became so integrated […]
When we talk about teaching, we tend to want to reduce it down to one goal. For some it might be an exclusive emphasis on knowledge, for someone else it might be basic skills, for another a deeper understanding of ideas and values. In classical education, we often fall into the habit of talking about […]
In Ernest Hemingway’s book A Moveable Feast, he gives the best advice I have ever read on dealing with writer’s block. He tells you to sit down, take up a pen, and write one true sentence. That’s it. Just one true sentence. For example, I had writer’s block as I sat down to write this […]
I was asked to speak to a gathering of classical educators recently on the issue of “pedagogy,” the science of how to teach and a word to which modern educators are very attached. One of the major points I made in my speech was this: Pedagogy is not the most important thing in education. It’s […]
To say that a book is a great Christian novel obviously and necessarily implies two things: first, that it is great and, second, that it is Christian. Many of the books here are widely considered to be great, but there seems to be little consciousness that they are also explicitly Christian. Although Dostoevsky’s The Brothers […]
The expression “dark ages” refers to the period of time after the fall of Rome in the fourth century A.D. until the resurgence of learning in Western Europe that started in about the eighth century. We call it “dark” because the light of learning that had been ignited by the Greeks and carried on by […]
In Amor Towles’ new book, The Lincoln Highway, we find eight-year-old Billy Watson in a railroad freight car waiting for his brother to get back. It is the 1950s and Billy and his older brother Emmett are riding the rails east to New York from Nebraska. A man drops into the car. The boy strikes […]
When I worked in public policy many years ago, one of my jobs was to take long policy papers from think tanks and reduce them down to one or two pages for state lawmakers. I also wrote the scripts for a popular radio show called “Point/Counterpoint” on a very large network in which two people […]
In 1981, a book was published by a well-regarded, but-until-then-not-terribly-famous philosopher. The book was called After Virtue; the author was Alasdair MacIntyre. The book sent shock waves throughout the academic community—shock waves that resonate even today. Some consider it the most influential book of philosophy published in the last fifty years. In the succeeding years […]
It is an interesting irony that, at a time when so many Christians have abandoned the King James Bible, a prominent atheist should come forth to praise it. In celebration of the four hundredth anniversary of the King James Bible in 2011, the famed unbeliever Christopher Hitchens paid it gushing homage in Vanity Fair magazine, […]