:: Art Stories: The Wounded Hero by Russ Ramsey @ The Rabbit Room
“Christ does not celebrate our strength while mocking our weakness. He picks us up in our broken condition and lives to be strong for us.”
:: Remembering What We Mean by Doug McKelvey @ The Rabbit Room
"We will see one day with such an unbroken, sacramental vision. All things. All things for the inexhaustible wonders that they hold, for the inexhaustible glories they reveal of the mind of the artist and storyteller who created them. But fairy tales, and luminous paintings, and the voices of cellos and the taste of a wild, sun-warmed blackberry or the sparkling of a chalice held aloft or the visual force and scale of a wide, windswept ocean can sometimes jar us back to that sacramental vision, even if only for a brief, precious moment."
:: Dulce Domum: The Longing for Home in Literature (and Our Hearts) by Renee Mathis @ CiRCE
"This desire for a place to call home provides one of the strongest themes for authors, poets, and artists of all kind to weave throughout their works. We may laugh at the sugary sentimentality of a glowing thatched cottage, covered in flowery vines and surrounded by a picket fence, but the desire for a place to call one’s own is no laughing matter."
:: Storied Living (or, Why Literary Criticism Trumps Self-Help) by Lindsey Brigham @ CiRCE [Most excellent!!]
“Thinking like a novelist, then, we’ll attend to the meaning by attending to setting, plot, and character. We won’t ask general questions like “What does Christ’s lordship mean for my life?”, but rather, “How, at this moment, could Christ’s lordship be communicated through the way I set the table for dinner?” (His person and reign are beautiful; set the table beautifully, with order and colors and flowers.) Not “How can I present the gospel to my coworker?”, but “What sort of character is my coworker—what are his quirks, his foibles, his virtues, his vices, his longings—and where among all this might he be met by Grace?” (For some characters, of O’Connor’s at least, Grace comes like a textbook hurled between the eyes or a serial killer’s gun in the face.) Not “How can we make Christ the center of our homeschool routine?”, but “How does the rhythm of our school-day sound out our dependence on the Lord?” (It’s a matter of actual spoken words and prayers and songs.)”
:: Are the Gospels Mythical? @ First Things
"The world’s myths do not reveal a way to interpret the Gospels, but exactly the reverse: the Gospels reveal to us the way to interpret myth."
:: Not Duffers, Won’t Drown @ First Things
"This vision of childhood, in which the role of parents is to trust children and the role of children is to keep that trust, to be honest and good and, above all, not duffers, is to me a purer, sweeter, and infinitely more potent vision than any other a child is likely to encounter in literature. As Chesterton observes in Orthodoxy, “The old fairy tale makes the hero a normal human boy; it is his adventures that are startling; they startle him because he is normal.” The world of Swallows and Amazons is a normal child’s ideal world, quiet and sheltered and kind, but full of startling and unexpected things, some of them real and some imagined."
:: 4 Reasons to Start Class With a Poem Each Day @ Edutopia
"These voices, contemporary and classic, have helped define my classroom culture to such an extent that on the rare occasion when I postpone the “Poem of the Day” until later in the class period, my students interrogate me about it."
"I expected Kern to rattle off these types of standard arguments. And, while he did hint that there are different kinds of magic, he went in a totally different direction than I was anticipating. And although I was initially confused by the approach that he took, I really should not have been at all surprised that he would take us back to the place that he almost always comes home to: Jesus Christ and Homer."
:: Why I Write Scary Stories for Children by N.D. Wilson @ The Atlantic
“There is absolutely a time and a place for The Pokey Little Puppy and Barnyard Dance, just like there’s a time and a place for footie pajamas. But as children grow, fear and danger and terror grow with them, courtesy of the world in which we live and the very real existence of shadows. The stories on which their imaginations feed should empower a courage and bravery stronger than whatever they are facing. And if what they are facing is truly and horribly awful (as is the case for too many kids), then fearless sacrificial friends walking their own fantastical (or realistic) dark roads to victory can be a very real inspiration and help.”
:: Maiming or Claiming?: On Writing in Books by Nicole Mulhausen @ BookRiot
“See, there is a kind of magic that happens when we read a book. We don’t merely enter another world, but that world enters us, marks us. It seems appropriate to record the intersection, the details that make up the context of our reading.”
:: The Question to Ask When Answers Are Unclear @ The Gospel Coalition [So many ways to apply this one in any subject.]
“What do I know to be true?”
:: Teaching Reading ~ The Detour @ Classical Academic Press
"Like Martha in Luke 10:41–42, we Christian classical educators are “anxious and troubled about many things.” So, like Martha, we must be reminded that “one thing is necessary.” Before we are careful about identifying phonograms or introducing new vocabulary words, we must first place our students at the feet of stories or poems—indeed, at the feet of language itself—and help to awaken a sense of what the philosopher Josef Pieper calls receptive openness or attentive silence. That is to say, we must help our students to choose, like Mary, that good portion that will not be taken away from them."
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