What We're Reading - November Edition

November is here, and in this season of thankfulness, we are reminded that we have so much to be thankful for within this church and school community at Immanuel. We give thanks for each of our families, and the wonderful opportunity to work with you in the important work of educating and nurturing your children.

This community and the close relationship between home and school, is fundamental to all we do at ILS, and we want to encourage and support you in this important work. As a community, we want to foster intentional discussions on culture-building and culture-shaping, and we hope that our monthly "What we're reading..." feature can inspire, encourage and support us in this work at home and at school.

This month, we’re grateful to the PTL for inviting Brooke Shannon, founder and CEO of Wait Until 8th to join us for a conversation on smart phones and other technology. We hope you will join us on Friday, November 15th at 8:30am for what is certain to be a thoughtful and encouraging discussion.

We also love for families to pass along things they have read that may be interesting to others in our ILS community! Please feel free to share a link in the comments to email us any time!

“Later, though, when I overcame my case of the chuckles, I got to thinking. What if living generously and living dangerously had more in common than I had first thought?

The book of Ecclesiastes offers a kind of funny opening to its 11th chapter. “Cast your bread upon the waters, for you will find it after many days.” Unless we are talking about feeding waterfowl off a quaint bridge, I am not one to cast my bread upon the waters. It sounds wasteful. It even sounds a little reckless to the worrywart in me! Then verse two gets loonier yet. “Give a portion to seven, or even to eight, for you know not what disaster may happen on earth.” If there’s one thing I know, it’s that looming disasters get the weather people talking earnestly about the need to stock our pantries, not fling all of our foodstuffs out the window.

These verses teach the kind of extravagant generosity that most of us would find risky. The point is this: If we have the means to be generous, we should be about it while we have the opportunity. Who knows what tomorrow may bring? But if today, right at this very moment, we happen to hold more than we need in our own hands, we should open those hands, widely, charitably — dangerously, even! — in Christian love to care for those who lack.

Living generously is one of the things that we are called to in Christ. He gave up absolutely everything for us and for the world, from the very shirt(/robe) on His back to His own dear life. We cannot live up to this, and indeed are not called to be saviors of the world, for that was the work of Christ alone. But by His Spirit, we can and should respond to His call to love one another as He first loved us. He loved us with a generosity like none other. He loved us to a dangerous degree. Following Him means that we say to the wisdom of this age that it very often has everything backward. Living generously does not always look sensible or wise, but it looks like the love of Jesus, and by this all people will know that we are His disciples.”
— Deaconess Rosie Adle, " Living generously, living dangerously"
“The custom of commemorating all the saints of the Church on a single day goes back at least to the third century. All Saints Day celebrates the baptized people of God, living and dead, here and around the world, on Earth and in Heaven, who make up the Body of Christ. On this festival, many Christian congregations remember the faithful who have died during the past year and celebrate with anticipation their and our transformation on the Last Day, the day of resurrection.

While we may face death with fear, the liturgy and the texts appointed for All Saints Day call us to hear the Lord’s promise. He is with us in life and in death and, in the end, “we shall be like Him, because we shall see Him as He is” (1 John 3:2).

1 John 3:1-3 begins with our status “in Christ” and concludes with an eschatological reflection which causes the reader to ponder, “What is Heaven going to be like?” Indeed, what are we going to be like, “when he appears?” John’s reflection explodes three popular misnomers about eternal life (a quality of existence—divine life, not a quantity of time, per se). First (and this is where everything gets derailed) the goal or purpose of salvation is not so your spirit, when you die, goes to Heaven. Second, because the goal or point of salvation is misplaced, there is a misunderstanding about what Heaven is like right now. This yields a third error, namely how Heaven—as many people understand it—is not the end of the story. There is life after life-after-death that must be recognized as the end of the story and what Heaven will really be like.”
— Pastor John Bombaro, "Epistle: 1 John 3:1-3 (All Saints Sunday: Series C)
“Blessed are you when they revile and persecute you, and say all kinds of evil against you falsely for My sake. Rejoice and be exceedingly glad, for great is your reward in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.” Matthew 5:11-12

To be blessed is the opposite of being cursed. When people curse you, you know that you aren’t being blessed. But there are times when to be cursed means you are blessed. This might not make sense, but it is true. When you are cursed for confessing Christ and his truth, you are being blessed. You join the company of the blessed. The prophets were persecuted for preaching the truth about Christ. Remember Elijah and the prophets of Baal? Elijah stood alone. He preached the truth and for his efforts the false prophets sought to kill him. Throughout history, the children of God have been mistreated by this world. When you are mistreated because you are a Christian, God is blessing you. This is how God conforms you to Christ’s image. This is how he confirms you in your Christian faith. Listen to what St. John writes in today’s Epistle Lesson:

”Behold what manner of love the Father has bestowed on us, that we should be called children of God! Therefore the world does not know us, because it did not know Him.” 1 John 3:1

To be a Christian is to deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow Jesus. What did they say about Jesus? They slandered him, twisted his teaching, falsely accused him, and crucified him as if he were a dangerous criminal. So then, Christian, what do you expect? Do you want to be a disciple of Jesus? Do you want to learn from him, listen to his voice, follow him, hold onto him in firm faith, and confess him? Then get ready to receive the treatment he received.”
— Doug Lemov, "Replacing "Learning Styles" with "Attention Types""
“Teach children difficult things. They will rise to the challenge.

My days are spent teaching hymns and liturgy to students from ages four to fourteen. I will say all day long that they can and should learn the music of the church—and the difficult music of the church, at that. Young children thrive on memorization and love to sing long, complicated words and text. Older students, while not always thrilled about learning yet another hymn, realize that learning hymns is a way of stretching and challenging themselves; that it feeds them good, robust truth instead of catering to childishness.

Our hymns often feature difficult subjects such as death, pain, persecution, and misfortune. They cover tough theological concepts, including the Trinity, Law and Gospel, angels, demons, and the work of Satan. And this is the strength of our hymnal: it expresses the truth in a nuanced manner, digging deeply and courageously into the Gospel and into the Christian life. It is good to teach our children these truths. It is good to teach our children to sing these truths and to take them to heart.”
— Marie Greenway, "Train Students to Sing Hymns Artfully"
“I love George Herbert’s The Temple—the major hits, the b-sides, everything. The more I read Herbert’s work, the more I realize just how inventive it really is. Take even a minor poem like “Paradise” for example. Like so many works by Herbert, this one is a little Matryoshka doll of meaning—a highly intricate artifact containing successive, hidden surprises.

The first thing the reader notices in this poem is Herbert’s experimental rhyming technique—how the final word of each line is pared down bit by bit in a stanza, revealing words within words. Herbert’s success here is his ability to demonstrate visually the way sacred truths or realities are planted or embedded in other, more mundane ones.

In the first stanza, we realize that Herbert’s “Paradise” describes the present, not some Edenic past: “I bless thee, Lord, because I GROW / Among thy trees, which in a ROW / To thee both fruit and order OW.” This opening image recalls the quiet prosperity of Psalm 1, where the “blessed man” is likened (as the KJV puts it) to “a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season.” The core of Herbert’s truncated rhyme (“OW”) tells the reader that this “order” is indebted to God, the one who gives the blooming communion its “fruit.””
— Josh Mayo, "Why I Love George Herbert"
“The world needs more rhetoric.

Yes, you read that correctly. Politics needs more rhetoric. Journalism needs more rhetoric. Social media needs more rhetoric. Our daily discourse needs more rhetoric.

Disagree? You’re not alone.

Many would argue the modern world needs less rhetoric, not more. Often cited as a major reason for today’s outrage culture, rhetoric has become a dirty word. It’s what you wield to keyboard-punch someone on Twitter. It’s how politicians utter hundreds of words while saying absolutely nothing. It’s kerosene for igniting violence and hate.

So why would I argue that society needs more rhetoric? Because in a noisy world, where loud voices vie for everyone’s attention, good rhetoric can cut through the clutter. Those who’ve mastered the art of rhetoric are, for good or for ill, the ones getting heard in the noise.”
— A. Trevor Sutton, "Our Noisy Age Needs More Rhetoric, Not Less"
“When it comes to educational technology, we are all being lied to. Educational policy-makers, teachers, students, and parents have been made to believe that modern technology is “transforming the way students learn,” and “revolutionizing education.” Schools issue tablets and laptops instead of textbooks. Students spend much of their school day and night tied to screens for schoolwork and homework. The ed-tech companies have successfully crafted, packaged and sold to schools many myths masquerading as facts. These are spun in such a way that we are made to feel bad for questioning them. However, once parents and decision makers see the truth, they will demand change. ”
— "Lies You Have Been Told About Educational Technology"
“The urge to prepare for a career is strong. Perhaps the stronger the student, the stronger the urge. Universities foster this urge with an ever-expanding array of studies that are career-based, career-driven. For example a student can choose to major in golf course management at some schools, as well as business administration, finance, computer engineering, and more and more. In many instances the work for these majors is surely demanding, directly related to what follows in a job, and amply respectable. Such interests increasingly drive university work, so much so that schools practically serve as job training programs with nice benefits in food, facilities, and fun. Parents hardly complain because, except for those pesky majors tending to be called “studies” of some kind (probably jobs follow these, too, but the urge to betray bias overwhelmed for a moment), jobs tend to follow the job training. Young people, then, are launched in their financial independence. For some, though, something is missing. Job preparation is not enough, and not rightly the focus of university at all.

Universities, by the grandest scheme, should train with a single goal in mind. Being a university, not a multiversity, itself suggests that. Graduates sallying forth from the ivied halls, or whatever kind of place it might be, need to be free men and women. That is the claim and purpose of the liberal arts. Having had a significant time to ponder and pursue and practice the virtues of freedom, these new men and women can join the ongoing conversation of the ages and continue their efforts to refine the personal and civic skills needed to live as free-minded souls.”
— Randall Tumlinson, "The Lost Art of Classical Education"

Join us on Friday, November 15th for a conversation with Brooke Shannon, Executive Director and Founder of Wait Until 8th, the national movement encouraging families to let kids be kids a little longer and empowering parents to say yes to waiting for the smartphone.