What We're Reading - January 2020

Happy New Year! We pray that all of our families enjoyed a wonderful Christmas and a restful break. It was delightful to see everyone return this week and hear fun stories about travel, traditions, time with family, and celebrations of the season.

Kicking of the new year, we will continue our work to support and inspire intentional discussions on culture-building and culture-shaping within our school and homes. Our monthly "What we're reading..." feature includes articles and other resources that we hope you find of interest.

2020 also marks that 150th anniversary of the founding of Immanuel Lutheran Church and School. Throughout the year, we look forward to sharing more about the school’s history in Alexandria, and together looking forward to the future. We are inviting ILS alumni and their families, as well as former teachers, to share their stories and photos from your time at Immanuel. Please contact us if you have pictures or stories you would be willing to share!

We give thanks for each of our families, and the wonderful opportunity to partner with you in the important work of educating and nurturing children. Thank you 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!

“First, you must lower your standards. It is not possible to achieve as much as you could with an easy book when it comes to scoring well on a test or developing the bad reading habits that endeavor forms in you if you want to read something more challenging. You won’t remember as much. You won’t understand as much. You won’t be able to imitate as easily.

But you’ll remember more that is worth remembering, you’ll understand life and yourself better, and you’ll be more humble before the masters.

Second, a hard book will humble you and that is good. If you run to twaddle, it won’t. ”
— Andrew Kern, "How to Read a Hard Book"
“Our culture and society emphasizes knowledge. Knowing things, having wisdom about the world around us is important. Everyone goes to school. From the time a kid turns 5 until they’re in their early 20’s they’re in a classroom. All sorts of information is at our fingertips. If you want to know something, you just have to ask Google. We want to know and understand our world. But in order for this to happen, we have to learn. Knowledge must be taught, it must be revealed to us.
Knowledge and wisdom was the pursuit of the wise men who followed the star. We call them wise, but Scripture calls them magi, men who were interested in dreams and astrology and magic. They hoped to find truth in these things. They hoped to solve the mysteries of the world through these things. They were learned men who studied all sorts of writings from different places and cultures. In today’s terms, you could call them worldly.
We emphasize worldly knowledge. It’s good to know about and understand different peoples and cultures. It’s good to share information so that we can all grow and learn. We live in a big world and there’s lots of people out there who know a lot of things. Sharing this knowledge can help develop new technologies and different engineering practices. Working together can bring about more effective medical treatments. Learning from our collective history can help us live together in the future. Just like the magi, we hope to solve the world’s mysteries through these things. We hope to learn truth. After all, that’s the ultimate pursuit of knowledge, to learn the truth and to live by it; … or at least, at one time it was. ”
— Pastor Peters, "Knowledge, Mystery, Faith"
“But, as I have written before, music (and dancing) education is about more than just the physical, mental, and social benefits we glean from it. In the end, it is about our souls. “How is square dancing relevant to our souls?” you might rightfully ask. Square dancing, and music and dancing in general, give us delight. These provide joy and promote a love of the good things in life. Understandably, not everyone agrees with me. Certainly, a majority of my middle school boys would not think dancing would bring them joy. That is why they must be taught. They must be taught what is good and what is not; that physical movement with our able bodies, that the art of stepping in sync with others, that respectful treatment of even those we do not like, and that the understanding of how music moves (and how it moves us) are all good things.

A good education will make a child intelligent. A solid foundation of mathematics will make taxes a breeze—maybe. An education in wisdom and prudence with a focus on Christ instead of material goods will make managing finances second nature.”
— Mrs. Marie Greeway, "Why We Learn to Square Dance"
“It was once true, unfortunately, that history was written by the victors. Now, it seems, we’ve gone terribly far in the other direction, and history, rather poorly, is written by the victims.

It’s not just our historians, I must admit, though academics as a whole contribute less than nothing to our society. After all, they care more about their own agendas and their own turf than they do about the common good.

As I look over social media, I see anger, emotion, more anger, sentimentality, victimhood, and even more anger. If social media is an accurate register, we have one very scary, atomized culture.

The same is true when I look at Washington, D.C. There, I also see anger, emotion, more anger, sentimentality, victimhood, and even more anger. But, I also see manipulation—manipulation of truth, manipulation of persons, and manipulation of the society. Imagine a group of people who have divided into two warring, Manichaean camps, each claiming to represent best the American Republic, all the while diabolically pushing us into outrageous debt and social engineering.”
— Bradley J. Birzer, "Remembering the Virtues"
“As God’s people, gathered around Word and Sacrament, we sing. But the song is not primarily our song, but the Church’s song. Of course we sing, but in worship we sing as a community of faith, joining together with angels, archangels, and all the company of heaven. It is a song sung by all the faithful who have gone before us, and a song that will continue after we are gone. It is a song that, in our own time and place, we are privileged to join. It is a song in which proclamation, teaching, and praise interweave in a tapestry of music unique to the Church. At the heart and center of that song is the proclamation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”
— Carl Schalk, "The Church's Song: Proclamation, Pedagogy, and Praise"
“For many people, Latin is useless. I won’t enter into a discussion on the meaning of “utility,” a concept with variations and stratifications that are centuries in the making, and which itself merits an entire book. What I will say here, however, is that those “many people”—civilians, politicians, professionals in every field—have a sadly (and dangerously) limited idea of education and human development. What their focus on “utility” betrays is the belief that, in the end, knowledge amounts to know-how, that thought should be immediately adapted toward a practical aim. But if that were the case, knowledge would hardly be useful: we’d have surgeons, plumbers, and not much else, given that machines are growing more and more responsible for satisfying our primary needs. Eventually the surgeon or plumber will disappear too. And if such is the fate of knowledge, that it be surrendered to machines—or, as we put it more often these days, to technology—what exactly will there be for humans to know? Of course, we’ll have to learn how to build the machines and keep them functioning, and to dispose of the remains when they become obsolete, and to procure the materials necessary to build new machines.

In short, all in service of machines, with the idea, no doubt, that machines are fundamental, the only truly useful thing, the all-encompassing solution . . . But what about the rest? Those needs that aren’t immediate, that aren’t practical or distinctly material, and yet are no less urgent? The so-called spirit? Memory, imagination, creativity, depth, complexity? And what about the larger questions, which are common to other essential domains of knowledge, including biology, physics, philosophy, psychology, and art: where and when did it all begin, where do I go, who am I, who are others, what is society, what is history, what is time, what is language, what are words, what is human life, what are feelings, who is a stranger, what am I doing here, what am I saying when I speak, what am I thinking when I think, what is meaning? Interpretation, in other words. Because without interpretation there is no freedom, and without freedom there is no happiness. This leads to passivity, a tacit acceptance of even our brighter moods. One becomes a slave to politics and the market, driven on by false needs.”
— Nicola Gardini, "Look, Latin Is Not Useless, Neither Is It Dead"