Happy August! We’re counting the days until our classrooms and hallways are once again filled with the joyful and delightful sounds of of our students and teachers learning, singing, praying together. It has been a blessing to see many of you over the summer, especially at some of the class gatherings on the playground. We give thanks for these opportunities to reconnect with old friends and welcome the new students and families who will be joining us in the upcoming year.
At the end of this month, our teachers will gather together for faculty meetings to plan and prepare for the new year. Follow the ILS blog as we introduce some of the new teachers we are excited to have joining our team in the new year. Together we look forward to opportunities to work alongside our families in the all important work of educating and nurturing our children.
As we engage with one another in conversations about how we can together shape our culture at school and at home, check out our "What we're reading..." blog post each month for a variety of articles that we have found to be inspiring, thought-provoking, or intriguing. Families are also invited to join us for our “First Friday Coffees” each month where we gather to engage in meaningful dialogue about topics related to education, culture, faith, and raising children.
Thank you for your continued partnership, and for engaging with us! Please feel free to share a link in the comments to email us any time!
The Tedious Work of Musicians and Christians - Mrs. Marie Greenway, Prelude to Postlude: CPH Music Blog
“Our life of faith follows the same trajectory. Certainly, our hard work doesn’t save us; Jesus Christ—His life of obedience, His suffering and death, and His glorious resurrection—saves us. Instead, through the grace of God, our persevering habits of body and soul affect how we live our lives. We expect to face the hardships in the life of a Christian more confidently when our daily habits prepare us for such things. Much like how we take care of our bodies not by running and winning marathons but by daily eating well and getting exercise, so many of us live faithful lives of service to God, not always by something drastic like dying for the faith, but by bringing a meal to a grieving family or by helping out at the next church work day. We learn to love and serve only by loving and serving. And very often, these things are not what we naturally desire to do.
Instead, we pray for the strength to do such things, and by the grace of God, we fight against our sinful human nature in order to do things we do not always feel like doing. And God gives us the strength to do this through His Word and Sacraments. It can be hard to focus on receiving God’s good gifts in worship when we are preparing ourselves for what we have to play next, or running through that tough line of the next hymn during the reading or sermon, but with practice we can get better at it. (And make sure to join a Bible study outside of worship whenever we can.) ”
Why I Love Watching the Olympics - Joshua Gibbs, CIRCE
“From one year to the next, the only televised sporting event I watch is the Super Bowl. But every four years, I watch forty hours of the Olympics. While I find myself increasingly skeptical that high school sports can offer athletes one-tenth of what they claim (virtue, martyrdom), the Modern Olympics have both goals and means that are quite different from the garden-variety volleyball program.
The Olympics—by which I mean the Modern Olympics, which began in 1896—are undeniably an Enlightened project, although they are touched by Romantic tastes, as well. There is something quite beautiful about the belief that bloodless sport and physical artistry could replace warfare as the primary stage upon which rival nations resolve their mutual animosities. After considering the unprecedented slaughter and barbarity of the 20th century, we should admit the Olympics have proven a complete failure in this regard, but there is nonetheless something innocent and childlike about such good intentions. Can sports replace war? No, but “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”
Despite their Enlightened origins, the Olympics are still a holdover from a saner age, and so the Games have many qualities which strike me as wonderfully opposed to the present zeitgeist.”
The Ballad of Baby Peach - Rachel Bomberger, The Lutheran Witness
““OK. Which one of you big kids wants to swap chickens with your little sister?”
It’s not the weirdest question I’ve ever asked as a mother, but it definitely ranks high on the list.
The chick that would be Stacey
During the early days of the 2020 pandemic lockdown, when some families were wrist-deep in sourdough starter and others were neck-deep in home improvement projects, we decided to help my parents (with whom we were hunkered down for a few weeks) start a backyard chicken coop as a homeschool science project.
Our first batch of fertilized eggs (bartered from a neighbor across the road) ended in tragedy. Not one hatched. So it goes.
The second time around, to our delight, four out of seven chicks pecked out of their shells like clockwork — well, almost like clockwork. The first three little bantam-cross chicks emerged one at a time after a few hours of hard work. Each was claimed and named by one of my three older children. The last egg (already starting to wiggle hopefully) was earmarked for their little sister, then in kindergarten. She planned to name it Stacey.
The egg-that-would-be-Stacey ended up taking 18 long hours to hatch. I thought she’d never come out. When she finally did emerge, she was a tiny, exhausted fluff-ball of a chick with what looked like a piece of shell stuck to her hind end. As her feathers dried off and she started to creep around the incubator, I noted with interest that whatever was stuck to her backside wasn’t coming off. It wasn’t until I picked her up to move her into the brooder with the other chicks, however, that I realized what the “eggshell” really was.
“Oh, my goodness!” I said out loud. “No wonder this one had so much trouble hatching. She’s got three legs!””
The Neglected Muse: Why Music is an Essential Liberal Art - Peter Kalkavage, The Imaginative Conservative
“Music transcends the classroom, the concert stage, and professional recordings. It pervades life. Mankind has long used music in all sorts of ways: to celebrate, to lament, to dance, to pray, to soothe or arouse, to woo, to infuse courage and terrify an enemy, to commemorate, to unite a community. Even the most primitive societies are keenly aware of the power of music, and various myths from cultures throughout the world confer on music and musicians a lofty, even divine significance. In some myths, notably in Plato’s dialogue Timaeus, the world springs from the composing power of a musician-god.
That music is a vibrant part of life is especially clear in the case of the young. Most young people cherish their favorite music as their most intimate friend and their absolute refuge from care and stress. When we get older, music is inevitably bound up with nostalgia. We older folk have only to hear a song from our youth in order to be magically transported, as if by a familiar scent, to a former time, place, self, or love. Music does not merely sound: It casts a spell and conjures worlds. Music is no mere addendum to human life, no historical accident that might just as well have never been, but an essential part of who we are as human beings.
Why should young people study music? One answer presents itself on the basis of what I have said so far: Music has a central place in the lives of young people. For many, music is their life. Teaching music to the young is therefore much more than conveying historical information and technical facts, or helping students develop their musical talent. It is more than the effort to make them competent and aesthetically refined. In getting young people to engage in a serious study of music, we are giving them an opportunity to know themselves better by becoming more precisely aware of the amazing power that music has over them. Also, as we shall see, we are giving them an opportunity to deepen their knowledge of the natural world—and of our connection to it—by becoming more aware of the mathematical order that underlies music.”
How to Teach History - Matthew Walther, The American Conservative
““No folk tale has ever begun thus: ‘Once upon a time there was a president.’” I have always liked this aphorism of Nicolás Gómez-Dávila, not because it is entirely true—one can imagine a fanciful children’s version of the life of, say, Cincinnatus that plausibly rendered the Latin dictātor as “president”—but because it draws our attention to the very real question of how children engage with historical narratives.
What, I wonder, could be more alien to a child’s imagination than modern liberal democratic politics? The unedifying, frequently meaningless pronouncements of elected officials, the ad-hoc principles articulated with a lunatic urgency matched only by the speed with which they are abandoned (and taken up by an opposing faction that had only lately afforded them a roughly comparable degree of opprobrium), the frenetic decontextualized argument, and, above all, the endless recriminations about third and fourth-order violations of supposed norms, or offenses even further afield: How much more mysterious these are than “Open Sesame!” To the extent that a child is capable of understanding any unit of social organization larger than the family, she is likely to think in terms of monarchies or tribes: romantic queens or chieftains, beautifully aged dowagers and sinister viziers and wide-eyed shaman, and wandering princes who dare to guess the secret names of ogres.
Properly understood, all education begins with wonder, with feelings of awe and impressions of beauty and strangeness. ”
C.S. Lewis and the Worth of a Liberal Education - Lou Markos, Real Clear Education
“While the current education environment increasingly prizes specialization above all, famed author, apologist, and teacher C.S. Lewis permits us to be generalists. Indeed, Lewis reminds us high learning is worth defending and is, ultimately, one of the greatest joys of being alive.
Widely known for his sophisticated yet accessible Christian apologetics, Lewis was an accomplished scholar, a beloved professor of both Oxford and Cambridge, and a determined defender of liberal education. He taught his students how to read, write about, and love literature. He taught colleagues and friends alike about a vast array of literary periods and genres. He taught generations about God and about man’s relationship to Him. And, Lewis still has much to teach the present generation about teaching itself.
Lewis possessed a deeper understanding of education than most who study it. While earning a good education himself, Lewis also came to understand genuine truth and how to best communicate it to others.”
Teaching Courage in a Sentimental Age - Joshua Gibbs, CIRCE
“The other day, I picked up my sixth-grade daughter from school and she immediately reported that, while the teacher was not looking, a fellow student had brazenly, flagrantly broken several school rules. “Did you tell the teacher?” I asked. She said she had forgotten. “No, you didn’t,” I replied, “because it obviously bothered you quite a bit. How could you possibly forget?” The truth, which slowly came out in the conversation which followed, was that my daughter didn’t want to tell the teacher for reasons of cowardice that are common to youth, adolescence, adults, and the elderly alike. And that was the word I used when I scolded my daughter: cowardice.
In the same way many modern Christians no longer believe that modesty or gluttony exist, the existence of cowardice is also an increasingly tough sell. We now measure courage by whatever we are willing to do. Every survivor of a public tragedy is “brave.” If a young woman posts a picture of herself in a swimsuit on Instagram and anyone says anything less than congratulatory about it, the girl who posted the picture is “so brave.” As a largely relativist society, we no longer believe in a transcendent standard of bravery. Bravery is whatever I say it is. Bravery is whatever I already am. We do not believe that a failure to be courageous is cowardly. Rather, we blame cowardice on whatever or whoever we fear. ”