What We're Reading - July 2020

We hope that the summer break is continuing to be restful and a time of intentional leisure for our students and our families. It has been wonderful to hear from and see a number of you over the past few weeks as you have checked in and shared how summer is going. In June, we gave thanks as we were able to celebrate our Class of 2020 and hold our 2020 Graduation Vespers Service. At the end of the month, ILS faculty and Staff participated in the Society for Classical Learning’s virtual summer conference, hearing from a wide variety of educators and other speakers, and engaging with educators from across the country.

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

If you are interested in learning more about classical, Lutheran education, the Consortium for Classical Lutheran Education (CCLE) is making available online videos from their past summer conferences. Find links for that, as well as summer reading and other activities, at the bottom of this post.

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!

“We need good music.

We need Palestrina and Bach and Mozart and Beethoven and Mendelssohn and so many others. We need good Renaissance and Baroque and Classical and Romantic music. We need good cantatas and passions and chorales and chorale preludes. We need our modern church composers, for what would I do Sunday after Sunday without my trusty Hymn Prelude Library? We need beautiful, classical, and sacred music that uplifts the soul and draws us to heaven, or refreshes the spirit, or teaches our children what truth, beauty, and goodness sound like.

But just as much as all of that, we need good modern secular pop music.”
— Marie Greenway, "Why Christians Need Pop Music"
“arents in their thirties and forties have a curious habit of calling Legos “good toys,” which is generally not the way they describe toy trucks, dolls, tops, jacks, and so forth. Trucks and dolls might be good toys, but children of the 80s and 90s speak of Legos with the same reverential tone and conviction other people use when speaking of “a good man” or “a good woman.” And yet, the same people who commend Legos as “good toys” usually go on to qualify the claim by disparaging many Lego sets of recent years, especially the ones which are based on movie franchises. We are far more opinionated about Legos than other toys.

However, when asked why Legos are such good toys, many parents stumble for words. They say Legos “encourage creativity,” they furrow their brows and think further, then they confess there is more to it than that, but don’t know how to put it into words. Developmental psychologists say Legos help develop fine motor skills, prompt cooperative play, and offer practice in problem solving. As a teacher of philosophy and classic literature, I don’t think any of these claims gets to heart of the matter. Instead, I think Legos teach us how to think about reality.”
— Joshua Gibbs, "Why Children Need Legos Now More Than Ever"
“My one-year-old has lately begun to “color.” A supply of pencils, crayons, and paper sits ever-ready at his small table in the corner of the kitchen, and when he first wakes up, or whenever he finds a free moment in his little day, he hastens there to draw, with all seriousness, beautiful inscrutable lines and swirls and loops. So intent is he that I sometimes have a hard time tempting him away for the day’s other tasks; he ignores offers even of snacks or outside play; I have to lift him, wailing and wriggling, to carry on with things I deem more needful: mealtime, bath-time, bedtime.

But, of course, I am too big for him to lift or pull away from my work of cooking or cleaning, even when he deems me needed elsewhere. All stern and patient, I, who tear him away from the work that absorbs him, explain that mama needs to finish her work before she can go to help pick up the blocks or rescue the stuffed puppy.

This is a double standard, and maybe it is not wrong. I, the parent, do have responsibilities that my son cannot yet understand. Food appears on his plate with the regularity of sunrise, and he cannot realize that it’s because of work I have had to finish over against his pleas. The parent, the provider, the protector, has a right, by the dignities and duties of his office, to privilege the finishing of his work over his child’s. ”
— Lindsey Brigham Knott, "The Worth of Work Unfinished"
“Music is as old as Jubal (Gen. 4:21), but for most of Western history, “music” didn’t mean what it means today. For us, music is a performance art. For acousticians, it’s part of a science of sound. When thinkers of earlier ages talked of “music,” they weren’t talking, in the first instance, about sound at all. Ancient Greek harmonia doesn’t refer to consonance among multiple notes sounded simultaneously, but to something more like a musical scale or mathematical sequence in which notes or numbers are related by a constant ratio. Audible music, what Boethius called musica instrumentalis, possesses a mysterious power because it’s an audible echo of the unheard harmony of the cosmos, the musica mundana.

Because it merges diverse numbers with a single mathematical interval, harmonia provided a master metaphor for uniting the one and the many in metaphysics, psychology, physics, and politics. Pythagoras believed in a fourfold harmony—of strings on a lyre, of body and soul, of the state, and of the starry, starry sky. Timaeus taught about the world soul, mathematical physics, and the origin of the human soul under the rubric of world harmony; and in the Republic Socrates claimed that the spheres revolve harmoniously around the spindle of necessity. According to Cicero, Scipio dreamed of a “large and agreeable sound” caused by the “onward rush and motion” of the heavenly spheres. ”
— Peter Leithart, "Retune the Sky"
“Our desire for perfect, never-ending love is not uniquely Christian; it is common to all of humanity. Robert Burns, for example, wanted to love his lovers with a love that would endure beyond the destruction of the planet and for which he would walk 10,000 miles. But Robert Burns, like all of us, could not live up to that wildly romantic standard. His poem “A Red, Red Rose,” like much love poetry, greeting cards and pop music, engages in wild hyperbole to make his point. It is a wonderful poem, but it is hyperbole. It is not real. We can forget that and become caught up in the fantasy that human love can satisfy every need of our soul. That fantasy always leads to disappointment.

The problem is not that what we want is not good. It simply does not exist on this side of glory. Reality tears it down and leaves those who held this fantasy in terrible pain. If that was all that happened, it would be bad enough, but it is usually much worse. Those who get married with the false idea that they are marrying their soul mates and fulfilling some destiny where love will win and satisfy them throughout all their days rarely give up on the fantasy just because it fails. Instead, they give up on their spouses. They decide that they made a mistake. They need to start over. They come to believe that a love that will satisfy and fulfill their needs is the greatest good. Therefore anything, including spouse and children, can be sacrificed in pursuit of this love. Burns’ own failed marriage and multiple affairs demonstrate that he was likely deluded in this way.”
— David H. Petersen, "Love Is Hard, Hard Work"
“Just think of all the places you will go the recruiter says to the new recruit as they are on the verge of enlisting in the United States Army. No, I don’t believe recruiters are issued a copy of Dr. Seuss’ book, “Oh, the Places You’ll Go.” Still, in many ways, the recruiting pitch may have some similarities. You’ll face danger, travel through wide-open spaces, enter the waiting place (which there are many), and hey kid - you will face problems. Am I doing a good job of recruiting future soldiers yet?

My parents knew all of the risks when they signed and gave me permission to enlist at the age of 17, we are a military family. One grandfather served in the Navy, and another was in the Army infantry during WWII. My father was in the Air Force during Vietnam, and my brother served in the Army National Guard in the 1990s. Still, knowing the danger, my parents granted me permission to enlist during my senior year of high school to become a soldier.

Little did any of us know that danger was creeping at the door, and the horrific events of 9/11 would be close at hand. As a 20-year-old specialist, I got the call to go. From the college life to the mountains of Bagram, Afghanistan, the transformation was quick and traumatizing. Honestly, I could have used a little Dr. Seuss back then to give me some false motivation and confidence as I traveled to places I did not want to go.”
— Pastor Noah Rogness, "Oh, the Places You'll Go"