January saw the return of some favorite ILS annual traditions as we concluded the month with our celebration of National Lutheran Schools Week alongside more than 1900 other LCMS schools from across the country. We loved seeing students and teachers participating in fun competitions, practicing recitations, decorating, sharing fun costumes, and more.
It was a delight to end the week with our 7th Annual ILS Talent Show! Held virtually for the first time, we enjoyed being able to welcome grandparents and friends from across the country to join us for a fun and engaging evening celebrating the many talents within our ILS community.
We were also honored to participate in an all-day virtual hymn sing organized by Our Savior Lutheran School in Grand Rapids, Michigan. As part of their effort to sing a stanza from each of the 635 hymns in the Lutheran Service Book, Our Savior Lutheran School invited musical Lutherans from around the country, including Immanuel, to participate. ILS Music Teacher, Mrs. Marie Greenway, directed our 4th grade students in beautifully singing two hymns.
As we kick off February with a snowy start, please enjoy the latest edition of our "What we're reading..." Blog. As always, we hope that you enjoy this variety of articles that we have found to be inspiring, thought-provoking or intriguing, and that these pieces continue to help to shape ongoing conversations. We would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below as you read these!
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!
Live Out You Love for Traditional Church Music - Mrs. Marie Greenway Prelude to Postlude: CPH Music Blog
“How horribly unfair movies are toward Christianity.
I am speaking generally, of course. But Hollywood is not a hotbed of orthodox Christian thought and practice. Movies often show the very opposite of what the Church teaches, but more than that, they often portray Christianity and traditional worship services as boring, dull, and humorously bad.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
In several movies I have seen, organists are portrayed as little old ladies playing a tremulo-heavy old organ at a somber tempo; choirs are made up of groups of off-key, warbly voices, causing the congregation to either cringe or to stare in annoyed disbelief; and the people singing traditional hymns sound absurdly and hyperbolically funereal. In a cyclical chicken-and-egg-type scenario, I’m not sure if movies portray traditional church music this way as a result of the larger cultural attitude or if the larger cultural attitude exists because of the way church music is portrayed in movies. Either way, the two reinforce each other, perpetuating the belief that church music is boring.
Downplaying Our Faith
Do we carry this attitude in the Church? Some of you reading this can truthfully respond to that question with a resounding “No!” But not all of us can. As a young teacher in the first few years of teaching, I knew it was good, right, and salutary to teach hymns, but I also often approached it in an apologetic way, especially with my middle schoolers. I have since learned a few things, one of which is that middle schoolers rarely display enthusiastic interest in what they are learning, but despite this, they often are actually enjoying what they are learning; their disinterest often stems from a lack of knowledge or experience with a subject rather than a dislike for it.
The truth is, just as my early years were marked by a somewhat apologetic mindset, Christians are often apologetic to the rest of the world. We don’t always hold to our convictions that our faith, and the gifts of our faith, are the best things we could know. When faith comes up in our secular circles of friends, acquaintances, and co-workers, we often shy away from the topic. We may not always do this in an attempt to cover up our faith or to hide the fact that we are Christian, but rather because we know the topic of faith might turn a lighthearted conversation serious; it opens the opportunity for questions we don’t always think we are qualified to answer; it immediately turns some people’s minds to the worst displays of Christianity seen in the media; and it makes us look a little weird. We love Christ and are faithful to Him, but we often like to downplay our faith and our Christian practices in front of non-believers in order to make ourselves appear more normal and less uncomfortably unusual.”
Beauty Can Teach Us the Art of Living Well - Brian A. Smith, The Public Discourse
“Defenders of the liberal arts point to truth, goodness, and beauty as the noblest ends that make for a worthy life. There may have been times these were held in high cultural regard. Our era is not one of them.
Our era’s strongest challenge to truth comes not from relativism, but from quasi-religious faith in utilitarian pragmatism or almost theological pursuits in identity politics. Both utility and identity fragment our moral universe, but they do so on the basis of ironclad beliefs concerning the nature of reality. As a consequence, we retain all too little in the way of shared language that would help us navigate different competing views.
Walker Percy suggested that many words necessary for grappling with the deepest questions of meaning in life—such as sin, redemption, and love—eventually become worn out. How do we talk about these concepts if the words themselves cannot gain purchase in our neighbors’ minds? For the utilitarians, these are perhaps non-issues. Truth is what generates progress or cash value, and we ought to discard the rest. So, much of what passes for transformative truth these days flows from the Churches of the Woke in calls to redeem ourselves from social injustices, debts that can never quite be repaid. Neither of these, however, accepts the idea that there are distinctive moral truths around which human life ought to be ordered.
The idea of the good is intimately related to truth but deeply enmeshed with questions of character. But today a belief even in the possibility that there are things we can identify as good falls prey to cynicism. Culture reflects this. Across the dizzying variety of digital entertainment media, one constant holds: we live in the era of the “complex” protagonist, characters whose stories lean toward a kind of benevolent moral ambiguity at best. At worst, they advance the notion that only evil is interesting, while the good is either dull and boring or, worse, a mask for imposing our will on others.”
Praying for My Children — And All the Baptized - Molly Barnett, Sister, Daughter, Mother, Wife Blog
“Becky Eminger’s post about her wish for Christmas struck my heart sharply. She reminded me to pray for all of God’s baptized children as often as possible. She also presented the difficult truth that, as a parent, I do not have control over my son’s gift of faith.
I admit that this was a tough pill to swallow for a new mother of a young child with another on the way. What I can do is follow her wise example and that of many faithful Christian parents, and dutifully teach my son God’s ways by taking him to church every Sunday, practicing devotions as a family at home, praying with him, and letting him witness my own shortcomings that need Christ’s daily forgiveness.
The rest is truly the doings of the Holy Spirit as I fervently pray He keeps my young son, a toddler, in the one true saving faith and into life everlasting.
”
Sermon for the March for Life - January 29 - Pastor Noah Rogness, Rogness on Tap
“What was Simeon waiting for? He was waiting for the consolation of Israel; the comfort and peace that was promised to come not only to the prophets of old, but to all of Israel.
However, waiting for peace to arrive today is often more a discipline of patience seen as a futile exercise of the mind and the heart. We want peace in our world, yet, we are divided by political parties and opposing ideologies. We want peace within our communities, yet, streets have been overtaken by mobs who wish to strong arm their will by force. We want peace among our families, yet, we argue among one another - displaying little empathy. We want peace in the womb, yet 62 million lives have been extinguished in our nation since 1973. We want peace in our own lives, yet, we all struggle with hearts that rebel against the will of our Father in heaven.
There’s no peace in this world, is there?
Which brings us to today - a day so often set apart for us to join our voices and our presence in the streets of Washington, DC - for what? Ultimately, for peace when hell itself assails us.
But, in reality, it should not be our practice of marching to the temples of man to demand change, rather, it should always be our practice to make the courts of the Lord our dwelling place and from there - depart into our daily lives as bearers of His name and messengers of the Gospel that brings comfort and transforms the harden hearts of man.
As we gather today to pray for the end of taking unborn life, we do so for a world that is consistently embracing death at all stations of life. While we pray for our leaders to act with godly wisdom, we ultimately need to pray for our hearts to be guarded from the evils of this world and for the hearts of those in great tribulation and turmoil to be transformed by Word of Christ (to be turned toward Christ).
Yet, this transformation of the heart and the periods of tribulation that assault the hearts of men do not simply occur in an instant with the strike of a presidential pen or a Supreme Court ruling, rather, they often require patient waiting and meditation upon God’s Word. ”
What Does “Back to Normal” Mean? - Peter J. Leithart, First Things
“Modernization involves multiple accelerations, says the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa in his 2010 book, Acceleration and Alienation. Advanced technology speeds up movement and communication, and the rate of technological change increases with Moore’s-Law regularity. Social change happens faster, as fashions and fads come and go. Daily life picks up pace.
Acceleration dashes the hopes of modernity. Many modern practices can’t run on technology’s schedule, and this de-synchronization leaves us politically dislocated and psychically disoriented. Modernity, for example, promises participatory government. Real democracy takes time, especially in modern pluralist societies without rooted norms and conventions. Ironically, Rosa says, “the same processes that accelerate social, cultural, and economic changes, slow down democratic will-formation and decision-making.” Politics cannot govern social change because it can’t keep up with the technology that drives social change. This is one of the deep sources of chaos in our politics: Frenetically driven by technologized time, we do not, cannot, take time to listen to one another. We don’t have time to get to the bottom of our disagreements, much less to resolve them.
Acceleration also clashes with modernity’s promise of freedom. There’s an inherent tension in modern freedom even if we leave acceleration out of the picture. On the one hand, we have far more freedom of choice than past civilizations. On the other hand, modern societies are interdependent to an unprecedented degree. Our complex webs of dependence must be coordinated, but coordination inhibits freedom of choice and action. Add in the acceleration made possible by communications and transportation technologies, and the tension intensifies. While free, we “feel completely dominated by an ever-increasing, excessive list of social demands.” Despite time-saving devices, we can’t keep up. We feel we have less time than ever. We eat more quickly, sleep fewer hours, and communicate less often with families and neighbors than past generations.”
Send Your Child to Hogwarts - Henry Olearcek, CIRCE
““What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” A classical Christian education dares to say quite a lot. But what does Hogwarts have to do with a classical Christian education? I dare to say more than you think, which is why I say send your child to Hogwarts. The book series contains a myriad of classical allusions and its positive (and in some ways practically Biblical) portrayal of love is astonishing to find in something so fervently revered by pop culture.
J.K. Rowling filled her magical world with references to classical culture with such intention that one could mistake her for a classicist, not a children’s author. While Cerberus hides behind the name “Fluffy,” we all know Hagrid would still love his three-headed hound even if he knew Fluffy guarded the gates of Hades long before he protected the Sorcerer’s Stone. Another big nod to the classical world is the use of Latin. Every time Harry casts a magic spell he brings the dead language to life, literally. To disarm an opponent, Harry uses the incantation Expelliarmus, a combination of “expello,” which means “I banish” with “arma,” which means “weapons.” Expecto patronum, a spell that conjures a magical animal for protection, can be translated “I wait for a protector.” I could write pages on the debt Rowling owes to the classical tradition in building her Wizarding world. But it is her portrayal of love and sacrifice, and how she equates the two, that make the Harry Potter books so intriguing for the classical Christian. ”