What has the Greek quest for excellence and order and beauty to do with the Hebrew quest for the living God? This is the question the Church Fathers asked themselves, a query that we still must raise from time to time. And in our day in particular, it is the question that Christian educators in […]
The expression “Athens and Jerusalem” is a familiar one in Western cultural history. It denotes two very different cultures: one a culture of reason and the other a culture of faith. So different were they that they became the subject of a raging debate in the early Christian centuries. As a matter of historical fact, […]
“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 […]
“A language must die to be immortal.” When it comes to expressing the eternal and immutable truths of the Christian faith, the only good language is a dead language. Chesterton once made a disarming retort to the customary detraction of Latin as a dead language. He simply remarked that to say this is not a detraction […]
…and how to know when you see it. One of the most overused terms in the Christian education lexicon is the expression “worldview.” And although it is frequently used, it is almost never defined. We are told how important “worldview” is. We are supposed to have a “worldview” and make sure we teach “worldview” to […]
A common question asked of classical Christian educators is why we should read the pagans. If you had to buy one book to help you answer this question, this is it. Markos, one of the most exciting Christian writers today, explains how Homer, Hesiod, the Greek dramatists, and Virgil foreshadowed the Christian revelation. Markos joins […]
Book Review: Preface to Paradise Lost by C. S. Lewis Most of us know that C. S. Lewis was a great Christian apologist and author of The Chronicles of Narnia. What most of us don’t know is that, as Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English Literature at both Oxford and Cambridge, Lewis was first and foremost […]
One of the best books I have ever read on classical education is the just-released Simply Classical: A Beautiful Education for Any Child from Memoria Press. Cheryl Swope’s book not only gives an unusually lucid explanation of what classical education is and how to teach it, whether in a school or at home—it reminds us […]
Reason #10: Literature What is literature, and what is it for anyway? Have you ever wondered that? It’s not practical like science and math, so what is its purpose? Why do we include literature in our curriculum, how do we choose it, and what do we hope to achieve by reading literature? These are some […]
When I apologized to my children for speaking crossly to them the other day, my daughter cheerfully replied, “It’s okay, Mommy. Errare est humanum.” She reassured me that it is only human to err, having been taught this and many other rich Latin sayings using Memoria Press’ Latin curriculum in our homeschool. Having been public-school-educated […]