Should pleasure define our sense of beauty or should beauty define our sense of pleasure? This is the essential cultural question of The Divine Comedy, and that of our lives as well. Every person follows one or the other of its directives. The world treats beauty as the outgrowth of personal preference. Its definitions of […]
David was small in stature. He had only five small stones. By any measure, David stood no chance against the Philistine Goliath. But the Lord was with David. This became an illustrative hope for me. As an adoptive mother I fretted when my twins were young. My son’s legs were twisted, his muscle tone floppy. […]
On a blessed August morning in 2012, I gave birth to our third child, Austin. Our prayers for a healthy and happy little boy, adorned with two unexpected dimples, were answered. He was an immediate treasure. We savored our first few months with him as in no other season in our life. Austin seemed to […]
My first-born son was a late talker. Children much younger than he were speaking in sentences much longer than his while my husband and I were getting excited when he said “Pop!” as the speech therapist brought out the bubble machine. The parenting journey for late-talking children can be tricky, since sometimes it’s autism and […]
My family delights in finding older, out-of-print books on Christian education because I delight in reading them. Written by Christian pedagogues in the 1800s or earlier, such books become a time capsule for all of us interested in passing on the best of classical Christian education. In a recent find called The Discourse of Errors […]
Repetitio Mater Studiorum. “Repetition is the mother of learning.” In our classical tradition we exalt repetition as a valuable tool for learning. But beyond prizing repetition as an aid in memorizing individual goals (Latin grammar forms, multiplication tables, Shakespeare soliloquies), a connected classical curriculum offers valuable repetition about important truths over the long course of […]
I remember being flabbergasted twenty-five years ago when my mother-in-law, Cheryl Lowe, casually mentioned that she’d like to start a college one day. At the time—the late 90s—Memoria Press operated out of the Lowe family garage attic. Mrs. Lowe and Martin Cothran worked on their Latin and logic programs on weekdays, and Cheryl’s son, Brian […]
Is a classical education still relevant? Is it worth the time and the effort, or should our students be studying the modern world and modern languages, preparing for modern jobs? Every one of us wants to give our students the best possible education—but what is the best? The latter half of the twentieth century has […]
“I am giving teachers a choice,” wrote the young Emperor Julian the Apostate in the summer of A.D. 362, not yet a full year into his reign. If they think the ancient writers were wise . . . then let them be the first to rival those authors’ piety toward the ancient gods. Or, if […]
