Wow! It is hard to believe we’re already entering our 2nd month of the new school year. As we have all returned to some of the traditional rhythms and routines of school, we are also all still adjusting to new changes we’re all facing this year. While we are all missing some of our traditional opportunities to gather as a community in person and eagerly await the time when those can return, we remain grateful for the ways we are still able to connect and support one another as we serve our students.
We hope that you enjoy our monthly "What we're reading..." Blog series, with what we hope is a variety of inspiring, thought-provoking or intriguing materials. It is our hope that these pieces continue to help to shape our ongoing conversation about how we create and build our culture together at home and at school. We would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below as you read these!
This month, we are also looking forward to a number of great opportunities to connect with families. We will be engaging in meaningful conversations with our current families during our first trimester Parent-Teacher Conferences. Then, families interested in learning more about a classical, Christian education at Immanuel are invited to attend our first Virtual Admissions Open House on Friday, October 16th. Then, we will finish up the month with our first virtual Lower School Showcase of the year.
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!
Holy Spirit, Breathe on Us - Mrs. Marie Greenway Prelude to Postlude: CPH Music Blog
““Thou camest to our hall of death,
O Christ, to breathe our poisoned air,
To drink for us the dark despair
That strangled our reluctant breath.”
So writes Martin Franzmann in my school’s hymn of the year: “O God, O Lord of Heaven and Earth” (LSB 834). With strong and striking text, he could almost be predicting our 2020 world of “poisoned air” and “reluctant breath,” thanks to the awful virus. It may be a novel coronavirus, but there is nothing novel about sickness and death, though it is fresh in our minds these days. Since our first parents partook of the fruit of the forbidden tree, our air has been poisoned, our breath both reluctant and short, and our despair, indeed, dark.
What is novel is the sacrifice of a man—a God-man to be precise, coming to breathe in our air sans mask and hand sanitizer. What would Christ say of these modern times? I can’t say for sure, but it might be something like “take heart; I have overcome the world” (John 16:33). Consider what may be our “hall of death” today. Is it the coronavirus unit in the hospital? Is it a hallway full of unmasked school children? Is it our own churches or our own homes? Courage, dear friends! Let us not forget that Christ has walked the ultimate hall of death for our sakes, harrowing hell in His own victorious death. The God-man who touched lepers and rubbed His own spit into another man’s eyes, who called forth the stinking dead man from his tomb and dipped bread into a shared cup with His betrayer hardly leaves us to fend for ourselves amid such sickness.”
Chasing Happiness- Rev. Christopher Thoma, Cruciform Stuff
“Admittedly, every year at this time, I’m reminded of how the changing seasons run parallel with a number of things in life. For one, I’m reminded to embrace the happy times—to appreciate family, friends, and the moments we have together in the “right now.” I recall these things knowing that everything could be very different tomorrow. Come to think of it, tomorrow itself is never a certain thing. This has begun to make more sense as my children get older. With each and every step toward adulthood, I’m reminded of just how momentary the current days truly are. At the moment, all four of my children still live at home, but it won’t be long before each will pass from the summertime of his or her life with mom and dad into the winter of “farewell.” Of course, they’ll move beyond that winter toward the spring and summer of new careers and family, and God willing, the parents will be brought along with them into these seasons of happiness.
All the same, too many parents know exactly the mixed emotions of this icy in-between that I’m describing, and so as the twilight of the events draws near, parents do their best to take as much joy from the moments as each will give. They’ll do what they can to hold onto the happiness.
I suppose before I go any further with my Monday morning tip-tapping of the keyboard’s keys—of putting onto your screen whatever I feel like putting there in the moment—I suppose I should get to some sort of point. Or how about a question? I think there’s one hidden in what I’ve shared so far.
How about this: What makes for real happiness?”
Dorothy Sayers on Classical Education - Raymond Dokupil, The Imaginative Conservative
“This is the challenge that resisting the culture of convenience and efficiency presents to us. Nobody who relies only on a GPS for navigation will ever master the art of navigation. Those who can only cook by following a cookbook will never master the art of cooking. If one’s musical education involves only learning pop songs from a YouTube tutorial, he will not acquire the first principles of music. Not that there is anything inherently wrong with these tools. The problem arises in how we are using them. An antibiotic can work wonders when you get an infected tooth, but nobody in his right mind believes that taking a daily antibiotic could in any way be a substitute for brushing, flossing, and limiting sugar intake, or that an antibiotic is a permanent fix for an abscessed molar.
In the end, the shortcut is no shortcut. Because we learn nothing, we retain nothing. Because we retain nothing, we must expend precious energy frantically appealing to Google every time we encounter a new situation. Googling “how to jump-start a dead car battery” may help us get to work on time, but it will not do anything toward helping us understand why the battery went dead in the first place, or even the first principles of general electrical theory. Hopefully, we will retain enough knowledge to jump-start our next battery failure, but the knowledge will do us no good when we blow a circuit breaker in our house. We must “Google it” all over again. And again. And again. Every time we get behind the wheel, we must re-invent it.”
A Backwards Way to Pray (and Why It’s Often Better) - Heather Smith, Sister, Mother, Daughter, Wife Blog
“From my quasi-Baptist upbringing I absorbed many assumptions about prayer. Some of them were admirable, and some questionable. I was indoctrinated that God cares about all aspects of our life (He does) and we should therefore submit all our worries to Him in prayer (we should). Various devotional programs emphasized setting aside daily time for prayer (a wise discipline that was unfortunately doled out as Law rather than Gospel). But perhaps more than anything else, I was taught that prayer must come from the heart. A spontaneous flow of ineloquent ramblings was the sure sign of sincerity, and I was actually cautioned against written prayers since these ostensibly could not reflect the genuine desires of the speaker’s heart.
However, the more years I am steeped in Lutheran liturgy and practice, the more I come to appreciate written prayers, particularly the collects of the Church. Far from leading me into a cold, rote faith, I find they direct my heart to Scriptural truths that I would otherwise overlook. Whereas the type of prayer I was taught as a child identifies my worries, my needs, my desires and asks God to fix these problems, the ancient prayers of the Church work backwards. They ask God to give us what we pray for—by fixing how we pray.
This struck me powerfully in the historic collect for the Ninth Sunday after Trinity:
“Let Your merciful ears, O Lord, be open to the prayers of Your humble servants; and that they may obtain their petitions, make them to ask such things as shall please You . . .”
What a radical prayer! My heartfelt spontaneous prayers would certainly never stumble upon the idea of setting aside the requests I have in mind and instead petitioning God to make me ask for better things. ”
The Value of Multiple Readings of the Same Book - and Having a Favorite Book - Ty Fischer, Veritas Press
“In this post, I want to encourage you to find and adore a particular worthy book more than others. By the way, I am assuming that all believers already have one book, the Bible, that must be number one and should serve as every believer’s daily bread. What I am advocating is having one other book that you devote yourself to regularly reading it and gleaning as much as you can from it. For me, that book is Dante’s Comedy. I used to read it each year, trying to find a different translation each time. Now, I read it every couple of years and I often go back to translations that are my favorites (Sayers and Esolen if you are curious). I am not arguing that your favorite book must be The Comedy (although I think it is the best, toughest, most rewarding read). I must admit that I have flirted with other favorites like Anna Karenina (don’t tell Dante) and Paradise Lost, but I always come back to The Divine Comedy. The book you choose should be a book worthy of many readings. Many of the books covered in the Omnibus curriculum could fit the bill as a “favorite book.” Here are a few of the most meaningful reasons for discovering a favorite book and rewards that you can only accrue if you devote yourself to multiple readings of the same book.
It is only in multiple readings of the same book that you catch all of the details and understand the deeper points the author is attempting to make.
This happens to me all of the time when I am reading the Bible. You read a passage that you have read many times and you see something new. There have been times that I have picked up the Bible and read this “new” part over and over, thinking, “who put this in here” or “I have no memory of this.” It is the same with the Great Books. Multiple, devoted, careful reads yield up fruit that can only be tasted through devotion, patience, and reflection. A single reading of The Comedy is almost useless. Dante expects you to return, to make connections, to glory in the details and coax out all of the layers of meaning. This is true of Thucydides, Plato, Virgil, and Tolstoy. The 10th read is better, much better, than the first.
Multiple readings help you to find friends who are also devoted to the same book.
This might seem weird, but it happens to me all the time. When I find other devotees of Dante, I reliably find really great friends. They have been formed by the same master. We end up seeing many things in similar ways and we always have something to talk about even if we do not agree. My Dean of Students, Graham Dennis, and I have an ongoing debate about the meaning of the Leopard, the Lion, and the Wolf in the early cantos of Inferno. He intentionally poisons students against my correct view and tells them to challenge me with his heretical views regularly. We have a great time talking about this disagreement. ”
Beauty and Charismatic Humanities - Mark Bauerlein, Public Discourse
“During the 1960s and ’70s, as the Theory Revolution swept through humanities departments, one of the fundamental issues in play was the status of beauty. Or rather, the question was whether a pure experience of beauty was possible—purity measured by how far an experience remained independent of social and political elements. Immanuel Kant defined the requisite attitude for beholding beauty as “disinterestedness,” that contemplative frame of mind that asks nothing of the object and judges it by its aesthetic features alone. A man dying of thirst, for instance, cannot tell the difference between a 1982 La Conseillante and a table wine from Trader Joe’s. “It is only when the want is appeased that we can distinguish which of many men has or has not taste,” Kant wrote in Critique of Judgment.
Disinterestedness falters, too, when a person applies personal background to an object, such as disliking a painting because it evokes a painful memory from childhood. Politics and morality also undermine the aesthetic experience. Kant takes the example of Rousseau viewing a gorgeous palace and seeing only the exploitation of peasants who built the pile and never enjoyed its comforts. One can look at things this way, of course, but it will produce something else: a sociopolitical judgment, not an aesthetic judgment. It applies non-aesthetic criteria to the object and thus prevents an experience of beauty from ever happening. It’s not that moral and political content play no role in the judgment of beauty, only that the value of that content lies in its skillful integration into the form and structure, the internal logic of the piece. A patriotic song can impart a good moral message and be very bad art. You can be a patriot all you want, but if you have the right aesthetic distance, you will see that song more clearly than you would if you responded only to its political thrust.”
How Biblical Illiteracy is Ruining the Humanities - Luther Ray Abel, National Review
“I attend a well-to-do liberal-arts school in the Midwest. The professors are wonderful and the classmates impressive. However, I find myself consistently pained by one thing: Many have little to no familiarity with even the most widely known Bible stories. In the words of the adventurous Professor Indiana Jones, “Any of you guys ever go to Sunday school?”
If the purpose of this essay were to merely shout at the heavens, proclaiming that the world is going to hell in a handbasket because of rampant biblical illiteracy on Earth, many may be tempted to dismiss my concerns — flippantly enough. But no, this article isn’t about that . . . not exactly.
The institution I look to protest on behalf of is instead the Western Canon, the Great Books. These enduring tomes, which start with the Iliad, Pentateuch, and the Odyssey and end with whichever text John J. Miller — host of the Great Books podcast — so declares, are threatened by the willful ignorance of we moderns.
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Let us first address the practical concerns: When a class must stop at almost every biblical reference in the poetry of Emily Dickinson — so that a student or the professor can explain who John the Baptist was or why the Book of Revelation is kind of a big deal — the quality and pace of instruction decline. Emily Dickinson was influenced mightily by her Calvinist roots, and though somewhat heterodox in her theology, she could not help but use Christian imagery and biblical allusions throughout her writings. When a majority of the class is unfamiliar with the Crucifixion, it makes for a long, and value-deficient, class.
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