In Episode 3, Scott Postma and Joffre Swait riff off of the humorous anecdote where Chesterton was asked which book he would want with him if ever stranded on a desert Island–Chesterton quickly answered, “Thomas’ Guide to Practical Shipbuilding”–and they discuss the top ten books they would recommend in a similar situation. Joffre comes at this question from a personal standpoint and discusses the books that shaped his own education. Scott comes at it from …
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[ 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 have a proper formation in the disciplines and a proper sense of the …
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 great deal of danger in exposing young people to high and holy topics …
When a culture is in the process of denying its own roots, it becomes most important to know what these roots are. We had best know what we reject before we reject it. If we are going to build a chair, the first thing we need to know, above all else, is what a chair is. Otherwise, we can do nothing. We are not a culture that never understood what a human being was in …
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 …