What We're Reading - August

We hope that our ILS students and families have been enjoying a restful and relaxing summer. While it is certainly quieter on campus, our faculty and staff have kept busy - participating in the CCLE summer conference in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and continuing to work on many projects for the upcoming year. We are delighted that a number of our families have joined us in our ILS Summer Book Club as we’ve enjoyed Anthony Esolen’s “Life Under Compulsion: Ten Ways to Destroy the Humanity of Your Child.” (We’d love to have you join us for our final conversation on Thursday, August 18th!)

Next month our hallways and classrooms will again be filled with the delightful sounds of children and teachers as we kick-off the 2022-2023 school year! We are all looking forward to seeing all of our returning families and welcoming many new faces to our Immanuel community. September will be a busy month with Back to School Nights, Constitution Day, Oktoberfest, and more!

Returning families will be familiar with our monthly "What we're reading..." blog series. Each month we share a brief selection of articles with our community. As we think about and work together at shaping and nurturing our culture together at school and at home, we hope that these articles may be inspiring, intriguing, encouraging, or thought-provoking, and that hopefully they will spark further conversations and dialogue.

What are you reading this summer? Are there things that you have read that you think others in our community may enjoy reading? Please feel free to share a link in the comments to email us any time!

Thank you for your continued partnership, and for engaging with us!

“Anyone involved in classical education has probably heard people talk about the Great Books—the texts that helped form the foundations of Western civilization. Before they graduate, students in ACCS schools will have read many titles from that list—Hamlet, Beowulf, The Iliad, The Faerie Queene.

Familiarity with the great works of the Western canon can help young people develop a love for beautiful language, an ability to wrestle with complex themes, and a better grasp of the lives and ideas that shaped the culture they inhabit. These works are called “great” for a reason.

But with so many great books to read, and such a short time to read them, shouldn’t we consider giving them to kids sooner? These are smart elementary kids, after all. Surely if any grade schoolers could handle it, ours can?”
— Hannah K. Grieser, "Back to the Books"
“A gem from Irenaeus:

With God there are simultaneously exhibited power, wisdom, and goodness. His power and goodness [appear] in this, that of His own will He called into being and fashioned things having no previous existence; His wisdom [is shown] in His having made created things parts of one harmonious and consistent whole; and those things which, through His super-eminent kindness, receive growth and a long period of existence, do reflect the glory of the uncreated One, of that God who bestows what is good ungrudgingly.”
— Irenaeus
“The natural delight we take in music demonstrates a divine experience of a physical thing. All sounds, including those we would classify as music, are comprised of sound waves. It’s why your side-view mirrors shake when the car sitting at the red light next to you has its bass turned up. It’s why you can feel your vocal cords vibrating when you hum or talk or sing. It’s why brass players need to buzz their lips when blowing into their mouthpieces. These vibrations cause or are caused by oscillating sound waves that create music. These sound waves are physical realities.

The physicality of music brings us beyond the physical to the divine. Consider how one may be moved by a particularly beautiful melody or how the tense music in a scary movie has us sitting on edge. This physical reality is capable of bringing us beyond the earthly life we live to something harder to explain scientifically. It can touch our emotions. But it goes beyond that to express an unseen reality.”
— Marie Greenway, "Music and Language Drawing Us to the Lord’s Supper"

  • Trinity 6 - Pastor Noah Rogness, Rogness on Tap

“You all know the story of Cain and Abel. These first brothers who worked and toiled in the land after their parents fell into sin. God had regard for Abel’s offering, and this angered Cain. God warned Cain and said to him, “If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is contrary to you, but you must rule over it.” (Genesis 4:7)

Cain didn’t pay any heed to God’s word. Instead, he rose up, permitted sin and anger not only to walk into the door of his heart but to dwell and overtake him – he killed his own brother Abel.

There was no hiding what Cain had done. God came to him and said to Cain, “Where is Abel your brother?” And he spoke those well-known words, “I do not know; am I my brother’s keeper?” (Genesis 4:9)

But God already knew what had occurred as He said, “The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground.” (Genesis 4:10)

Cain had attempted to downplay and sidestep the situation, but God knew his heart.

And so it goes for you as you fail to tame the anger within your heart, and you slay your brother or sister with your thoughts, words, or deeds. ”
— Pastor Rogness, "Trinity 6"
“Adear friend of mine likes to opine, “I don’t read fiction,” though she actually does. She reads Narnia books aloud to her children as well as parables to her Sunday school class. She also listens to country music and enjoys Friday night movies with her family, which, in essence, is listening to other people sing and read fiction aloud to her.

I once pressed her on the matter, and her response was succinct: “I read only true things.”

Before that conversation, I had never considered the notion that fiction might not also contain true things, and as I started running through the plots of favorite novels in my head, I realized that I read fiction for the very reason my dear friend avoids it: I want to read true things, as well, and so much of what I encounter in the pretend worlds of Middle Earth and Watership Down and even Pemberley brings to light the truth about good and evil in this world. Granted, plenty of tainted tales out there hurt rather than help a reader, but a similar poison can be found in a number of nonfiction books written by a variety of wealthy, false prophets. Whatever we read, we are wise to remember that not every idea we meet dressed in a hardcover is beneficial, and an ISBN proves nothing more than a signed-and-paid-for spot in the Library of Congress catalog.

It is with deep admiration for truth in stories that I compiled a list of recommended reads for the summer, and — sorry, dear friend — every single book on that list is fiction. Below are 10 of the best, truest tales I have ever read, and it is my hope that, in reading them, you too will be encouraged — by Josip Lasta, Adam Bede, Bigwig and a whole host of wonderfully crafted fictional characters — to open your mouth for the mute, defend the weak and the fatherless, preserve justice for the afflicted, and rejoice in the Truth that sets all of us free.

A quick caveat: I am going to assume that most readers have traveled “there and back again” multiple times, so I am setting aside every beloved tome by J. R. R. Tolkien, his contemporaries and his imitators in order to make room for less-renowned titles.”
— Katie Schuermann, "My Top Ten Good Reads for the Summer"
“ If we believe that classical Christian education is about “cultivating virtue” we should look further than the classroom. This is where fathers come in: Historically, generational vocations used to ensure that the father apprenticed the son. One of the biggest influences on Paideia, then, was dad. I encourage dads to find a way to apprentice their sons starting at about age 12— in something vocational and real– whether it’s auto mechanics, woodworking, agriculture, or even landscaping.

This past week, my boys and I thinned forest and built roads on a piece of mountain property in Idaho. In addition to my own sons, I hired a couple of local boys who knew how to work. When a machine went down or I wasn’t around, those local boys looked around and piled slash or did whatever needed to be done— no standing around awaiting orders. My boys learned from these 19-year-old hired hands who were well raised. When one of the boys tried to put a tree into the chipper with part of its root-ball attached— it jammed. They watched me carefully use the chainsaw and then winch and UTV to get the stump removed. Chainsaw maintenance was a daily hassle. They learned to do it. But, with every small lesson in “figuring it out” they became less helpless. All of this in 100 degree heat! Last year, the heat drove my sons to sit in the shade. This year, they worked through it. Progress!”
— David Goodwin, "Dads: It's Hard Work to Teach Hard Work"
“As far back as I can remember, my childhood home had an Encyclopedia Britannica, a late 1950s revision of its fourteenth edition, which came in its own wooden two-shelf bookcase, with a deep slot in the back that held a massive atlas. My siblings and I all used it when working on our homework, and it was a ready resource for idle browsing when one was bored or hadn’t decided what book to read next.

I suppose Britannica began my fondness for reference books—that and the Random House Dictionary my parents bought when it came out in 1966. I now have that dictionary, though the Britannica I rather sorrowfully let go after my parents passed away. In my home office today, I have one bookcase mostly filled with reference books of various descriptions—on language, history, philosophy, religion, law, and politics.

Why bother with the books? Can’t we just look up everything online nowadays, thanks to Google and Wikipedia? Not really—or perhaps not just yet—in part thanks to copyrights and paywalls. Google and other search engines often yield bizarre results, requiring the exercise of some prior knowledge and judgment to tell the wheat from the chaff. And Wikipedia, which I use frequently, is difficult to trust on anything beyond bare facts (and even those are sometimes wrong). If you want to know the date of the battle of Blenheim, fine. But if you want a reliable understanding of the War of the Spanish Succession of which it was a part, not so much. For that I would turn to the brief entry in George C. Kohn’s Dictionary of Wars. For non-paywalled online resources on specific subjects, the one that comes most readily to mind for exceeding its print rivals in expertise and comprehensiveness is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. But in general I still find reference books hard to beat.”
— Matthew J. Franck, "The Bookshelf: You Could Look it Up"
“Most humanities teachers have some degree of romanticism. It’s hard to teach without it. But sometimes the stories and people we teach seem like faint echoes that bear little relevance to us.

Before proceeding further, I must confess: I am a proud romantic. St. George is my hero, Beowulf is the grandest epic, Susan Pevensie is still alive (do the math), and King Arthur will return one day.

But I am also a pastor and teacher, living in the twenty-first century with the internet, electric cars, nuclear power, and drones. Every day we hear stories about people dying in the saddest ways possible (opioid addiction, accidental air strikes, etc.). Our students struggle to relate to the sacrifice of Hector, the courage of Faithful in Pilgrim’s Progress, or the valor of the Christians at Lepanto. If we’re honest, we struggle as well. The older we get, the more sin and suffering we see. It’s hard to maintain motivation when it feels pointless.

Ours is an age of acedia. We burn through our amusements and are bored to death. We’re like Odysseus on Calypso’s Island, engaging in pleasures every day and night but with only emptiness to show for it. Our nostalgia for a city whose builder and maker is God—that sought by Abraham, Moses, Isaiah, the Apostles, Augustine, Aquinas, King Arthur, and the Inklings—is a childlike dream. We walk into our classrooms with a smile, but the smile hides our quiet cynicism.

My heroes have long been those faithful men and women who preserved civilization—some through battle, some through study, some through faithful martyrdom. Having the advantage of historical distance, we can see how God was working through them at the time. But they had no such advantage. They didn’t know how God would use their work. St. Jerome despaired for civilization when the Barbarians were attacking Rome. St. Augustine was more hopeful, but still had no idea how it all would end. The same can be said when the Vikings attacked England, or when the Moors captured Constantinople (we’re still waiting to see the end of that story). Nevertheless, Jerome’s Latin Vulgate was preserved in spite of the Barbarian attack, becoming a foundational text for Medieval Christendom. Augustine’s City of God, written when Hippo was surrounded, survived and is one of the greatest works of Western literature. Alfred the Great was scolded by the right old lady at the right time, and consequently England gained her independence. Through small acts of courage, obedience, prudence, and charity, the wisdom of God is declared and preserved for the future.”
— Matthew Carpenter, "Defenders of Civilization"
“In our contemporary world of ubiquitous mirage, the skills of discernment are not only important, they are of vital benefit. “Likely stories” are a bedrock of classical education, and classical educators should endeavor to have students read them not because they believe students must be virtuous in order to go to battle against societal disintegration and disarray, but because without it students cannot be virtuous at all.”
— Kate Deddens, "Likely Stories: A Bedrock of Classical Education"