It’s November, which means it is once again time for our ILS Month of Service! Love and service toward our neighbor is an important part of our life together in Christ. This month is a time when our school community comes together to recommit to intentional actions to demonstrate this love and service. Learn more about our Month of Service activities and how you can participate throughout the month! We are also looking forward to welcoming parents, grandparents, and friends for our Salute to Veterans this month, as they share with students more lessons about service and sacrifice.
Please also take a moment to enjoy our November "What we're reading..." blog. It is always our hope that these articles spark on-going conversation and engagement with our community as we work together shaping and nurturing our culture at school and at home.
We are also excited that the PTL is working to engage families in more conversations with their Book Club. Please consider joining us in reading these selections and participating in some of the conversations throughout the year! The first book club discussion will be held on Thursday, November 17th. We hope you will join us!
Are there things that you have read that you think others in our community may enjoy? 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!
Seeing Beyond the Day - Hannah K. Grieser, The Classical Difference
“Small beginnings. It’s easy to despise them. It’s easy to roll our eyes at ordinary people with “high, apple-pie-in-the-sky hopes.” We’ve all seen startups fail. We’ve all seen new institutions struggle. We’ve all met the wild-eyed dreamer with completely unrealistic goals. Not every plan succeeds, and it’s the potential for failure that makes the risk takers seem just a little nuts.
But even when these new institutions manage to not struggle or fail, our instant-gratification culture has a hard time taking the long-term view. Everyone wants the apples; very few want to plant the tree and wait. But planting and waiting is very much what Christians, of all people, should be about. After all, didn’t somebody, somewhere say something about the kingdom of God growing like a mustard seed?
It’s easy to dismiss that pitiful mustard seed as a scrap of nothing much. It’s easy to forget that a single match can light up an entire room—and set the world on fire. It’s easy to look at the muddy creek meandering along the backroads and doubt that it could ever wind its way toward the mighty rivers that rush into the sea. But every great endeavor must begin somewhere—usually somewhere quite small. Somewhere like, say, a family dining room in rural Idaho.”
Watching Phones Instead of Reading Good Books is Starving Kids’ Souls - Katie Schuermann, The Federalist
“My husband pastors a campus church at a Big Ten university, and we live amongst college students. It is a blessed life, one in which our evenings are longer and our mornings shorter, all because we have the privilege of fostering 50-plus Gen Z-ers in the faith.
What passion and curiosity reside in the hearts and heads of our young people! But do you know what else resides there? Fear and distrust of most everything coming out of the mouth of anyone older than them.
For so many of these students grew up reading, hearing, watching, and absorbing stories that assert that they are omniscient, that no outside source is as trustworthy as their own feelings. They are certain they know what is best for themselves, and anyone who asserts otherwise is an indoctrinated false prophet of the dead past who simply refuses to sing along with Elsa, “Let it go.””
The Musical Heritage of the Lutheran Church - Mrs. Marie Greenway, Prelude to Postlude: CPH Music Blog
“Martin Luther famously stated that “next to the Word of God, music deserves the highest praise” (AE 53:323). An accomplished amateur musician himself, Luther led the charge of putting music into the mouths of the people. He wrote several hymns that married Christian doctrine to singable tunes of the era like “Dear Christians, One and All, Rejoice” (LSB 556), “These Are the Holy Ten Commands” (LSB 581), and, of course, “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” (LSB 656) among others. These hymns and others like them enabled the rapid spread of Reformation theology as they were sung around Germany. It was clear from the early sixteenth century that music—hymns in particular—would play an important role in the Lutheran Church, especially as the role of congregational singing grew.
Some of the most theologically rich and musically exquisite hymns came from Lutheran German hymnwriters in the years during and following the Reformation. Writers and composers such as Paul Speratus, Philipp Nicolai, Johann Heermann, and Paul Gerhardt contributed hymns such as “Salvation unto Us Has Come” (LSB 555), “O Morning Star, How Fair and Bright” (LSB 395), “Wake, Awake, for Night Is Flying” (LSB 516), and numerous others that continued to uphold the role of music and hymns in the Lutheran Church. These hymns were meant to be sung by the congregation so that the words were in their ears, minds, and mouths. It was clear that Lutherans took their music seriously and strove to build on the rich musical tradition of the Church at large, not limiting music’s role as other reformers did.”
Pursuing a Life - Kate Deddens, Circe Blog
“I am consistently struck by the persistent emphasis on the question, “What do you do?” Frequently, it is lobbed around in a careless, off-hand way, with the anticipation of a brief reply. It seems mostly meant to elicit a quick answer for a fill-in-the-blank mentality that at worst wants to pigeonhole its interactions or at best wants to find common ground for a perfunctory, ice-breaking conversation.
When asked this question I suspect, from years of experience, that others are looking for a succinct job title that will convey how I am “employed.” Now, being employed is a good thing: how I employ the time given to me is a critically important aspect of my daily journey. But that is not exactly what is usually meant by the question. People are not often asking for a description of how I spend my time, what I create or produce, how I nurture or facilitate, or how I am called to be a part of my communities both large and small. I am being asked what my “label” is, which often also distills to the question of “who is it who pays me” – dare I say, whose golden handcuffs encircle my wrists?
The question also drags along with it the lodestone of status because the answer I give to this question will clue my inquirers in to how they think they should respond to me in our interactions. I will then be related to, not as a human being – a person – but as a component of a system, a massive juggernaut monotonously repeating itself over and over again to less and less apparent aim other than material gain. ”
Classical education isn’t just a lifeboat - Barton J. Gingerich, World Magazine
“The main goal of education shouldn’t be moneymaking. It shouldn’t be self-actualization or gentlemanliness. It shouldn’t be good citizenship, however defined. It should be wisdom and virtue. Those two universal goods justify the sacrifices of time, effort, and funds, for they are universal and good in and of themselves. Kingdoms rise and fall, constitutions change, economies boom and bust. In all those times, in all those seasons, a person needs wisdom and virtue for himself and others, and he is richly blessed by the wisdom and virtue of his fellows. The kind of person he is—his substance—matters most. The prosperous and civilized can be nice to have around, but they aren’t as needful or eternally significant as the saint. Classical educators see it as their duty to lead a student out of darkness into light—into the enlightenment of wisdom and virtue. Those same teachers realize that, sometimes, the horse won’t drink when led to water, but at least his parents and teachers loved him enough to make the effort.
Other goods like patriotism, industriousness, and chivalry also spring from this fount. But virtue and wisdom are paramount, and they cannot be severed from questions of God, objective reality, or the long conversation of human civilization. Indeed, students of the liberal arts soon find themselves plunged into a millennia-long tradition, reading Livy in the original Latin or meditating on loyalty with Beowulf. Leisure isn’t for passive entertainment—it is for pursuing human excellence and worthwhile avocations, the stuff of humanity and civilization. Likewise, virtue isn’t a matter of vague “character counts” clichés—it is about piety, courage, faith, and charity that springs from our eternal Creator and Redeemer.
Why does this matter? Because, right now, many parents are urgently seeking alternatives. They may land on a classical Christian school as their lifeboat of choice. But it isn’t a lifeboat. Classical education is better seen as an ark.”
Seek to Show Hospitality - Katie Schuermann, The Lutheran Witness
“I am not in the habit of bowing to the earth like Abraham when guests come over for dinner, but I do like to run out my front door and greet guests in the yard. I also like to stand in my driveway at the end of a visit and wave goodbye as their taillights blink out of sight. Perhaps it is an overliteral interpretation of the apostle Paul’s exhortation to “seek to show hospitality” (Rom. 12:13), but I consider it a privilege to welcome people — neighbors and sojourners alike — into my home.
Not everyone thrills to it the same as I do, but showing hospitality remains a good, salutary practice in the life of the Christian. I remember a beloved seminary professor’s widow saying to a roomful of us seminary wives, “Do not let your husbands neglect hospitality in the home.” Her advice came after decades of practical experience, but it also came after decades of living by God’s Word. My now-pastor husband reminds me that every New Testament command to extend hospitality appears in the midst of a lengthy instruction on love, so to be hospitable is to be loving.”
Study: Outside of School, America’s Teens Average 70 Hours Per Week Glued to Screens - Joy Pullmann, The Federalist
“Americans ages 11 to 18 play online for an average of 10 hours per day, according to a study out today by a research team that includes psychologist Jean Twenge, author of “iGen” and “Generation Me.”
The researchers surveyed 1,600 Americans ages 11 to 18 in May 2022. On average, the study participants reported using digital media an average of 10 hours and four minutes per day, on such entertainment activities as social media, video chat, texting, shopping, and gaming.
That’s a total of 70 hours per week spent online, approximately double the average time spent in school. If teens were suddenly banned from screen time, they could use the time freed from solely that to instead hold down both a full-time and a part-time job. Some of this average may include multitasking, such as texting while scrolling Instagram, the study said, but this total of 70 hours per week spent on screens also did not include time spent watching TV.”