It is a great joy to begin our 2020-21 school year and welcome all of our new and returning families to our ILS community. One of the cornerstones of our our Immanuel community is the strong partnership between parents and school, and we value the opportunities for conversation and dialogue as we work together to serve our students.
Each month, we share a "What we're reading..." Blog post with a variety of articles, sermons, or other materials that we have found inspiring or intriguing. It is our hope that you will find value in these and that they will help to shape our ongoing conversation about how we create and build our culture together at home and at school.
Another opportunity for engaging in these conversations is our monthly First Friday Coffee. Parents are invited to join us each month for informal conversation and discussion on different topics. Our first Coffee of the 2020-21 school year will be held on Friday, September 11th via Zoom. Join us to discuss the habit of prayer at home and school and the blessing we have in this community to pray with and for one another.
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!
Music, The Church Year, Repeat - Mrs. Marie Greenway Prelude to Postlude: CPH Music Blog
““Repetition is the mother of all learning.”
This is a common saying, especially in education. The exhortation to repeat, repeat, repeat hopefully is prevalent in our Lutheran schools. Only through repetition does one learn and retain something. You are only reading this right now because someone drilled you on your ABCs and phonograms. In music, we drill note names and scales and rhythms.
Repetition has an even greater importance in theology, perhaps because theology is, or should be, essential to an education. I can recite the catechism only thanks to my parents’ relentless quizzing of my brothers and me. The liturgy is the great repetition of the Church, a Sunday after Sunday education for the congregation. Do you know the liturgy by heart after hearing it countless times? Good. Then you know several Bible passages by heart, you have words to confess your sins, you can recall good prayers easily, and you know the wonderful and serious joy that is the Sacrament of the Altar.”
Celebrating the Job of “Parent” on Labor Day - Rev. Christopher Thoma, Cruciform Stuff
“I pray you’re having (or had) a restful weekend. The unofficial end of summer, Labor Day, has been set before us once again. Believe it or not, Labor Day has been around since 1894. It was established as a day to celebrate the efforts of this nation’s workers—the ones who keep the cylinders in the American engine firing.
Of course, the tendency on Labor Day is to shine the brightest spotlights on the most obvious laborers among us—the skilled trades, medical doctors, engineers, teachers, law enforcement, and so many more. Such vocations deserve our admiration, and naturally, a civil society with any hope of long-term survival needs them. Mindful of these, however, we also need the small, medium, and large organizations and businesses that employ these workers. And among both the employers and employees, we know we are bettered by the innovators, those people who are willing to take a chance that might lead to discovery, even if only very small.
It was Jonathan Swift who said, “He was a bold man who first ate an oyster.”
Still, for as much as these jobs are all needed for an ordered and functioning society, there’s one particular vocation that might be far from our minds the first Monday in September. I’m talking about the vocation of “parent.”
Sure, mothers have “Mother’s Day” and fathers have “Father’s Day,” but I think the labor involved with parenting deserves a nod today, too. Why? Because say what you want about the importance of any job in our world today, it doesn’t change the fact that since the beginning, the task of parenting has always been the center-most cog in every societal machine. Without fathers and mothers, nothing else turns as it should. And there are countless proofs for this.”
The Spirituality of Everyday Life - Gene Veith, Patheos
“In our efforts to Christianize “Labor Day” by turning it into a feast day celebrating the Doctrine of Vocation, I would like to offer you some recent reflections on why vocation is so important, how it can solve so many of the problems Christians are currently struggling with, and how it has the potential to revitalize contemporary Christianity.
This is from the introduction to the chapter on vocation that I wrote with Trevor Sutton in our book Authentic Christianity: How Lutheran Theology Speaks to a Post-Modern World:
The Reformation contributed three major teachings that would characterize Protestantism in all its diversity: justification by faith, the authority of Scripture, and the doctrine of vocation. The first two still have currency, despite recent criticisms. But the concept of vocation has been gradually lost. First it was turned into a “work ethic.” Then it turned into a pious attitude empty of specific content. Eventually it was reduced to just another synonym for “a job.”
Vocation was never meant to be just another word for “occupation.” Rather, it was originally about the Christian life that is fully integrated, meaningful, and teeming with purpose. Vocation was the locus for other important teachings, such as the priesthood of all believers, good works, and sanctification. It was not merely a theoretical teaching; rather, as taught in the early Reformation catechisms and sermons, the doctrine of vocation gave practical guidance to Christians in their marriages, parenthood, economic activity, and their role as citizens.
The doctrine of vocation shows Christians how to live out their faith in the world. It is about God’s presence in the world and how He works through human beings for His purposes. For Christians, vocation discloses the spirituality of everyday life.”
Not for Bread Alone: Notes on Good Work - Benjamin Woollard, Mere Orthodoxy
“On a number of the shelves in my home sit baskets that I have made myself. I took up the craft out of a need for contrast in what is a largely abstract existence, mostly consisting of reading and computer work. Being a person who enjoys working with his hands, I was not all that surprised when I found this to be deeply gratifying. The constant application of my mind and body to a challenging, but not terribly complicated, activity resulted in long periods of intense inner quiet that gave rise to a peace not unlike prayer. This kind of experience is something that seems to have a great pull for many people, as is attested by the seemingly endless stream of internet videos in which people build huts, craft wooden furniture with non-electronic tools, or weave comforters using archaic methods, some of which attract millions of views.
It is especially interesting to note that many of the people in these videos, as well as those viewing them, live in a time and place where most of these practices have become almost entirely obsolete. Few of us who have been born in the post-industrial west have any need of primitive survival skills, traditional woodworking knowledge, or an ability to sew, and yet many of us consistently look back nostalgically upon the connection that our forefathers had with the basic tasks of subsistence. We have accumulated so much comfort that we are forced to face the realization that this is perhaps not what we really wanted all along. There is something beyond the mere necessities of life, and yet which somehow also involves those necessities.
There are two primary assumptions that I most frequently encounter regarding human subsistence, both of which are false. The first is that the fundamental drive of action is material security. This is the survival narrative, which is so often used as a lens through which to view the entire natural world, humanity included. Of course, there is some truth in this, as material security is a prerequisite for the higher forms of culture—art, philosophy, and so on—which require a good deal of leisure. There is always a certain animal necessity in our existence, with all the spear throwing, or office work, that this necessitates.
Yet to prioritize this over meaningful engagement with the world is a mistake. If that which is desirable for its own sake constitutes the good, as it does, then surely mere material subsistence is not the good, but only a stepping-stone to achieving it. The second assumption is the extreme opposite of the first: that the task of creating material necessities is merely foundational to higher pursuits. Such a perspective sees the production of food, clothing, and shelter in a starkly utilitarian light. Yet this too is incorrect, as we should not assume that because material security does not constitute the ultimate good, acquisition cannot therefore participate in the higher orders of human longing. Both of these perspectives are erroneous because they fail to integrate every dimension of the human person, creating a false opposition between the ends of the spirit and those of the body.”
Education and the Restoration of Moral Agency - R.J. Snell, Public Discourse
“In many ways, our time is like all others. Humans are born, live, fall in love, die—the basics. Every person still encounters the challenge of living well, and of facing that daunting task without knowing precisely how to do it. We’re all, as Walker Percy noted, slightly lost in the cosmos. Still, there are moments throughout history in which the task of living well becomes especially difficult—times when the institutions, mores, laws, and social prescriptions are unusually confused or weak, unjust or irrational. Sometimes a collective hysteria or moral revolution uproots the sane and settled ways. And there are occasions when the authorities are supine, abdicating their responsibilities.
Some would consider ours to be such a moment, claiming that we live, in the hyperbolic words of Michel Houellebecq, “in an age . . . miserable and troubled,” in countries “sliding slowly, ineluctably, into the ranks of the less developed countries,” and where people live “lonely, bitter lives.” As Mark Lilla riffs, our polity, having lost its way, all but forces individuals to live “like elementary particles spread out in space, each rotating at its own speed and following its own trajectory.”
I’m hardly alone in noting that young people are particularly affected by the loss of authority and tradition, to various effect: some—the young who make the news—are full of passionate intensity and riotous indignation, but a good many are simply lost, uncertain what to do or how to live. Many lack a sense of moral agency, the urgent responsibility to shape their lives and character. Some of the following is anecdotal, gained from personal interactions with students, but it conveys, I think, a sense of need and longing expressed by the many young people shamefully robbed of their cultural patrimony by their parents, clergy, and teachers.”
Craft, Vocation, and the Decline of the West - Matthew Pheneger, The Imaginative Conservative
“A characteristic feature of contemporary society is a lack of appreciation for traditional craftsmanship. Few have captured this sentiment with as much verve as the celebrated American cartoonist Bill Watterson, who once exclaimed that “We don’t value craftsmanship anymore! All we value is ruthless efficiency, and I say we deny our own humanity that way! Without appreciation for grace and beauty, there’s no pleasure in creating things and no pleasure in having them!”
To the extent that it undervalues craftsmanship, modernity again proves itself the exception. Indeed, for much of Western history the craftsman occupied an honored and sacred place in the social fabric, whether brewer, builder, or blacksmith. We can glean an impression of the way contemporary attitudes towards craftsmanship differ from those of our forebears by looking to the various guilds and professional associations that proliferated in Europe’s cities and kingdoms during the Middle Ages, and which were themselves vestiges of similar institutions that dated from antiquity, such as the Roman collegium. At a practical level, the guild system helped to set fair prices and ensure that what was produced met given standards of quality. At the same time, it served to bind practitioners of a given craft together in a fraternal manner. As G.K. Chesterton argued in his work, A Short History of England, because membership in a guild was predicated on a long period of apprenticeship that in turn depended on mutual trust and cooperation among its members, the antagonistic “class struggle” that would later plague industrial society was rarely to be found:
A Guild was, very broadly speaking, a Trade Union in which every man was his own employer. That is, a man could not work at any trade unless he would join the league and accept the laws of that trade; but he worked in his own shop with his own tools, and the whole profit went to himself. But the word ‘employer’ marks a modern deficiency which makes the modern use of the word ‘master’ quite inexact. A master meant something quite other and greater than a ‘boss.’ It meant a master of the work, where it now means only a master of the workmen.”