In the Christmas of 1838, Danish author Hans Christian Andersen published The Steadfast Tin Soldier. In it, a one-legged tin soldier endures an adventure filled with many trials—including a passionate love for a beautiful paper ballet dancer—only to be spontaneously thrown into a fiery furnace by a capricious boy. The...
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Christmas is the celebration of the incarnation of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. He came to do a lot of things: forgive sins; defeat sin, death, and hell; establish His Church; be enthroned as King of kings and Lord of lords; redeem creation; and so on. He came,...
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Last year, I had the opportunity to study T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Journey of the Magi” with a high school student whom I was tutoring. I had read the poem before and my graduate school roommate was an Eliot aficionado, so I felt reasonably confident as I approached the...
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In Homer’s Iliad, Achilles refuses to accept gifts from the hand of Agamemnon precisely because he refuses to become “the king’s man.” Agamemnon had wronged Achilles—grievously—and to receive his gifts would amount to admitting that it was within Agamemnon’s authority to commit such a wrong; it would equate with accepting the...
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This week was a busy one in my Challenge III class. Students completed study guides in philosophy, turned in American history notebooks, gave a philosophy lecture, and completed finals in US history and chemistry. There were several important reasons for a classical education to include these tasks. The finals...
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Our current world is obsessed with quantitative thinking. Frankly, I am, too. Numbers are extremely helpful in gauging all sorts of things in life, from the output of the economy to the number of people who show up in church each week. The problem, however, is that in order...
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This fable came to my mind early one morning. It articulates, through symbols, a few of the things I think are true about the world. What emerged proved apropos to the Thanksgiving and Christmas season. One of the primary things this fable concerns is reading good books of the...
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Watch this video to hear the thoughts of Leigh Bortins, Chief Academic Officer, and Robert Bortins, Chief Executive Officer, as they share a recap of 2012 and some thoughts for 2013. https://youtu.be/kIn4mY00Ny0
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It will not come as news to you that our homeschooling communities are concerned about the potential for government interference in our affairs. There are extreme cases where communities have closed themselves off from politics, higher education, and much of the rest of society as well. Most of us...
Read the Full ArticleI am not a machine, and neither are my children. That is one of the reasons I took them off the conveyor-belt-style education of public school. It is too easy, however, to slip into conveyor-belt education at home by taking the view that if all the blanks in the...
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Of all the intellectual tools I have been given over the years, there are two that stand out as exceedingly valuable for me. Both of these were bequeathed to me by my parents through the example they set for me; they never taught me these things directly, but I...
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Thirds are difficult in Latin. Third declension is troublesome, third conjugation is perilous, and third declension adjectives are downright inconvenient. Just when you think you have a handle on Latin—after first and second declension nouns, verbs and adjectives—third comes along and provides a jolt to your system. You start...
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