Happy October! As we move into the second month of the school year, it is such a delight to see and hear all the delightful rhythms and routines returning around campus. The school is alive with students singing in music class, enjoying great literature books together, exploring the world through science experiments, and engaging in House competitions.
It has been such a joy to welcome new and returning families to campus for weekly Chapel, Back to School Night, our First Friday Coffee, the PTL/Room Parent meeting, our 8th Grade Parent meeting, and of course, Oktoberfest! We so missed having so many of these gatherings in person last year, so it has been such a great way to begin the year being able to once again meet and gather face-to-face.
At Immanuel, we truly believe that parents have the primary role in the education of their children. This is why we fundamentally believe that the relationship between home and school is so vital in the education and nurturing of children. It is a joy and a privilege to work so closely together with our families as we share in this important endeavor. Together with you we engage in the work of shaping our culture at school and at home. Each month, we compile a "What we're reading..." blog post with a small selection of articles that our faculty and staff have found recently to be inspiring, intriguing, encouraging, or thought-provoking. We always love to hear your thoughts on these or other things you’ve been reading as well.
Thank you for your continued partnership, and for engaging with us! Please feel free to share a link in the comments to email us any time!
The Importance of Movement in the Divine Service - Mrs. Marie Greenway, Prelude to Postlude: CPH Music Blog
“As anyone who spends time around kids can attest, children love to move. In fact, it is often difficult to get them to sit still, and many teachers know how beneficial it is to plan lessons in which children can move their bodies while still learning. Like many things, this characteristic of children speaks truth about human beings in general: we are made to move.
God made our bodies to move, and, furthermore, that movement is an important part of what forms our souls. Our everyday movements become our physical habits, and these physical habits, in turn, shape our hearts and minds. After all, the little things we do daily show what kind of person we are and guide us into becoming a certain kind of person.
Do you brush your teeth daily? If so, have you ever forgotten to brush them on occasion? If so, you probably felt a little off the day you forgot to brush because you deviated from habit. Most of us automatically reach for the toothbrush or have it ingrained in our daily routine. We not only value our dental health and hygiene to begin with, but the habit of brushing daily also encourages us to continue to take our dental health and hygiene seriously. It is important to guide our daily movements into good habits (such as brushing our teeth) because these habits eventually form our characters.
The formation of good physical habits affects our hearts, minds, and souls, and is part of why the Church has handed down the tradition of movement during the Divine Service. Consider the physicality of the Service and how we are taught to stand, sit, bow, kneel, close our eyes, and fold our hands. These seemingly little and unimportant movements help us to form a proper level of reverence and respect.”
Classical Education Isn’t Smart - Travis Copeland, Classical Learning Test Blog
“How students learn to relate to knowledge teaches them about who they are and who they ought to become. Virtue, wisdom, and knowledge come together to form particular students and a particular place, and there is definitely a place for knowledge. Knowledge only lives well in the mind of a student when accompanied by the dual pursuit of wisdom and virtue. This is not to say that I don’t wish for my students to have knowledge of the Roman Emperors, the Æneid, the Brontë sisters, or Shakespeare. Instead, my pursuits, what I consider “success” as a teacher, and the results of a thoroughly classical education, are not enlarged brains. They are hearts and minds connected to love the true, the good, and the beautiful. Any student of middling grades and adequate essays who is wise, honest, respectful, upright, and loving is a student of value. Where they would not exemplify the model student in a school with its mind set on making “smart people,” classical education should be proud of sending students like that into the world. When we praise that student and hold them up, we contend with the brain-only anthropology of modern education; we assert that humanity is more than information or production. True education is about nurturing practiced virtue and wisdom, supported by truthful knowledge about the world, in every student that enters our classroom.”
How to Read - Andrew Kearn, CIRCE
“If we read tribally, we short circuit the path to wisdom.
If we read obsequiously, we enervate ourselves on that path.
What I mean is this: if my first question when I read the quoted paragraph above is, “Who wrote it?”, I am asking a perfectly natural question, one that is rooted in my desire to be secure with my tribe. I am not, please note, using the word tribe negatively. I am using it as a matter of unavoidable fact. Perhaps I should have used the words “as a member” or “communally,” but I wanted to indicate different emphases.
The basic error of tribal reading is not to read as a member of a tribe or community because something that cannot not be done is not an error. The error arises when I allow my tribe to interpret the text for me in a way that causes me to close down my own thought processes. I reject this passage because, say, Tucker Carlson or Don Lemon said it, not because it is false or immoral or self-contradictory.
On the other hand, I could read it obsequiously, which is to say, I could surrender myself to it without reflection. Perhaps this is also tribal reading, but the difference as I see it is that an obsequious reader reads anything without a critical apparatus. It is written so it must be true and wonderful. Perhaps the obsequious reader goes a step further and says, “It is written, and I like it, so it must be true.”
This is a much more delicate matter than we often assume. We have learned in the past century or more that elementary textbooks matter. We have learned that thought patterns that get established in school, intended or not, have lifelong effects: personal, social, and cultural.”
Reverence Opens the Door to Beauty - David Trull, Dappled Things
“When I was young, my mom would often take my siblings and I to the St. Louis Botanical gardens. It was a magnificent place, nestled in the center of the city and surrounded by imposing, ivy-covered walls. There was a two hundred year old manor house at the center and a hedge maze in which, as small children, we loved to get lost for hours. It was one of my favorite places in town.
Generally, we went with just our immediate family. One day, however, my mom had volunteered to watch her friend’s two sons for the day, who were both about my age at the time (nine). This was no easy task, as they were two of the most rambunctious lads I have ever encountered. A pair of energizer bunnies, they barreled, crashed and torpedoed their way through life. In other words, they could be a lot of fun.
My mom wisely determined that our house could not contain these twin cyclones, so we visited our old standby: the gardens. We had a grand old time bounding around the place, chasing our way through the maze and rolling down hillsides. At one point, we found ourselves in a corner of the park that we seldom visited. It was a zen garden, complete with a tea house surrounded by a small lake. The sand on the shore had been raked in intricate patterns and the place was circumscribed by a delicate rope fence. Most alluring, however, were the lustrous black rocks that blanketed the ground. They were jet black, yet so smooth and shiny that they appeared to be made of glass. The sun shone brightly with the rosy hue of late autumn afternoon, and the way the light caught those stones made them look like alien jewels. ”
Wanted: Americans with Grit - John Horvat, The Imaginative Conservative
“Amid the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, a glimmer of honor appeared on the horizon. A group of American veterans helped evacuate fellow Americans and faithful Afghans left behind with the Taliban.
These Americans, many of them former members of Special Forces, arranged to send people out of the country. After the fall of Kabul, they did what the enlisted men were ordered not to do. They entered the city and devised ingenious ways around Taliban checkpoints in the dead of night to deliver hundreds of people to the Kabul airport for evacuation.
These veterans did not have unlimited funds or special equipment. As civilians, they had no obligation to risk their lives for others. However, the men had ties of loyalty to those left behind that demanded action.
Most importantly, they had grit. Their desire to help found a way around the problems and led them to display unyielding courage in the face of danger. They got the job done.
Something like this needs to be done to solve problems in America today.”
Where is the world's most expensive painting? - Caryn James, BBC Culture
“Somewhere in Saudi Arabia, hidden away by order of Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, is the world’s most expensive painting, Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi. Or is it? No one in the art world knows for sure where the painting is. Most observers agree that it is likely stashed in the Middle East, but some have speculated that it is stored in a tax-free zone in Geneva or even on the Prince’s half-a-billion-dollar yacht. Is it even a Leonardo at all? The image of Christ as The Saviour of the World was billed as The Last da Vinci at Christie’s 2017 auction, where it sold for a record $450 million (£342 million) to a proxy for bin Salman (yes, that bin Salman, whom the CIA found responsible for ordering the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi). But even then, many Leonardo experts were dubious that the painting had more than a few brush strokes by him, and those doubts have ramped up ever since.
Veiled in layers of mystery and international intrigue, the story of the Salvator Mundi is an ongoing, endlessly fascinating saga, told in two new documentaries, The Lost Leonardo and Saviour for Sale: Da Vinci’s Lost Masterpiece?, which play out with all the drama and suspense of a detective story. They arrive in the wake of Ben Lewis’s high-profile 2019 book, The Last Leonardo, and dozens of articles. The painting, which dates to around 1500, was lost to history for more than 200 years, was damaged and badly restored, and was sold and resold as a minor work, probably by a Leonardo acolyte. But now the Salvator Mundi has become the poster boy for the volatile mix of money, power and geopolitics that defines the art world today.”
The Cross, the Crucifix and other Crosses - Edward Riojas, The Lutheran Witness
“Ask a believer what the first Christian symbol was, and most likely they would respond: “The cross.” They would, however, be dead wrong. For decades after the ascension of our Lord Jesus Christ, the cross was merely a public execution device. It was humiliating, excruciating and, as with all public death sentences, carried the stigma of a heinous malefactor. Polite folks did not speak of the cross openly.
One feeble attempt to modernize our understanding of this reality happened in a Bible study that used an electric chair to explain the crucifixion of Jesus. In spite of the strange attempt at updating history, it nonetheless drove home the point of the cross’s stigma.
While we may find it nearly impossible to wrap our heads around the ancient perception of crucifixion — especially when modern Christianity is saturated with images of Jesus’ death — it adds profound meaning to Paul’s then-strange admission to the Corinthian church: “For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Cor. 2:2).”
Make Learning Fun - Austin Hoffman, CIRCE
““Do what you love, and you will never work a day in your life.” Enjoyment certainly makes the job easier. This is why many trades have work songs that can be sung by laborers as they work in the shop or field. Work invites levity and joy, and difficult labor does not prohibit cheerfulness. So, while education is difficult work, we should also encourage delight in studies. But what is important about this proverb is that the joy comes from the work itself, not from outside.
Sometimes you will hear the complaint that a child is not enjoying school as much as they should. Then come the pleas for more entertaining activities: Students should have the option to express themselves artistically and respond to what they read. Math should include more games and fun activities. Classrooms should include more opportunities for creative outlets like video and media production. Students shouldn’t have to read great books; historical fiction would do the job just as well and be more fun.
While education must be joyful, artificially injecting entertainment denies the principle of attraction: “what you win them with is what you win them to.” If students are attracted to youth group because they get to guzzle soda, play games, and goof off with their friends, what do they learn to love? They are not coming for the Bible lesson; they want fun apart from the teaching. The lesson is just the cost of admission. If they want entertainment, they need to endure the 10–20 minute lecture. Then, when the teenager becomes an adult and grown-up services no longer offer entertainment, he leaves. He never loved church for its own sake but for the distraction. ”