What We're Reading - August 2020

While we are definitely missing our students and families, we hope that summer break continues to be restful and a time of intentional leisure for each of you. Our ILS administrative team has remained busy as we plan for a safe and healthy return to school. We have enjoyed hearing from many of you over the summer, and we remain deeply grateful for your continued prayers, support and encouragement in these challenging times.

Our August edition of "What we're reading..." is now available, and as always, we hope that these articles will inspire and shape our ongoing conversation about how we create and build our culture together at home and at school.

Thank you for your continued partnership, and for engaging with us in these ongoing conversations and for sharing items you have read that may be inspiring to others in our ILS community! Please feel free to share a link in the comments to email us any time!

“This past weekend, I discovered a delightful new album that mixed Mozart horn concertos with mambo music featuring the French horn. The promotional video for the album showed a colorfully arrayed orchestra playing a mambo on a Havana street, the musicians dancing to their own music.

The music was infectious in its joy and fun. The musicians themselves couldn’t stop smiling, and the onlookers were dancing in the streets. I couldn’t stop grooving even as I sat on the couch. The joy of the music and the musicians was captivating. For me, it was the epitome of why musicians do what they do—to bring joy.

Glorifying God is True and Good
Johann Sebastian Bach attributed his music-making to the glory of God, writing SDG for soli Deo gloria—to God alone be the glory—at the end of every piece. We would do well to follow Bach’s example here, not necessarily in literally writing SDG at the end of all of our music, but in recognizing that our point in making music is to glorify God. God is, after all, the final end of our endeavors. A life lived without this knowledge is futile and leads only to despair. So in music-making, like in everything else a Christian does, we glorify God.

In glorifying God, we are doing as we ought—we are doing what is true. A life lived according to what is true is a good life. It is a life of purpose and confidence. A common theme in literature and stories in any medium is that a life of lies ends in confusion, anger, despair, and sadness. How many times have you watched a movie in which a character lies about something, and you predict the misery that follows because of that lie? At times (thank you, Shakespeare), the lie is the basis of a comedy, but the happy ending occurs only because the truth is finally known. Despite the consequences that usually follow truth-telling, we know that “the truth will set you free” (John 8:32). The truth sets you free from the burden of a guilty conscience and from the confusion of non-reality.”
— Marie Greenway, "Why Christians Should Make Music with Joy"
“Students running for student government tend to have a lot of ideas about how the school can be improved. Their ideas for improving the school usually involve staff and faculty using their power, time, and money to make the lives of students easier and more pleasant. They want a senior lounge, more dress down days, longer breaks between classes, more parties, a prom, and so forth. Occasionally, I step in and ask candidates, “And who will take responsibility for your ideas if they go horribly wrong?” They usually respond, “Wait, what could possibly go wrong?”

Of course, when adults implement teenage ideas and those ideas go horribly awry, it is adults who take legal and fiscal responsibility for the mess while teenagers look on and say, “I did not see that coming,” or, “That was not what I meant.” Meanwhile, the adults get sued.

Similarly, I have a whole bunch of ideas about what would be best for my school. I have ideas about policies, procedures, bureaucratic changes, curriculum changes, not to mention COVID contingency plans. Occasionally I share these ideas with the administration, but most of the time I keep them to myself.

I have learned to see myself in my students.

Like my students, a lot of my great ideas involve other people taking legal and fiscal responsibility for plans that— in my opinion— would work really well. Of course, if the administration took my ideas and they proved disastrous, I would be the one looking on, saying, “I did not see that coming,” or, “Whoa, you should not have listened to me. I am only 39.”

Why bring any of this up now? Because in the 2020-2021 school year, there is far more up for grabs than ever before.

Just one year ago, pretty much nobody had an opinion on how many days a week school should be in session. While touring a school, prospective parents never asked, “Do you meet Monday through Friday?” Monday through Friday, 8 to 3 was a given. But that has changed. Now, everyone has an opinion about issues that were perfectly settled just a few months ago— and here’s an unsurprising claim: a few of the opinions about “what is best for the school” currently floating around are actually just descriptions of what is most convenient for me.

All of which means that administrators are no longer merely fielding suggestions that every student needs a laptop, or that Homer was a racist, or that the school mascot isn’t woke enough. Because of COVID, absolutely none of the concrete is dry anymore. Not only is Homer up for debate. School itself is up for debate. And so private school administrators across the country are about to enter into the most difficult year of their careers.”
— Joshua Gibbs, "Spiritually Preparing for a Very Difficult Year"
“Back-to-school season was much closer to “back-to-chaos” season for my family. Even as an only child, I was part of so many extracurriculars that my parents were constantly running me around, even on weekends. There was rarely time for family dinners, much less a moment to try and squeeze in family devotions. My family could have used a steady routine, especially when it came to planning family time.

With the back-to-school season fast approaching, it’s a great time for your family to start, or find, a daily devotional routine. Daily devotions are the best way to keep your family centered on Christ throughout this busy time of year. This month, pair musical coloring pages and a bookmark with hymn-centered devotionals made specifically for busy families to find time with Christ.

Read a Story; Sing a Song
No matter what age or stage your child is at with reading, there are plenty of amazing devotionals available. Happy Times is designed for preschoolers to have their own moments with Christ. Six issues per year are filled with a variety of devotional projects, such as crafts, recipes, and more, so you can adapt each issue’s ideas to fit your ever-changing schedule. Pair these devotions with My First Hymnal, a children’s hymnal especially for young readers. Slowly teach children about the symbols and colors of the Church Year, and pair a song with an activity each day.

For older children who love to sing, there’s the new children’s hymnal, One and All Rejoice, which features two hundred hymns, Luther’s Small Catechism, psalms, and more. Pair this hymnal with My Devotions for the elementary and pre-teen students in your family. These devotions can easily be adapted to fit your family schedule. Daily devotions make sure that you always have something to sit down with together, even if it’s just for five minutes before bedtime. For families who would like a different or additional devotion for Sundays, use the One and All Rejoice Devotions Guide to get even more out of the new hymnal. This guide is great for older kids who want to see how the Church Year flows and how hymn selections fit into the lectionary.”
— Delania Byerley, "Setting a Family Devotion Routine for Back to School"
“A pernicious notion seems to have settled into the minds of my generation (I’m 36) when we were little boys and girls. It’s now an unquestioned “fact” that “staying informed,” “staying engaged,” and “following the news” are the obligatory duties of sensible, responsible people.

They’re not.

Reading and watching the news isn’t just unhelpful or uninstructive; it inhibits real learning, true education, and the rigorous cultivation of serious intellectual curiosity.

Simply Gathering Information Is Not Educational

When I was a child, my parents, quite rightly, restricted my television viewing. I could not, for instance, watch television after 5:00 p.m. or for more than an hour on weekdays. (Saturday morning cartoons ran for a permissible two hours, before my parents arose from bed.)

The glaring exception to these rules was “the news.” Watching the evening news was for my family a ritual in information gathering, the necessary means of understanding “current events.” Whatever else people said of it, the news was, by all accounts, educational.

Was it, though? U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. famously refused to read newspapers. In The Theory of Education in the United States, Albert Jay Nock bemoaned “the colossal, the unconscionable, volume of garbage annually shot upon the public from the presses of the country, largely in the form of newspapers and periodicals.” His point was that a societal emphasis on literacy was by and large ineffectual if the material that most people read was stupid and unserious. Does one actually learn by reading the cant and carping insolence of the noisy commentariat?”
— Allen Mendenhall, "The News Makes You Dumb"
“I have a lot of free time at the moment. Like many people in lockdown, and particularly among those of us privileged to have jobs that allow us to work from home, I have fewer ways to spend my hours. I don’t go to bars or nightclubs. I socialize rarely: on Zoom, at the odd picnic. I don’t even go to buy groceries. In the age of coronatide, so much of my daily routine turned digital. I have so many hours in the day.

I spent some of those hours—in March, in April—writing a novel. It was a luxury good, those several indoor hours. My husband and I were able to work remotely. We were fed, and healthy, and inside. I was conscious—all too conscious—of time I spent on my book as a fortuitous and unearned freedom: one predicated on privilege.

I worry—sometimes, often—that what I am doing is useless, that all art is quite useless. I have worried about that, all the more, over the past few months. The world has been ripped apart at the seams. The pandemic has pulled back the curtain on capitalism’s failings. The protests following the killing of George Floyd have made ever clearer, too, other structural sins: a country based on vectors of racist oppression, of undue power.

How do we write when the world is falling apart? And—no less vital—should we?

It is impossible—in a capitalist society, and in a broken and fallen world—to separate out the creation of words—such seemingly unbodied things—from the luxury of leisure. The freedom to make imaginary worlds is also the freedom that gives us time to form words, not things, with our fingers. Despite the utopian proclamations of techno-capitalists, human beings cannot create something out of nothing. Free time comes on the backs of other people’s labor. Those delivered groceries were picked, and packaged, and brought to my doorstep, by other human beings, with far less free time.”
— Tara Isabella Burton "Toward a Christian Aesthetics"
“The Washington Redskins announced recently that they’re changing their name. For this season, they’ll be known as the Washington Football Team, which is actually more creative than their style of play.

The name change comes amid the destruction of statues across the land. Stoking the fires of racial and religious division, Shaun King called for the destruction of statues and stained glass images of Jesus and His mother. These Christian symbols are “tools of oppression” and “racist propaganda.”

The fervor behind such iconoclasm is rooted in a new fundamentalism. Nathanael Blake calls it “symbolic purges of the inherited wickedness of the past.” Language of “inherited wickedness” immediately gets my intention; instead of using the term “original sin,” the Lutheran Confessions preferred the term “inherited sin” (erbsünde in German).

But original sin is making a comeback in the language of the culture wars. Jim Wallis recently wrote a book called America’s Original Sin, with the subtitle Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America. There are plenty of places to study and debate the meaning of America and her founding principles. The pulpit is not the appropriate vehicle for that. But Wallis is making a specifically theological statement – that racism and white privilege are America’s “original sin.” His mistake is not in being too radical. He’s not radical enough.

The problem is not in America’s founding. The problem—the original sin—is far deeper, and far more perverse and corrupt than we imagine. Symbolic purges won’t cleanse our sins. Smashing statues cannot liberate us from our origins. Changing the name of the local football team is a marketing strategy. It may propitiate the mob for a time, but there is no redemption there.

Our inherited wickedness goes back deeper than 1776, 1619, or 1492. It stretches back beyond the tyranny of popes and emperors, beyond the enslavement of the Jews in Egypt, beyond even the wickedness that precipitated the great flood of the ancient world.

We inherited the wickedness of our first parents. Their crime was not in eating fruit. Their original sin was in turning away from the Creator’s Word and purpose. Our first father rejected who God made him to be. The Antifa anarchists trying to burn down our cities have nothing on him. Adam is the original anarchist.”
— Pastor Christopher Esget, Trinity 7 Sermon 2020