January was quite the busy month between our return to school following Christmas Break, our final Admissions Open House of the year followed by our admissions application deadline, the March for Life, some snow days, and National Lutheran Schools Week!
As we meet with families applying to ILS as part of the admissions process, it is wonderful to hear more about what attracted them to Immanuel, and so much of what they share focuses both on the type of culture and community we have here at ILS, as well as the emphasis we place on the role of parents in the education of their children. It is a delight to meet so many families who share these values and desire to see their families become a part of this community.
Every month, we compile a "What we're reading..." blog post with a selection of articles that we would like to share with our community as we think about shaping and nurturing our culture together at school and at home. These are pieces that our faculty and staff have found recently to be inspiring, intriguing, encouraging, or thought-provoking. 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!
Sanctity of Human Life 2022 - Pastor Esget, Esgetology
“The abortion challenge is a challenge to the meaning of human life itself. God made man to live, and not die. Moreover, God made man as steward of the earth. This stewardship could not be carried out alone. “It is not good for the man to be alone.”
Adam needed community. And not just any community. He needed for his stewardship one who could be similar yet other. The one God made for Adam was one God made from Adam. She was bone of his bones and flesh of his flesh. But she was not man, but woman.
Only together, in a synergy, could they do what God gave them to do: continue His work of creation through procreation. “Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it.” Long before St. Paul said it in Romans, God blessed our first parents with the same calling: “Live in harmony with one another.” “Cultivate the earth such that the garden expands to fill it with life and beauty.”
Thus the sanctity of human life is not a contemporary issue. It is the original issue. Marriage, sexuality, ecology, family, abortion are all connected. At its heart is the vibrant breath God breathed into our first father and the living waters that pulsed through the four rivers of Eden.
In the beginning was the Logos, the Divine Word that spoke the world into being. “In Him was life.” Not was as in past tense—He had it once—but was as in always: In Him always was life – and always will be. This is what we know and confess – but it is not what we experience.”
Epiphany III - Pastor Rogness, Rogness on Tap
“What do you desire in life? What do you desire within your home? Or what do you desire within this congregation?
These all appear to be innocent and honest questions, but they have one common flaw, they begin with you.
If we are honest, our desires throughout life often proceed out of personal distress, the need for control, or the unwavering belief we possess all the answers to the problems of life, the difficulties of our homes, or the issues of the church.
When we believe we have all the answers, we are led to become haughty and conceited, as the Epistle warns against. (Romans 12:16) We are led into arrogance and becoming excessively prideful.
Solomon wrote in the book of Proverbs, “Be not wise in your own eyes; fear the Lord and turn away from evil.” (Proverb 3:7) Still, the inborn sin of your first parents continues to tug at your heart, whispering into your ears – speak up, chart a bold path forward, you know the way to go… don’t give in to others.
This subjective and self-absorbed confidence you demonstrate is precisely what the Proverbs warn against – it is the turning away from the objective Word of God, your Creator, and redeemer. It is the way of sin.
Sin separates man from God, resulting from Adam and Eve’s disobedience that ended with expulsion from the Garden. Sin also separates men from one another, the cause of strife and division.”
Do We Listen to Too Much Music? - Mrs. Marie Greenway, Prelude to Postlude: CPH Music Blog
“I was recently listening to a podcast in which one of the hosts shared a personal anecdote about his attempt to not listen to music all day. He briefly related how he realized he had music playing almost constantly and found it incredibly difficult to stop listening for one 24-hour period. This experiment reminded me of the countless people I know who work with headphones on or earbuds in all day long. It is almost assumed today that music will have a permanent place in the background of most environments, be it the office, a coffee shop, or anything in between.
The Prevalence of Music
Digital technology affords us unparalleled access to the best music in the world. Today, we can easily pull up an exquisite rendering of our favorite symphony or a moving interpretation of a sacred choral piece simply by commanding the robots in our homes to play it. On the other hand, even ignoring the bad, crass, and immoral music the whole world can access with this technology, it still behooves us to consider how much we listen to music. Like all technology, has this thrust something artificial into human lives? More than that, is this artifice always good or should we limit it?
Humans need quiet. We need times when we can rest from the noise of the world. The music we listen to almost constantly distracts our minds. When we always need music playing, we can lose our ability to live contentedly in times of quiet. The noise becomes our distraction from the world and a form of escapism from our current situation. A preference to listen to music while you work out, drive in the car, or work on a variety of tasks is not a bad thing. Instead, I wonder if we have become addicted to it. Do we need to switch on noise as soon as we wake up, or are we comfortable with starting our days quietly? Like the ever-addictive smartphone, do we turn to music anytime we have a moment of silence or boredom? Or do we welcome the chance to remove excess distraction from our lives?”
Hearing and Believing - Richard Resch, Musica Dei Donum
““Let the Word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs with thankfulness in your hearts to God.” Colossians 3:16
Could it be any clearer? I think not! For here our God is telling us that there is a simple, beautiful, and joyous way for His dear Son to dwell richly in us. All that the saints have to do is sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs together. And as they do this, they will be filled with Christ – and they are taught the faith.
A lifetime of singing psalms and hymns filled with Scriptural truths is one of the main ways that saints of all ages have through the ages learned the church’s doctrines. When asked what they believe about any doctrine from angels to the Trinity, the saints will often answer with words straight from a hymn text learned through a lifetime of singing hymns of the faith. The hymn had been their teacher all along, and they probably did not even realize it.
Soon after Martin Luther’s first hymn hit the streets printed as a broadsheet in 1523, he witnessed something that surprised him. He saw that if he set words to music in the form of a hymn, he was able to spread the content of that hymn very quickly and effectively to all ages. That’s exactly what happened as his first hymn spread like wildfire throughout Germany and beyond, telling the powerful story of faith that led to the death of the first two Lutheran martyrs.
As a musician, Martin Luther knew that music was a power. But now after seeing what happened with his first hymn, he realized how combining music’s power with the power of the Gospel in the form of a hymn would make it an extraordinary tool for the spreading of that Gospel. This is when “The Nightingale of Wittenberg” took flight. And the result of this flight is a glorious inheritance of hymns that beautifully set forth the truths of Scripture as they let Christ dwell richly in the singer. ”
Are there any adults left in America? - Carl R. Trueman, WORLD
“The crowd stampede at the Travis Scott concert in Houston in early November seized the news headlines for a number of predictable reasons: the number of fatalities; the lawsuits; and the injuries to a nine-year-old boy, Ezra Blount, who was caught up in the chaos. The usual questions are being posed. Could the organizers have prevented the tragedy? Is Scott liable and do the lawsuits therefore have merit? One question which it is no doubt tasteless to ask at this point but that probably touches on a more important facet of contemporary American culture: Is it appropriate for children to be at a concert given by someone whose lyrics, to the extent that they are at all coherent, speak of the vilest aspects of human behavior in the crudest terms?
A similar issue arose some years ago in Britain, where an Ariana Grande concert was subject to a terrorist attack. The newspapers accented the despicable nature of the attack by underlining the fact that many of the concertgoers were young teenage girls. The question of whether it was appropriate to take children to hear a performer whose lyrics are saturated with sex was never, as far I could see, seriously asked. But then again this is a world in which my wife and I recently saw a toddler in an airport with (presumably) her father who was wearing a Pornhub tee shirt and nobody seemed particularly fazed.”
Maths means nothing if we don’t know where numbers come from - Piers Bursill-Hall, The Times
“As a lecturer in the subject, I’m biased but for me mathematics is a sublime form of beauty — for those lucky enough to experience it.
To the uninitiated, however, it can seem like an intimidating, closed world. But although it is an abstract subject, it is also an intensely human activity that takes place in a complex cultural, social and intellectual context. It is political — and will get more so with, for example, the rise of artificial intelligence. We mathematicians are just normally quite bad at talking about that. I talk about it a lot. For the past 40 years I have taught a history of maths course at Cambridge.”
The Bad Old Days - Philip Jeffery, Public Discourse
“Do we want to turn back the clock?
Popular culture and political opponents confront social conservatives with this question every day—mainly because we don’t have a clear answer. Different pro-life, pro-family Americans are prone to answer it differently, indulging in varying degrees of nostalgia for a time, whether real or imagined, before consumeristic market values took hold of our sexual culture. Even the most nostalgic among us cannot literally “turn back the clock,” of course, but the pre-’60s past looms over social conservatives’ projects and proposals.
Social conservatives must soberly engage with that past, not romanticize it. That is the aim of this essay. We ought to ask what American attitudes toward sex and the family were like before the sexual revolution; what worked about them, and what didn’t; why they didn’t last; and what alternatives, if any, the past may offer.
The history of American family values is a huge topic, about which historians disagree all the time. But it’s clear that middle- and upper-class American family values, in the decades leading up to the 1960s, suffered from at least one of the basic problems we look to confront today. Namely, they were subordinated to the regnant logic of the marketplace, at the expense of basic human goods. Though not yet reflecting the throw-away flippancy of a consumer society, late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American family values aimed at individual control over the means of reproduction, with a faith in technical rationality capable of bending human nature to that end.
In short: we weren’t getting it right. The status quo before baby boomers and Roe v. Wade and second-wave feminism was shaped more by modern notions of industrial progress than by eternal truths about the human person. Understanding those notions can help us recognize how the sexual revolution emerged from axioms that had already existed in the mainstream for decades, and recognize the counterproductive ways in which those axioms still shape our discourse about the family today.”
The Need for Eloquence - Landon Loftin, CIRCE
“Wisdom alone, John admits, may be of some benefit to the individual who possesses it, even in the absence of expression, but the highest forms of wisdom inseparable from cultivated powers of expression. John agrees, it seems, with Francis Bacon who thought that the fullness of wisdom is only realized in the labor of clear expression, for reading fills a mind with knowledge, but only in speaking do their thoughts take shape, and only in writing do they become exact. In John’s words, “[r]eason would remain utterly barren, or at least would fail to yield a plenteous harvest, if the faculty of speech did not bring to light its feeble conceptions.” One cannot value wisdom and reject eloquence.
Not only does ineloquence leave wisdom “barren,” but it stifles it since without being shared, wisdom fails to bless society. Because of wisdom’s bond with eloquence, when one attacks the one, he or she necessarily attacks the other. Therefore, as John argues, when one attacks eloquence, he attacks the wisdom needed for a flourishing society: “Although [Cornificus] may seem to attack eloquence alone, he undermines and uproots all liberal studies, assails the whole structure of philosophy, tears to shreds humanity’s social contract, and destroys the means of brotherly charity and reciprocal interchange of services.”One cannot reject eloquence and value culture.”
Top Twenty Partner Schools By CLT8 Score - Chelsea Niemiec, Classical Learning Test
“The Classic Learning Test is thrilled to announce its 2021 School Rankings for the CLT8! Every year, hundreds of CLT partner schools across the country offer the CLT8 to their seventh and eighth graders. We are pleased to recognize the twenty highest-performing schools in 2021...”
History: The Miracles of Memory and Tradition - Will Durant, The Imaginative Conservative
“The very excess of our present paganism may warrant some hope that it will not long endure; for usually excess generates its opposite. One of the most regular sequences in history is that a period of pagan license is followed by an age of puritan restraint and moral discipline. So the moral decay of ancient Rome under Nero and Commodus and later emperors was followed by the rise of Christianity, and its official adoption and protection by the emperor Constantine, as a saving source and buttress of order and decency. The condottiere violence and sexual license of the Italian Renaissance under the Borgias led to the cleansing of the Church and the restoration of morality. The reckless ecstasy of Elizabethan England gave way to the Puritan domination under Cromwell, which led, by reaction, to the paganism of England under Charles II. The breakdown of government, marriage, and the family during the ten years of the French Revolution was ended by the restoration of law, discipline, and parental authority under Napoleon I; the romantic paganism of Byron and Shelley, and the dissolute conduct of the prince of Wales who became George IV, were followed by the public propriety of Victorian England. If these precedents may guide us, we may expect our children’s grandchildren to be Puritans.”