What We're Reading - December Edition

As we enter the final month of the calendar year, the church has begun a new year with the beginning of Advent. This penitential season of waiting finds us waiting both for the celebration of the Christ child as we also wait for the final coming of Christ our King.

As a community, we want to support and inspire intentional discussions on culture-building and culture-shaping, and we hope that our monthly "What we're reading..." feature is one way we can support this work at home and at school. This month, we include resources on Advent, celebrating St. Nicholas, and other topics of interest to our teachers and families.

We give thanks for each of our families, and the wonderful opportunity to partner with you in the important work of educating and nurturing children. Thank you for engaging with us in these ongoing conversations and for sharing items you have read that may be inspiring to others in our ILS community! Please feel free to share a link in the comments to email us any time!

“About the time this article hits the web, our older son will be getting married. We blinked, and the boy traded in Legos for a bride.

I’ve come to appreciate that babies are born as helpless blobs: especially for first-time parents, this is a great mercy. Sure, a newborn is totally dependent and needy, and parents develop an abundance of worries as they learn their art. But along with worry, they also have control: they can do something about their worries by caring for their kid. A baby that can’t even roll over on his own isn’t going to outrun or outwit his parents any time soon, so I’ve always been thankful that, as I learned how to be a father, I had the upper hand.

The balance is tipping, though. We’re all self-sufficient now, more or less, and it will be that way until our boys need to care for us in our infirmities. I’m not faster or smarter anymore. I’m still wiser, I think, but only because I’ve had more years to make more mistakes.

And our older boy is getting married. He’s leaving father and mother to be joined to his wife. We’re not going to be interfering busybodies, so the joy of the wedding day also destroys any illusion that we’re still in control. The control is gone.

However, as any parent knows, the worry remains.

And prayer. We also have prayer. We’ve prayed for our sons from the day they were born. We’ve prayed for their future wives for years, whoever they might turn out to be; and we are grateful for the Lord’s faithfulness. ”
— Tim Pauls "Losing Control"
“Oxford professor Nicola Gardini urges people to read and study Latin. He believes that Latin is the antidote for the modern age, which seems transfixed by the spontaneous, the easy, and the ephemeral.

His new book, Long Live Latin: The Pleasures of a Useless Language, argues that Latin combines truth and beauty with the timelessness of art. People should study Latin for all the reasons people should read literature.

In his Confessions, St. Augustine (354–430 C.E.) “placed the learning of Latin under God’s purview,” Gardini writes. Augustine believed Latin drew a child closer to God, “the truest truth.”

Gardini argues that Latin contains the logic and precision of math. He uses Caesar’s De bello Gallico as an example of language trying to “re-create the world mathematically and geometrically, its sentences organized according to precise cause-and-effect relationships.”

The syntax of Latin stimulates logical reasoning, Gardini says. Its morphology jogs memory. Most important, Latin is the language of civilization. “The western world was created on its back. . . . Inscribed in Latin are the secrets of our deepest identity.””
— Diane Scharper, "Why Study Latin"
“Today, the day after Thanksgiving, shoppers plunge into “Black Friday,” the lights go up, homes and businesses deck their halls, city sidewalks dress in holiday style, Santa Claus comes to town, Christmas muzak fills the air, and the overall Christmas frenzy begins. Yes, we decry the commercialization of Christmas. And yet, don’t you still enjoy the Christmas hooplah?

Michael Brendan Dougherty says he is one of the “complainers” about the secular observation of Christmas. He even calls himself an “Advent snob,” who insists that this is not the Christmas season at all–that’s the 12 days after Christmas–but Advent. Nevertheless, he says that when the decorations go up, they create a positive feeling that he needs right now.”
— Gene Veith, "A Defense of the Christmas Frenzy"
“Having God, we have everything we need. God is preparing for us things we can’t even desire yet, let alone deserve. To this good God we give thanks for all we have lost. To this good God we give thanks for all we do not have.

The confession, “He is good,” releases us from the anxiety we so naturally feel. “Do not be anxious,” Paul says to us. Is this a demand? “You better not be anxious, or else!” A commandment to not be anxious makes me more anxious.

But it’s not a commandment. It is a gift. Like a mother comforting her sobbing child, the Lord says to us anxiety-ridden troubled souls, “I am your Father; you are My beloved son, My beloved daughter. You make me very glad!”

That all happens through our adoption in the baptism of Jesus. The words said to Jesus now apply to you.

So thanksgiving is not gratitude for our stuff, although you should be grateful for your stuff. Thanksgiving looks to the God who gives, and does not give, and sometimes takes away, and says, “He is good, not because He gives me always what I want. No, He is good; I see this because He made me. He is good; I see this because He took on my flesh and bone and died for me. He is good; I see this because He has sanctified me in my baptism. He is good, and I know He will give me exactly what I need when I need it.””
— Pastor Christopher Esget, "Thankful for All We Do Not Have"
“We all mature in different ways and at different rates. Some reach maturity by the age of twenty; some never reach it all. Part of the reason for this is that people rarely mature, rarely come of age, until they have undergone a rite of passage, an ordeal that tests their courage, their endurance, and their faith.

Alas, there are many who fail the test when it comes, who choose to meet it with pride or envy, bitterness or skepticism. Such are those who think they have matured, but who have not. For maturity and cynicism are not synonyms but opposing states of mind. There is a difference between seeing one’s flaws and feeling sorry for oneself, between choosing to sacrifice yourself for others and developing a martyr’s complex, between doubting yourself and doubting goodness and truth.

Consider my Sir Gawain, noble knight of the Round Table and nephew to King Arthur. The trial he underwent tested every ounce of his physical courage and moral fiber. Yet he survived it and returned to Camelot a sadder but wiser man.

We are all friends here; let me tell you the tale.”
— Louis Markos, "The Imaginative Conservative"
“As laptops become smaller and more ubiquitous, and with the advent of tablets, the idea of taking notes by hand just seems old-fashioned to many students today. Typing your notes is faster — which comes in handy when there’s a lot of information to take down. But it turns out there are still advantages to doing things the old-fashioned way.

For one thing, research shows that laptops and tablets have a tendency to be distracting — it’s so easy to click over to Facebook in that dull lecture. And a study has shown that the fact that you have to be slower when you take notes by hand is what makes it more useful in the long run.

In the study published in Psychological Science, Pam A. Mueller of Princeton University and Daniel M. Oppenheimer of the University of California, Los Angeles sought to test how note-taking by hand or by computer affects learning.

”When people type their notes, they have this tendency to try to take verbatim notes and write down as much of the lecture as they can,” Mueller tells NPR’s Rachel Martin. “The students who were taking longhand notes in our studies were forced to be more selective — because you can’t write as fast as you can type. And that extra processing of the material that they were doing benefited them.””
— James Doubek, "Attention, Students: Put Your Laptops Away"
“Technology titans are issuing startling warnings about the dangers of social media and excess screen time for kids.

Facebook’s first president Sean Parker said of the social platform he helped build, “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.” Tony Fadell—a key member of the original iPhone design team—described tech’s negative impact on his own kids, and confessed he wakes up in “cold sweats every so often thinking what did we bring to the world?” And last year, legendary Silicon investor Roger McNamee wrote, “In the pursuit of profit, internet platforms are mounting an assault on the minds of children.”

As more tech leaders speak out, it’s not surprising that parents everywhere are questioning how to navigate a world in which the average American child gets a smartphone at ten years old and 45 percent of U.S. teenagers report that they are online almost constantly. ”
— Brooke Shannon & Dr. Richard Freed, "Parent Like a Tech Exec"
“Santa Claus has become the patron saint of a secularized Christmas. Many Christians are trying to balance the mystique of Santa with the true meaning of Christmas centered in Christ. Some families are doing without Santa altogether, but even that can prove complicated. (As one of our own children told the grandparents, “My parents don’t believe in Santa Claus, but I do!”)

And yet, no matter how hard people try, Christmas resists secularization. The very name contains Christ, and when stores try to avoid that name by using holiday, that word, too, contains a confession that the day is holy. And Santa Claus, which is just a contraction of St. Nicholas, really is a patron saint.”
— Gene Veith, "Putting St. Nicholas Back In Christmas"

Advent Resources

If you missed our program last month with Brooke Shannon, Executive Director and Founder of Wait Until 8th, or just want to learn more, please explore the following resources.