Run. And don’t look back.

Whenever a Christian follows authority figures who don’t allow questions about themselves or their direction or teaching, get out and don’t look back. Whenever someone says he knows what’s best for your life, better than you do; whenever someone says that she speaks for God; whenever someone pretends to be anything other than a flawed human being who makes mistakes and sometimes gets it wrong — that person is sitting on a pedestal of his or her own making, and if you don’t destroy it, God will. So many freedom-destroying things we do are connected to an irresponsible decision to allow others to be to us what only God is supposed to be.

Steve Brown

Thank you, Josh.

Josh introduced me to Franz Wright. 

Today I read God’s Silence in one sitting.  It was like having a conversation with someone who opens his mouth only to have his soul sit on his lips.  I’m kind of exhausted.  but exalted. 

Franz would be proud.  In his poem “Poet’s Room in a Museum” he writes, “Poem in other words may or may not result from inspiration but must (in reader and author alike) produce it–”

I’ll let the pros review this book of poems.  I’ll only react:  Often in the beginning I was offended at Wright’s banality and pretended I could not identify with this recovering addict.  But as I kept reading, the moments of clarity (in, for instance, “The Hawk,” “The Heaven,” “Text & Commentary,” “Petition,” “The Walk,” “The Fire,” “Why is the Winter Light,” “A Successful Day (Fill in the Blank)”) created sublimities that I wanted to share. 

Just this morning, I had one of  those experiences at church in which the Infinite spoke to me.  But I sounded moronic trying to explain that experience to another person.  Wright deftly captures those soul-lifting moments and makes them contagious  in this collection of poems.

My Philosophy of Education

THE GOAL OF EDUCATION

Isocrates, perhaps the father of the trivium, asserts that our ability to persuade others and communicate our desires sets us apart from the animals.  Our ability to come together and devise cultural norms is distinctly human and uniquely a result of the power of speech. 

For this it is which has laid down laws concerning things just and unjust, and things honorable and base; and if it were not for these ordinances we should not be able to live with one another.  It is by this also that we confute the bad and extol the good.  Through this we educate the ignorant and appraise the wise; for the power to speak well is taken as the surest index of a sound understanding, and discourse which is true and lawful and just is the outward image of a good and faithful soul.

In Antidosis, Isocrates views his educational goal as patriotic.  While he labored to touch the souls of his students in order to make them good citizens of Rome, we must strive today to make strong citizens for the kingdom of God. 

Mature and active citizens of God’s kingdom love wisdom and seek the honorable and lovely throughout the entirety of their lives.  Kingdom citizens submit to the reign of Christ in every aspect of their lives.  We recognize the importance of allowing the gospel to activate and empower our knowledge to change our own lives and the culture in which we live.   

THE FUNDAMENTAL ELEMENTS OF EDUCATION

The fundamental elements of Christian education are summed up beautifully by John Milton Gregory as “the Seven Laws of Teaching”:

(1) a teacher who knows the lesson to be taught; (2) a learner who attends with interest to the lesson; (3) a common language used, a medium between the teacher and learner; (4) a lesson to be mastered that uses the known to explain the unknown; (5) teaching that arouses the learner to use his mind to grasp a new idea or truth; (6) learning that is the process of a pupil thinking a new idea or truth into his own understanding; and (7) review and application of the ideas and truths communicated.

 

THE AUTHORITY IN EDUCATION

Authority is the right and power to command, instruct, and direct.  As citizens of the kingdom of God, all authority is His.  God has instituted the church and family to cultivate children to become godly citizens.  A family can not raise a fully developed child, ignoring religion.  Each family tacitly proclaims their religious beliefs through their lives.  Deuteronomy 6 gives families the responsibility to diligently teach their children.  However, the context seems less like transferring knowledge and more like sharing the legacy of the Christian culture.  Parents are commanded to teach the moral law and Christian principles when they sit in the living room, when they walk around the neighborhood, when they lie down to sleep, when they rise to greet a new day, and all the opportunities to find Christ in between. 

 

Professional educators partner with parents in order to educate and cultivate a culture of Christ, always acknowledging the parents’ God-given responsibility to raise children in the nurture and counsel of God. 

 

THE METHODS OF EDUCATION

From the ancient days of Isocrates, students were educated in what would later be codified as the trivium.  Throughout history, children have learned according to the method of classical education until John Dewey asserted his new antics in the beginning of the twentieth century.  As a tried and successful method, the trivium has produced the great minds of Aristotle, Pythagoras, St. Augustine, Francis Bacon, John Locke, C. S. Lewis, and virtually every other person involved in the great conversation before 1950. 

 

The trivium includes three stages:  grammar, logic, and rhetoric.  The grammar stage is the first and most basic.  During this stage, a student learns the basic language of a subject and all its vocabulary.  Students learn the very basic methods of memorizing while young:  singing, chanting, and repetition, repetition, repetition.  While accumulating the facts of a subject, the student provides a foundation for the next stage, logic. 

 

The dialectic, or logic, stage takes the stored knowledge of various subjects and begins to organize it in a meaningful way.  This necessitates formal logic training but also accompanies the stage of development in which children begin to demand logical explanations for knowledge rather than a simple fact.  Organizing knowledge and beginning to learn how to define something through logic adds strength to the child’s knowledge and confidence in truth. 

 

Finding truth is not the ultimate end of education though.  Rhetoric is the culmination of the stages of learning.  Rhetoric, or the art of persuasion, requires students to find ways to make their arguments for the truth attractive.  This includes poetry and higher sciences and wisdom in addition to the artful construct of logical arguments.  Rhetoric also forces students to recognize that their lives are the most potent of the persuasive powers.  Isocrates, along with countless other rhetoricians, acknowledge the power of ethos, or personal character, in the attempt to persuade others:  “…[A]n honorable reputation not only lends greater persuasiveness to the words of the man who possesses it, but adds greater luster to his deeds, and is, therefore more zealously to be sought after by men of intelligence than anything else in the world.”  Because people believe people, not disembodied ideas, rhetoric demands that we be the kind of people worth believing—people filled with the power and wisdom of the gospel. 

 

THE PERSONALIZED APPROACH TO EDUCATION IN LIGHT OF THE ABOVE

As a believer of the gospel and the ideas asserted above, I have no small task in showing the next generation the wonder and grace and knowledge of God in all creation.  In the classroom, I must lovingly show the power of the gospel to students who do not believe they can master themselves or the subject at hand.  I see the classroom as a training ground for life in which discipleship is the counterpart of academics. 

Do you believe in magic?

When I was in seventh grade, we had to keep a padlock on our PE locker.  We put all our clothes, any jewelry or books in the locker while at class–all safely under the combination lock.  That first year, there were several times that I was late to my next class because that lock was so tricky.  Don’t worry, by 9th grade, I was pretty much a pro. 

I forgot about how trickly combo locks can be until my 9 year old cousin was trying to get the lock off our pool gate yesterday.  He tried and got frustrated and tried again and told me it was the wrong numbers and tried again and then asked me to do it.  As I deftly opened the lock, his eyes got big and he said, “How’d you do that?!” 

“Magic.”

His eyes narrowed, and he informed me, “There’s no such thing as magic.  How did you open that lock?”

There is something fundamentally wrong here.  If a 9 year old doesn’t believe in magic, who does?  Why are families willing to put a dollar under a pillowcase in exchange for a tooth, but deny a fairy visited their house in the night? 

I reject any idea that a child will have some strong sense of injustice when he realizes his parents LIED to him all those years that Santa left presents under the tree.  If when you are nine, you cannot believe in fairy godmothers or dwarves on the march to reclaim old family money or a cousin with magic lock opening fingers—what will you be when you are grown? 

If you haven’t practiced believing the unbelievable, if you haven’t stretched and exercised your imagination, will you be able to believe in the stories and miracles of the saints?  Will you be able to fathom that God in flesh died for your stinking, sin-rotting soul?

Going the Rounds: a sort of love poem

I took a compilation of poetry with me to read while I got my oil changed.  I like this one: 

Some people cannot endure
Looking down from the parapet atop the Empire State
Or the Statue of Liberty–they go limp, insecure,
The vertiginous height hums to their numbered bones
Some homily on Fate;
Neither virtue past nor vow to be good atones

To the queasy stomach, the quick,
Involuntary softening of the bowels.
“What goes up must come down,” it hums: the ultimate, sick
Joke of Fortuna. The spine, the world vibrates
With terse, ruthless avowals
From “The Life of More”, “A Mirror For Magistrates.”

And there are heights of spirit.
And one of these is love. From way up here,
I observe the puny view, without much merit,
Of all my days. High on the house are nailed
Banners of pride and fear.
And that small wood to the west, the girls I have failed.

It is, on the whole, rather glum:
The cyclone fence, the tar-stained railroad ties,
With, now and again, surprising the viewer, some
Garden of selflessness or effort. And, as I must,
I acknowledge on this high rise
The ancient metaphysical distrust.

But candor is not enough,
Nor is it enough to say that I don’t deserve
Your gentle, dazzling love, or to be in love.
That goddess is remorseless, watching us rise
In all our ignorant nerve,
And when we have reached the top, putting us wise.

My dear, in spite of this,
And the moralized landscape down there below,
Neither of which might seem the ground for bliss,
Know that I love you, know that you are most dear
To one who seeks to know
How, for your sake, to confront his pride and fear.

                                by Anthony Hecht

Created Equal?

                                        

In her book that I’ve been quoting, Ms. Elliot operates and teaches under the presupposition that all creatures glorify God when they fulfill their God-given purpose.  As weird as it sounds, a jellyfish is glorifying God by stinging things.  It was created to do that.  As we look at the created order around us, we must find our place.  The created order necessitates a hierarchy. 

We ought not shrink from this idea in family life, for whether we think of the crew on a boat, the government, society at large, an anthill, or the church, the order of each allows and enables it to work efficiently.  Elisabeth Elliot embraces an Aristotelian political view of justice and uses that definition in relationships:  rather than being created equal, we have “proportional equality.”  Meaning that God “allot[s]  carefully graded shares of honor, power, liberty, and the like to various ranks of a fixed social hierarchy, and when justice succeeds, she produces a harmony of differences.”  She also weaves a theme of discipline into the theme of ordered creation with an example of a boat:  the sail boat is effective and even a beautiful sight to behold because it, its builder, and its crew obey laws. 

A ship tacking against the wind moves deviously, but when she runs with a strong tide or a following wind she takes to herself the power of tide and wind and they become her own.  She is doing the thing she was made for.  She is not free by disobeying the rules but by obeying them.

She expounds and makes plain this fundamental idea in many practical ways.  I love her no-nonsense style.  I am turned off by the emotive writings of most women.  However, Elisabeth Elliot is thought-provoking and plainly speaks truth that humbles me.  This book is a compilation of letters originally intended for her daughter before she married.  While Ms. Elliot often speaks of the relationship between men and women–specifically man and wife–in this book, it would behoove any lady to read it.  The chapters are only a few pages each, which adds to the ease of reading.   

However, don’t let the simplicity in the writing fool you.  The ideas are quite challenging. 

And in honor of the name of this blog, I’ll leave you with Elisabeth Elliot’s closing of this book:

You can’t talk about the idea of equality and the idea of self-giving in the same breath.  You can talk about partnership, but it is the partnership of the dance.  If two people agree to dance together they agree to give and take, one to lead and one to follow.  This is what a dance is.  Insistence that both lead means there won’t be any dance.  It is the woman’s delighted yielding to the man’s lead that gives him freedom.  It is the man’s willingness to take the lead that gives her freedom.  Acceptance of their respective positions frees them both and whirls them into joy.

Discuss!

The faculty book club is reading C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces this month.  I’d love to have some preliminary discussion — with those who won’t be there (you!). 

So, get to reading!  Oh, but before you begin:  The original myth is in the back of the book.  I suggest reading it first.  I think it gives you a greater appreciation for what Lewis is doing. 

Here are some things to think about as you read.  Three of these questions I stole from another site. 

1.    Human attitudes toward God or the gods.

2.  The role of storge love.  At what point does this kind of love cease to be love and become instead a demon?

3.  Self-knowledge.  What does it take for some humans to come to a real knowledge of self?  At what point does Orual come into a knowledge of who she is and what she is willing to do to assure her survival?  How does she handle the truth–about herself, Psyche, the gods, and so on?

4.  Image.  What role does image play in Orual’s life journey?  How does she compensate for her physical ugliness?

5.  The Fox becomes a catalyst for Glome to shift from barbarism to Hellenistic thought and ways of life.  What are specific ways that the King and Queen embody those distinctions?  Why we attracted to one above the other?

New Year, new choices

I have one resolution to share.  I will be considerate of others’ time.  As much as I try to talk around it, or use my family’s disregard for time as an excuse, or pretend that my buddies see it as an endearing quality–habitually being late translates into, “I don’t care about your time.” 

 While I don’t consciously think the whole world should wait for me, it is quite selfish to force my dear friends to wait.  So, dear ones, please forgive my tardiness, and have patience while I learn to cultivate time-conscious habits. 

Candidate for 2008

Last night, Jonathan introduced me to Ron Paul.  Check out some of the videos on his site or youtube. 

He has some very real, commonsense responses to many things that baffle other candidates.  His foreign policy echoes Monroe, rather than Wilson.  He is anti Roe v. Wade.  He describes himself as a constitutionalist.  He is for local government, and against centralized government.  If you aren’t in love with any other candidate–even if you are–check Paul out.  

I think you will be surprised at how reasonable and relevant this old man is.  

Raw! Raw! Rhetoric!

Right after I read this honest struggle on a blog and this concocted idea of rhetoric meets theology in a pamphlet, I wanted to say something.  And what I had to say was too long for a comment on a blog, so I thought I’d take up my blogspace, and not hers.  

I read a pamphlet “Quantum Faith”—I should send it to you.  Both got me thinking about rhetorical theory again.  That pamphlet has to do with the creative power of our words.  Annette Capps puts a whole lot of stock in our words, indicating that our faith actually comes from the words we utter.  (I know, you are probably thinking, “Whoah!  What happened to this?”)  She purports an extreme creative and changing power in our words.  (She also begins with a very different theology than I.)  However, I realized, among other things, that she was putting too much faith in words and not enough faith in God’s Word or Christ Himself. 

And when I think of how often rhetoric is attacked because it seems superfluous or even obscuring to the truth, I want to ask the assailants of rhetoric, “Does it have to be truth or beauty?” and “Are you considering rhetoric to be an end-all panacea for bad ideas?”

If you want to dress in rhetorical garb, I think the fabric has to be beautifully woven with strings of truth that we are able to spin from the wool of the Word and the world around us.  The speaker, not the idea, wears the garment.  The options a rhetor chooses to dress in might be merely frizzles (what a fifth grader called lace on my dress one dayJ) or starched truth that lets her barely move.  Are those the only two options in the closet? 

I hope not.  But, that means we cannot go to Charlotte Rousse’s rhetorical boutique, we will have to go back past the days of making our own clothes, to learning how to weave fabric.  If we can genuinely offer a fabby, veritable option to those around us, we can in a sense set a trend.  A trend, not of a golden mean, but a trend that makes everyone say, “Where did you get that fabby dress?”  And then we can say, “Oh, I made it!  My father me gave me the materials, and this family showed me how to make it.”

Now, what more could you ask for?  More options?  Good idea.  Paul wasn’t always concerned with looking dapper.  Some aren’t.  That’s okay.  Some ladies would rather wear 

;

I’d rather wear . 

Sometimes I need to wear if I have to get some place quickly, or  

if I’ll be getting lots of sand in my shoes, or

if I am going on a field trip through the city to look at the historic churches in the area.    I’m just saying there should be options.  Just like there should be rhetorical options.  Sometimes the most appropriate thing to say is grandiosely concise and in your face.  Sometimes the most appropriate thing to say is genuinely poetic.  Sometimes jovially entertaining.  Sometimes gently stretching.  Sometimes profoundly searching.  You get the idea.  It takes the discretion of knowing which words match which audience, and which declarations clash with which situations. 

Like so much in this world, rhetoric is not black and white, right or wrong, to be implemented today or dismissed forever.  I love to be a pendulum swinger and go to an extreme.  And maybe this is an extreme.  But in all of this, studying to get to the point of having all these options in your rhetorical closet and the style-sense to be able to put it together creates the opportunity for someone to ask where you got your outfit.  …And that enables us to share the panacea of the gospel, instead of calling the rhetorical What Not to Wear crew.