We’re one month into the school year, and it is delightful seeing the return of all the rhythms and routines of the school year! September was filled with many wonderful ILS traditions - our annual Constitution Day celebration, Oktoberfest, our First Friday coffees, fall parent socials, and more! We are looking forward to ongoing conversations with families during our fall Parent Teacher Conferences, welcoming guest for our first Lower School Showcase of the year, and planning ahead to our November Month of Service and our Salute to Veterans on Veterans Day next month.
Every month, we share our "What we're reading..." blog, filled with a variety of articles and news. This is one of the many ways we endeavor to spark on-going conversation and engage our community. As we think about and work together at shaping and nurturing our culture together at school and at home, we hope that these articles may be inspiring, intriguing, encouraging, or thought-provoking, and that hopefully they will spark further conversations and dialogue.
We are excited that the PTL is working to engage families in more conversations with their Book Club. Please consider joining us in reading these selections and participating in some of the conversations throughout the year!
Are there things that you have read that you think others in our community may enjoy? Please feel free to share a link in the comments to email us any time!
Thank you for your continued partnership, and for engaging with us!
Our Anchor, Our Hope (Part 3) - Kristina Cowan, The Classical Difference
“To shape our image-driven, internet-saturated world, our children need a sharp command of language. Thankfully, classical Christian education (CCE) is language-focused, not image-and-technology driven.
Author Susan Wise Bauer says the two demand vastly different habits of thought: “Language requires the mind to work harder; in reading, the brain is forced to translate a symbol (words on the page) into a concept. Images, such as those on videos and television, allow the mind to be passive. In front of a video screen, the brain can ‘sit back’ and relax; faced with the written page, the mind is required to roll its sleeves up and get back to work.”
Kids’ minds are hard at work in CCE schools. They’re steeped in the ancient practice of memorization—an art and a science all but lost in modern education. In his book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, Nicholas Carr writes:
”By the middle of the twentieth century memorization itself had begun to fall from favor. Progressive educators banished the practice from classrooms, dismissing it as a vestige of a less enlightened time. What had long been viewed as a stimulus for personal insight and creativity came to be seen as a barrier to imagination. … Don Tapscott, the technology writer, puts it more bluntly. Now that we can look up anything “with a click on Google,” he says, “memorizing long passages or historical facts” is “a waste of time.””
Memorization isn’t a waste of time. CCE emphasizes it across all subjects and grades. Starting in kindergarten, students memorize and recite timelines, poems, and historical facts. With the help of songs and chants, the information plants itself in the children’s brains—and never seems to leave.”
Sermon: Eleventh Sunday After Trinity - Pastor Esget, Esgetology
“Justification is the central doctrine of Christianity. Justification is the article by which the Church stands or falls. Justification was the number one issue in the Reformation. More than indulgences, or the papacy, or monks howling masses for money, justification was the central issue. Take away the Bible’s teaching of justification, and you end up with an entirely different religion.
So what is justification? We can define justification like this: justification is a restoration to a right relationship between two parties who were in conflict. Justification is also making restitution for wrongs that have been done.
But how can that be done? If we are in a conflict, how can we get back to a right relationship? If you’ve done something wrong, how can you make it right? It’s hard enough to fix problems between two people. But the broken relationship here is with God. We have wronged God. How can that ever be made right?
That was the Reformation question, just as it was St. Paul’s question. But I don’t think it resonates with most people today. No one’s looking for a gracious God. Human concerns have shifted, and the temptation is to shift theology with it; or maybe it’s easier to say, Religion should offer new answers since the questions have changed.
I mean really! A God who demands satisfaction? A God who requires payment for sins? Sin?! This is the twenty-first century. Get over it!
But the questions haven’t really changed. We’ve just lost the terminology, the framework to address our ills. It’s like having a pain in your body but not knowing the cause. You know something’s wrong, but you can’t find the remedy until you know precisely what is wrong.”
Using Hymns to Learn or Improve Improvisation - Mrs. Marie Greenway, Prelude to Postlude: CPH Music Blog
“These days, I tend to improv when playing one instrument—the organ. Why? When I am playing the organ, it is typically because I am playing for church. When I play for church, I always play hymns. And playing hymns is, I posit, the best introduction to building the skill of improvisation.
Like most skills, it is helpful to start learning improv step-by-step in a structured environment. Hymns offer the ideal avenue for that kind of skill-building.
Hymns provide a solid structure from which to build improv skills, particularly when playing hymns for a congregation to sing. Because of this structure, hymns offer limited improv choices, making them a good first step to learning the skill. A musician working on improv skills can only pick from a few things to try, taking away the overwhelming feeling when faced with unlimited options.”
Trinity 16 - Pastor Noah Rogness, Rogness on Tap
“Today’s Gospel sets up with two processions. The first is that of Jesus. Having healed the Centurion’s servant just before our text, Jesus is now traveling with a great crowd and approaching the town of Nain when a second procession also of great size is coming out of the village to the cemetery outside of the city gate. Here is a very different procession, a somber procession where a widow brings her only son to be buried.
You, too, have undoubtedly felt the pain of the widow’s grief at the death of a loved one. You have made this procession before, the procession that leads out of the Church and to the open grave. Tears have run down your cheeks, and you have felt the pain you believed would never depart.
But here at the city gates of Nain, in the middle of the road, two worlds collide, and two parties come together. The first being led by the Word incarnate, the only begotten Son of God, who brings life in His very Word. The other group is a procession of tears, death, and grief.
We can all relate to this collision of life and death in our own lives. My family has felt we’re in a similar clash of death and life this week. Yesterday, we gathered at the grave to remember Faith Zion Rogness, our child who died in the womb one year ago. And yet, in the coming weeks, we look forward, with joy and excitement, to the welcoming of the newest Rogness baby. In many ways, these emotions are all so confusing.
I believe the Easter hymn, “Christ Jesus Lay in Death’s Strong Bands,” captures these feelings of death and life throughout our days, as well as our Gospel text as it says, “It was a strange and dreadful strife, When life and death contended. The victory remained with life, The reign of death was ended.”
And yet, our grief often appears to go on without end, doesn’t it? ”
God’s Clear, Reliable Word - Pastor Matthew Harrison, The Lutheran Witness
“I was in Nebraska a few weeks back for their district convention. An older farmer pulled me aside and said, “Pastor, I have to tell you something.”
“What’s that?”
“Pastor, I see people, young people hurting or confused.” He began tearing up. “I know it when I see ‘em, Pastor. I know they’re hurting. You know what I do, Pastor? I give them a catechism.”
“Oh,” I said, “You give them the little pamphlet edition of Luther’s Catechism, just Luther’s part?”
“No, Pastor, I give ‘em the whole thing. You wouldn’t believe what happens.” He proceeded to tell me amazing things that happened in the life of the recipients: conversions to Lutheranism, fresh comfort from the Word and consolation in the midst of struggles.
Last week I went to CPH, and I bought a stack of them. Before I got home that day, I gave away three — two to people looking for a church that teaches the Word of God.
“How can I, unless someone guides me?” the Ethiopian eunuch asked Phillip (Acts 8:31). We often have the same question. It’s vital to know the clear and main teachings of the Bible to be able to read it most profitably. That’s what the catechism is and does. It’s nothing but the Bible. That’s why Luther translated the New Testament so early in the Reformation (and continued on to translate the Old Testament as well); it’s why he wrote the Small Catechism and Large Catechism in 1529. The catechism is our Phillip.
Read your Bible. Read it daily. Read your catechism. Read it daily. Buy your kid and grandkids the new catechism. Get The Lutheran Study Bible. Buy your kids CPH’s Bible story books. Knowing the Word of God will make you confident in your salvation, wrought by Christ and pointed to by the whole Bible. God works through His Holy Word (including the texts in the catechism) to create faith in those who hear and read it. “So shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty” (Isaiah 55:11).”
Redshirt the Boys: Why Boys Should Start School a Year Later Than Girls - Richard V. Reeves, The Atlantic
““It was a light-bulb moment for me,” Christopher Schroeder, an entrepreneur, an investor, and a father of two boys, told me. His son Jack had been accepted to Beauvoir, the National Cathedral Elementary School, in Washington, D.C. But “it was clear to the school that Jack should wait a year,” he said—not because of his academic ability, but to give him more time to become socially and emotionally prepared. “My view was that smart kids should be pushed forward as fast as possible,” Schroeder recalled. “But as I laid out my case to the head of the school, she listened patiently, waited a moment, smiled at me, and said, ‘What’s your rush?’ ”
Jack started at the school a year later and ended up flourishing, largely, his father thinks, because of the decision not to rush him. When it was time for Jack’s younger brother, Ben, to attend the school, he also started a year later—at his parents’ insistence. “By then we were thinking, Why not? ” Schroeder said.
The idea of a delayed school start—often referred to as “redshirting,” a term borrowed from athletics—got a burst of popular attention in 2008, when Malcolm Gladwell presented evidence in his book Outliers that children older than their classmates do better on academic tests and in life generally.”
The Bookshelf: Dangers of the Siloed Life - Matthew J. Franck, Public Discourse
“We live in an age when, thanks to the internet, more information, with more variations of type, quality, and point of view, is available to billions of people than ever before. But the sheer quantity available demands of each of us that we filter our consumption of “content” to make our intake manageable and meaningful to us. And so we get our news from these sources and not those, subscribe to these publications and not those, and “curate” (a much overused word, I know) our social media feeds to “follow” some people and not others. Each of us settles into a groove of checking the same sites each day, opening emails from the same subscriber lists, and tuning in to the same radio stations, TV networks, or podcasts. Sometimes we add and subtract from our usual sources, but a habitual status quo of information channels is our daily norm.
The danger, of course, is that we will “silo” ourselves, choosing to listen only to voices congenial to our own views, and walling off our access to other points of view. On social media this is a particular temptation, because there is often more heat than light in such places—the premium on brevity leading to snark and sneer rather than argument and evidence, with users naturally resorting to friend/unfriend, follow/unfollow, and mute-or-block with the click of a mouse when the clanging cymbals of insult grow too loud. It’s easy to wind up, though, in a cozily narrow information environment.”
The Vacation Problem - Joshua Gibbs, CIRCE
“Most teachers will tell you that “making up what you missed in class” never really works. The pandemic showed us that. Students who are accustomed to in-person classes don’t thrive when they’re briefly, suddenly thrust into alternative situations. “Making up what you missed in class” often just means getting notes from a classmate but getting notes from a classmate is generally a worthless, bureaucratic requirement that produces no real learning. The idea that “getting notes” is educational at all is rather absurd. Why? Because “getting notes” carries no moral weight, no authority, takes almost no time, involves no real struggle, and produces no genuine intrigue, respect, or wonder. Getting notes on class works about as well as getting notes on church. If a teenage boy stays home sick on Sunday morning and his father later hands him a church bulletin with a few stray claims about Hebrews 2 jotted down, the boy gains nothing nothing. If the boy or his father pretends the notes have done any good, the boy will actually lose quite a bit of respect for church. Any class session that can be reduced to “getting notes” was not worth taking in the first place. If a student misses a week of class, the only way to truly make it up is with several lengthy makeup sessions with the teacher. Anything less is either fake restitution or else proves the class is nothing more than a babysitting service.”
The Great Conversation: Sign & Symbol, Part I - Gabriel Blanchard, CLT Blog
“Signs are one of the most ubiquitous of the great ideas. The alphabet, in which this sentence is written, is a system of signs; for that matter, language as such is a system of signs.
What is a sign? In brief, it is a thing that points to another thing. In a handful of cases, like one-way street signs, this “pointing to” is quite literal, but most of the time “suggests” or “indicates” would do as a substitute. Additionally, making abstract signs seems to be a peculiarly human activity; other animals communicate for practical purposes, but only humans seem to be interested in, or have much knack, for “pointing at” invisible concepts. The study of signs (with due respect to Dan Brown’s fictional professor of “symbology”) is called semiotics, from the Greek σημεῖον (sēmeion), “sign.” Given its definition, semiotics technically covers every form of communication and thought; however, “ideas” is not a very distinctive intellectual turf in Academe, and most semioticians specialize. Many pursue linguistics; some study the techniques and conventions of the arts; one could consider the many regimes of rituals used by institutions (religious, military, athletic, etc.), or the intricate rules of heraldry and vexillology, or the subtleties of computer programming—they do call it “coding” for a reason!
One of the immediately obvious facts about a sign is that it is not identical to the thing it signifies. In many cases, though not in all, the connection between a sign and its meaning seems arbitrary; this is where the distinction between signs and symbols comes in. Sign covers all “indicators”; although the distinction is not absolute, symbol is often restricted to those less-common signs which do have a natural link with the thing they signify. Our next Great Conversation installment will pick up the topic of symbols; here, we will discuss what are called conventional or artificial signs. Understanding a conventional sign normally requires being told what it means by somebody who knows already, and using that knowledge in further encounters with the sign to unite it with its meaning.”