Books to Read

I’ve been reading in snatches of a page or two at a time a book that fell out of heaven into my lap at the conference this summer. If you are interested in a theological and philosophical understanding of the place of rhetoric in the Christian classical tradition, I don’t think you’ll find a book more [...]

Is this a once in a lifetime opportunity?

I’m not altogether certain but it might be. How often do you get to spend a weekend with a translator of Dante, a founder of a Christian classical college, and a group of people driven to figure out what Christian classical education is and how to implement it?
I just attended the SCL conference in Charleston, [...]

The Lost Tools of Writing and Al Gore’s Speechwriter

If you are hired to write speeches by the Vice President of these United States, you can write speeches. You can imagine, therefore, why my attention was aroused when I discovered an interview of Daniel Pink (speechwriter to Al Gore) by Tim Ferriss (author of The Four Hour Work Week).
Of course, I wanted to see if [...]

The Simplified Curriculum

When we think of curricula, we tend to think of classes or subjects and materials to read or study in those subjects. That’s a very fine thing to do and we should keep doing it. I want to suggest that there might be more to think about and it’s one of those “mores” that make things [...]

Nature and Convention and the culture wars

RV Young puts it this way:
According to the reigning heterodoxy, absolutely nothing is “for all time”; and works of literature do not bespeak the “soul of the age,” so much as they conceal, even while embodying, its ideological and economic imperatives. Hence the clamor from powerful forces within the academy of the”opening up” or dismantling of [...]

Grammar, Potter, and Freedom

Alan Warhaftig has found 474 run on sentences in Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows. Given that the book fills about 750 pages, we cannot help but be astonished by such editorial carelessness. 
I’m guessing this news will find a mixed reaction. The sentimentalists will complain that Mr. Warhaftig is trying to ruin a good thing: [...]

LTW on Sale: One Week Only!

I’d better mention that the Lost Tools of Writing has been placed on a Back To School sale price. If you buy all the parts separately, it is only $147 for teacher guide, module guides, CD’s, and student workbook. If you buy them all together we lower the price to only $127.
But for THIS WEEK [...]

What’s classical? Who’s classical? Whose classical? Huh?

This from a fascinating blog on classical education as it is defined since Dorothy Sayers and how Charlotte Mason understood it. So who’s really classical?
It is fascinating to me how we bandy about words like ‘classical,’ ‘education,’ liberal arts,’ and more, tossing them lightly into the air, taking them for granted, when if we stop [...]