Confessions of an Unlucky Good Girl…

Vilonia, AR.

It is Tuscany yellow. The room where her 
Mind will not stay. His is Othello’s
Rage portending a thousand slaughters. 
The sun has set. Death rehearses
Violent hours. She hopes in sleep,
Perchance to dream, to wish—to be 
No more unsifted. She Knows not 
What she shall be. A battered Bitter’d 
Soul sings a dirge. Weep willow—
For Barbara as she cries. 
“Come all you forsaken and mourn you with me,
Who speaks of a false love, mine’s falser than he
—for I may die with his wound.”  
She fears she does not yet know Who. 
He spoke no words, He heard none too. 
His razor sharp, His cuts heal. 
Made serene in His tempest. Wreck’d by the Quiet.

So begins the prologue of the literary memoir of a formerly good girl. Existential angst? Uh-huh. Crisis of meaning? You bet. Boethian? Most assuredly. “I find your writing is elegant, almost poetic at times—you have a real gift of written expression, it is obvious you are well read,” responded a major publisher. The manuscript outlined the bad fortune of a family overtaken by a number of disorders, betrayal, corporate espionage, AIDS, abandonment, patricide, filicide, suicide, and an eros that dare not speak its name. Like Boethius, who suffered grave injustices through no fault of his own, she was alone in a room with an almost disinterested stranger pondering the unlucky turn of a home destroyed. The misfortune is spiritual fodder for “all things working together for the good.” What is good? Surely, a book deal is good. But, the publisher urged her to “go back through it and make your points a little more starkly, but not luridly.”

Click below to continue…

Published in Front Porch Republic: https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2020/09/awakening-to-virtue-confessions-of-a-well-read-unlucky-good-girl/

The Classical Approach to Education – The Three Ways

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Classical Education, Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric, The Trivium

The ancients such as Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, et al., were the fathers of what is known as classical education, the trivium. The Latin term trivium simply means where the three roads meet, or, the three ways. Consisting of distinct stages, Sister Miriam Joseph points out the distinctions of each aspect (Joseph,2002):

Grammar School

• Grammar – the art of thinking
• Logic – the art of inventing and combining symbols
• Rhetoric – art of communication

St. Augustine and the church fathers subscribed to this method in all or part. The writings of such ancients as Quintilian, Education of the Orator, solidified the trivium as “the common paradigm for education throughout the Western world” (Hart, 2004).

Though the philosophers stumbled upon God’s truth in education, they by no means invented it. For the most ancient history of all for the trivium is found in Hebrew scripture described as:

• Knowledge (Grammar)
• Understanding (Logic)
• Wisdom (Rhetoric)

The first incidence mentioned in the Bible of being filled with the Spirit is in Exodus 31:3 referring to the artisans that would craft the items for the Lord’s dwelling. “And I have filled him with the spirit of God, in wisdom, and in understanding, and in knowledge…” Long before Plato, God put the trivium in the Jewish people’s heart and the fruit of that was the triad of truth, goodness and beauty…the consequence of being “filled.”

Men may attain a purely secular classical education and the carnal man will bear some fruit

Separation of School and State in Arkansas

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Arkansas, choice, education

Have you ever thought about what it would be like if there was only one church – one denomination – that we had to all attend (unless we had a lot of money to start our own church)? Even if it would be my church-with my beliefs …how awful would that be for Arkansans? We can easily all see the problem in this….

But what about the government school that compels me by law, location, and economics to send my child to it? It is a one size fits all – one way secular and “Dewey-ized” denomination. Personally, I am an advocate for classical Christian education (college prep) model. One in which grammar, logic, and rhetoric are emphasized in the stages of child development (Dorothy Sayers Lost Tools of Learning) – you know – the one that dominated at America’s inception – the one that produced genius never since replicated on a mass scale….it is also known as a Great Books or Classics model…

The #1 school in Arkansas is a college prep charter school, Haas Hall in Fayetteville.

So I know that many of you don’t understand,

Inside the Iron Tower: The Life of Conservatives in Academia

This week, Kurt Schlichter published an article that appeared at Townhall.com.  It had the catchy title: “Let’s Help Academia Destroy Itself.”  In addition to arguing that the contemporary university is a parasite on society—a “liberal tick,” is how he describes it—Schlichter welcomes the demise of academia on the grounds that it is a tax-payer subsidized “reservoir of leftism” that produces little except for an endless supply of unemployed and underemployed Democratic voters

Read More Here….Inside the Iron Tower: The Life of Conservatives in Academia.

Paideia: My Philosophy of the Role of the Christian Mind

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education

And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture (paideia) and admonition (nouthesia) of the Lord.        Paul, Ephesians 6:4

My philosophy of the role of the mind in the Christian life is to create a Christian culture. In Ephesians 6:4 we find the word nurture which has been translated from the Greek word paideia. Paideia has no true English equivalent. However, the idea of paideia was central to the ancient classical (and Hebrew) mind. Paul’s use of this word is highly instructive to us in the how and why of education. Paideia does encompass formal education, but it goes far beyond that in that it enculturates. The Greeks would have understood that paideia forms an ideal man that creates an ideal culture. Paul was encouraging Christians to train the ideal Christian that creates the ideal Christian culture.

Highly recognized as the foremost authority on Greek philosophy and ancient culture, Dr. Werner Jaeger, formerly the Director of the Harvard Institute for Classical Studies, states regarding his study of paideia, that it is an enormous ideological task:

They were concerned with nothing less than the shaping of the ideal man, who would be able to take his place in the ideal culture. Further, the point of paideia was to bring that culture about.

The role of the mind is in creating a culture. Paideia encompasses science, art, literature, ethics, family life, city life, country life, politics, architecture, et.al. The education of the Greek did not begin

Family ties

Mattie Ross is my favorite fictional Southern Presbyterian. Not to be confused with the Cumberland sect – which my family apparently pioneered after the second great awakening, and of which Mattie said:

I say nothing against the Cumberlands. They broke with the Presbyterian Church because they did not believe a preacher needed a lot of formal education.  That is all right but they are not sound on Election.  They do not fully accept it.  I confess it is a hard doctrine, running contrary to our earthly ideas of fair play, but I can see no way around it.

Intellectual Abdication (a.k.a. “appeasers”)

When the ablest men turn into cowards, the average men turn into brutes.

“The truly and deliberately evil men are a very small minority; it is the appeaser who unleashes them on mankind; it is the appeaser’s intellectual abdication that invites them to take over. When a culture’s dominant trend is geared to irrationality, the thugs win over the appeasers. When intellectual leaders fail to foster the best in the mixed, unformed, vacillating character of people at large, the thugs are sure to bring out the worst. When the ablest men turn into cowards, the average men turn into brutes.” — Ayn Rand Disclaimer: While we do not support the wordview of Ayn Rand (Objectivism) — to the extent that she uses lumber from a Christian worldview to build her house – we would find agreement. We believe that what Schaeffer called “true truth,” and what Augustine referred to as “plundering the Egyptians,” belongs to God and to us as Christians. Therefore we do not shun truth whether it comes from Rand or pagans such as the philosophers.