[ This post originally appeared on my classical teacher site, Locus Classicus. ] [ Concluded from Part 1 ] For myself, I desire to take the classical Christian tradition with the utmost seriousness, meaning that I do not simply reject something found in it because it is not immediately apparent to me how that thing is sensible and might be true. On the other hand, our tradition itself permits us to imagine that, if we …
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[ This post originally appeared on my classical teacher site, Locus Classicus. ] I want to approach this seemingly counter-productive question (at least for those of us involved in CCE, Classical Christian Education), by discussing two pretty provocative classical statements that recently came to my attention regarding politics and theology. These two statements, one from the 4th century B.C. and the other from the 16th century A.D. stake out the position that there is a …
Say what one will about mythology; there are times when it is an incredibly deep store of verifiable human knowledge drawn from experience and made more powerful through allegorization. Take Virgil’s remark in Book IV of the Aeneid that as soon as Aeneas and Dido have, according to Juno, been married, immediately “Rumor flies through Libya’s great cities. Rumor, swiftest of all the evils in the world.” Who is this Rumor? What happens if we pay attention …
What does the word “rhetoric” mean to you? Most people associate “rhetoric” with words that are big, showy, or empty, fake, and manipulative. Why would we want to teach our children how to use words to manipulate people? As an online teacher at Kepler Education who teaches Rhetoric, I’d like to submit that rhetoric is inescapable. We are surrounded by rhetoric. It’s not a question of whether our students are going to learn rhetoric–it’s a …
In the midst of the global COVID-19 crisis, there are many features of our modern life that we take for granted. Toilet paper, meat, hand sanitizer … and hospitals. Although adequate medical care is still tragically absent in many countries throughout the world, a huge percentage of the world’s population can simply go to a hospital when they need medical attention. This fact is worth pausing over. For much of human history, it was not …