A Day in the Life - CM Open House

At the moment, we have a 12-year-old in Year 7, a 10-year-old in Year 4, an 8-year-old in Year 2, a 6-year-old in Year 1, a 4-year old and a 1-year old.  I hope this is a helpful peek at how doable this AO homeschooling thing is, even with a wide range of ages.  Disclaimer: The baby was sleeping during the time we took the video, and the preschooler was being more cooperative (and less loud) than usual. Also, my current Year 1 student is a stellar reader, so is probably more independent than your average 6-year-old. 

Obviously, there are many parts of our day that didn’t make it into the video (More narrations! Art! Outside time! Shakespeare and Plutarch! All these were on our schedule and did get done, but not on tape…), but this does give a glimpse into our day with four kids in three different forms. The one other piece that didn’t make it into the video is our “family study” section of day, which happens over lunch. This is when we do Scripture reading, artist and composer study, folk song, hymns, catechism memorization and other assorted riches. I usually eat quickly and then lead those activities while the children are finishing their meal.

The key in our family, as you can probably tell from the video, is to help train the children to be as independent as reasonably possible. It takes some effort at the beginning of each year to tweak the routine so that everyone gets the attention they need in a timely manner and can be working productively while they wait. A master list for each child for each day is helpful. I prepare copy work for one child who already knows how to write well for the whole week at once (or let them choose a passage of appropriate length).  A child can do review sections from their math page by herself until I have a moment to explain the new skills. Instrument practice and recitation can fit in while a child is waiting to narrate a reading, but I am helping someone else. I can listen to a narration or two while throwing in a load of laundry or changing the baby.  I’ve let the kids know how many kids can reasonably be helped with math at one time: Two, no more! Any other child wanting to do math has to wait. I’ve combined books between two children in adjacent years to cut down on reading-aloud time.  At our house right now, Y1 is listening to Y2’s Burgess Animal Book, and will do the Bird Book next year. I’ve also combined the Shakespeare retellings in a Form I rotation, since those are not tied specifically to the history timeline. Other readings I prefer to keep in their specific year because they fit well (Little Duke) or are more age appropriate there in terms of reading level.

Once the kids know what they can (and should) do independently and how to choose a varied sequence of activities, it’s a matter of keeping the more easily distracted children moving on to the next thing, and making sure everything did, in fact, get done by the end of the school day. (Inspect what you expect – at least look at the copywork page to ensure quality, glance over the list of readings to make sure everything got narrated, etc). 

Longer term, we schedule six weeks on and then take one week off. During that week, we try to finish up the bits and pieces that got overlooked (one more chapter from this book, may finish that art project) and spend a lot of time outside (hiking and snowshoeing, mostly) as well as give the house a deeper cleaning than usual. We usually schedule those breaks one week off from the public schools around the area, so that we in effect end up with two lighter weeks (one week in which we school, but don’t have extracurricular activities due to public school vacation, and one in which we are off, but the activities occur).

Stephen Colbert vs Bart Ehrman

Simply wonderful: Colbert, genius comedian, defends the accuracy of the Scriptures from Bart Ehrman. Is Colbert sincere, or simply good at spotting bad arguments? Either way, you have to see it!

HT: Extreme Theology

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Unchurched Spirituality

What is the nature of true spirituality? Russel Moore critiques the attitude some take about campus ministries, particularly the tendency to replace the church with campus ministry: "Sometimes young Christians mistake youthful idealism and, frankly, erotic charge for the spiritual gravity of a moment." If I can add my 2 cents, note that you can pick your friends, but not your family. The same dynamic applies to Christian life- the church is a family, not a group of friends you choose. Campus ministries can be attractive partly because you get to choose to hang out with people you like, people who are like you. Join a church, and you do not have such liberties- the people there are your brothers and sisters in Christ, like it or not!

Part of the beauty of this reality is that, while friends may come and go, a healthy family is the foundation of a person's life. Family members are supposed to care for each other, whether or not they particularly like each other! Furthermore, these kinds of relationships allow us to grow by bring out (and cutting down) the worst in us, our pride. Jesus came to save broken and sinful people; if He saved you, on what basis can you judge another person as inferior, or not worth your time? What part of "But I don't want to have to deal with those people!" doesn't sound like arrogance to you?

Campus ministry can be fun, powerful, strategic, and even necessary. However, it is not the center of Christianity! As a parachurch worker who values the local church above parachurch organizations, I appreciate and recommend Dr. Russell Moore's article, Jesus Didn't Die for a Campus Ministry.

The Place of Persuasion

Does a person have to be pushy and belligerent to talk about religious opinions, particularly the Gospel? Does a person have to be slick and salesman-like? Maybe just emotional and effusive?


May it never be! I assert that a person who relies on these traits or methods to proclaim Christ actually betrays the Gospel. The work of drawing people to Christ is the work of God, and no human being can accomplish it. This is what prompts Paul to say, "But we have renounced disgraceful, underhanded ways. We refuse to practice cunning or to tamper with God's word, but by the open statement of the truth we would commend ourselves to everyone's conscience in the sight of God" (2 Corinthians 4:2).


Not only this, but if there is a universal methodology to proclaiming Christ, it is to persuade people by appealing to their will and emotions through the mind. Any direct appeal to the will ("Just Do It!") or the emotions ("Look how much Jesus loves you!") is manipulation, a self-derived and self-reliant approach that exalts the skill of the persuader rather than the beauty and power of God. "For what we proclaim is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus' sake" (2 Corinthians 4:5). A good proclaimer of the Gospel does indeed address the will and emotions, not directly or manipulatively, but by the open statement of the truth. "For we are not, like so many, peddlers of God's word, but as men of sincerity, as commissioned by God, in the sight of God we speak in Christ" (2 Corinthians 2:17).


Put another way, all of the skill of the proclaimer ought to be directed towards faithfully serving the hearer in the manner of the communication, and towards faithfully serving the Lord in the content of the communication. For a thorough and thoughtful approach to the topic, check out Tim Keller’s talk, Persuasion.

How Much Do You Have to Hate Someone to Not Proselytize?

Two items on the subject of evangelism that deserve some consideration:

1) The video below by Penn Jilette (of Penn & Teller fame) describes his encounter with a man who gave him a Bible after a show. As an atheist, Penny says, "I don't respect people who don't proselytize," and "how much do you have to hate someone not to proselytize?" Penn seems to have a mature view of what it means to live in a pluralistic society while believing in truth.

2) Jacob Baron, class of 2010 at Dartmouth, made a similar point in The Dartmouth last year in his article Sociopathic Scripture:

"But what of those devout believers who do not proselytize? What of the woman on the subway, who expressed indifference at the idea that my friend would suffer infinite agony forever? What of the devout millions nationally and worldwide who revel in the righteous damnation of their neighbors? I cannot see how this religious behavior is anything other than sadism and sociopathy on a grand scale."

The point that both of these non-Christian men make is that it is supremely unloving towards our fellow human beings to fail to speak the Gospel to them if we truly believe it ourselves. Contrary to the prevailing cultural assertion that it is selfish and arrogant to proselytize, these men reveal that, done properly, it is the only selfless and humble option for the true believer. Selfless in that the gain you have in mind is for your neighbor, not yourself, and humble in that you are adhering to what you believe to be the truth, not your own mere opinion. This may well be why Penn describes his evangelist as "not defensive."

You may note as well that what has been discussed in these two pieces is a purely horizontal phenomenon, meaning that it has to do with love from one human being to another. For the Christian, there is also the awareness of the vertical dimension to these issues, namely that we have a debt of love and obedience to God Himself, who commanded His people to represent Him and preach the good news to all the earth. If anything, the horizontal illuminates the greater prominence of the vertical dimension of evangelism for the Christian.

HT: Dashouse

John Owen on the Mortification of Sin

The Puritans have a reputation for being insufferable moralists. I have no idea where this idea came from, since 1) the Unitarians who split from the Puritans seem far more moralistic and 2) I can find no evidence of this moralistic stance in the writings of such emminent Puritans as John Owen. Take, for instance, his treatment of the mortification of sin from the book, Overcoming Sin & Temptation:

"Without sincerity and diligence in a universality of obedience, there is no mortification of any one perplexing lust to be obtained." While this may sound moralistic, observe what follows:

"It is evident that you contend against sin merely because of your own trouble by it. Would your conscience be quiet under it, you would let it alone. Did it not disquiet you, it should not be disquieted by you... Do you think he will ease you of that which perplexes you, that you may be at liberty to that which no less grieves him? No. God says, "Here is one, if he could be rid of this lust I should never hear of him more; let him wrestle with this, or he is lost."

The concern is for knowledge of God, not mere moral conformity. In fact, Owen opposes self-motivated and achieved moral efforts. Where did the Puritan reputation come from?

I Am a Family Man

Andrew Peterson is perhaps my favorite musician right now; enjoy the video.



HT :Between Two Worlds

The Object of Our Hope

A homily for the Dartmouth Ecumenical Christian Chapel, given Thursday, October 9th, 2008.

A wise man once told me that a Christian only ever faces two problems in life: fear and discouragement. As one prone to discouragement, I am either especially qualified or especially unqualified to speak to the theme of hope. In any event, the issue is unavoidable, for we cannot live without hope.

We might say that there are two sides to hope, the subjective and the objective. Subjectively, we cannot live without the experience of hope, something to orient our lives in a positive direction. Without this kind of hope, we give up, passively and actively destroying, rather than supporting, life. King Saul ends his own life when he cannot prevail over the Philistines, Peter abandons his Lord, Judas repents with bitterness and hangs himself. We abandon our families, betray our trusts, and stop caring for the "least of these" in order to take care of ourselves. Unrestrained, fear and despair lead to death.

We must experience a subjective hope, and we celebrate this kind of hope endlessly in our literature and media. In our children's literature this theme is particularly ubiquitous, with the "Little Engine That Could" as the preeminent example. However, nearly all of the stories we tell feature this theme, hope in the face of tough odds. We root for the underdog in our sports movies, and we know that the heroes in movies like The Lord of the Rings, Spider-man, and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington will prevail, no matter how hard things get. It may be a particularly American phenomenon.

However, all too often we promote subjective hope with no tether to an object of any kind. Without the counterpart of objective hope, our hopes are mere wishful thinking. As a husband and father, I had the unpleasant privilege of catching rats for the first time last winter, and I learned something about hope. Some were caught in traps, but one of the rats was too smart for this, and he moved into our cabinets. Since I did not want either a dead rat in a trap or poison in with our food, I caught him with my two hands and a bit of Tupperware. Since he had clearly found his own way into my house, I couldn't simply release him. Fortunately, a friend had told me how to remove a rat's objective hope. Placed in a bucket of water, a rat will swim for a time, but no matter what his hope for escape may be, a bit of soap mixed into the water with objectively change his hope, for without surface tension, no one treads water for long.

Another name for hope with no object is false hope, and it is as cruel as it is foolish. No one would stand before a paraplegic and tell them that they can walk solely on the basis of a subjective hope, yet this is essentially what we do when we tell someone to do something because they can believe in themselves or the economy or some other abstraction. The unbearable cost of their actions are then recklessly reckoned to themselves or to others around them.

Our current economic crisis is born of such wishful thinking, with reckless behavior justified by the thought that since thing have been exceptionally good for so long, it must be that they will always be this way. We can fudge the numbers a bit, the economy can take it. Here at Dartmouth, students come to believe that they can push themselves ever harder, giving up food and sleep, until they disappear from our community on medical leave. Subjective hope is not enough; we must have an object that can bear and fulfill our hope.

The need for subjective hope is amply revealed by our cultural bias, but our need for objective hope is obscured by these same bias. While we are endlessly celebrating new life and hope, we are also endlessly avoiding the reality of death. "Time cuts down all, both great and small," and "Xerxes the great did die, and so must you and I" were rhymes taught to Puritan children to help them learn their alphabet- the letters T and X in this case- and though a tad morbid, they are absolutely correct.

Consider, of what use are our desires and efforts for social justice, equity, and improvement if the members of our someday socially just society all die? In many places, statistics such as infant mortality, life expectancy, and even relative wealth have improved, but the mortality rate itself remains the same. What comes of your aspirations the day you die? You cannot ensure that the goals you pursue and the causes you contribute to will continue beyond your own death, if you can even ensure them that far. The object of our hope must bear not only the weight of our lives, but also death itself.

This leads me to ask you the classic question: what is your hope in? Do you have an object that can sustain your hope? Our text today speaks of being "born again into a living hope" through the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus. It would be easy to point to the resurrection as a remedy to death, as indeed it is, without asking the simple question: why do we die? The Scriptures tell us of several other resurrections, such as that of Lazarus, Jesus' friend, and strangely enough, these resurrections are not permanent. Both before and after Jesus' own resurrection, those few who died and were raised again merely died a second death. Simply reversing death is not enough, and so we must ask why death occurs in the first place.

Last week learned from Romans 5 about suffering, endurance, character, and hope. Later in this chapter we are told precisely why human beings universally die: "Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man [Adam], and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned-- for sin indeed was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not counted where there is no law. Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sinning was not like the transgression of Adam, who was a type of the one who was to come." (Rom 5:12-14) In other words, death is a result of our offense to the God who made us and gave us all the good things we enjoy. It is, in fact, the result of our propensity to place our hope, faith, and love in any other object, rather than in Him.

Without hope, we die, and with false hope, we die. Peter speaks to us of a hope that is living because its object lives as the conqueror of both sin and death. Consider on one hand, the death of the Lord Jesus; simultaneously God and Man, willingly accepting the penalty of God's wrath in our place through His death on the cross. Death must occur, and so the Lord Jesus tastes it for us.

Consider also the resurrection of the Lord Jesus: by raising Him from the dead, God demonstrates His acceptance of the sacrifice, for if there is no longer any wrath, neither can there be death. This is why Peter speaks of being born again into this living hope, for what is needed is not merely a pep talk or an improvement to our lives, but a new life altogether, and such life is available to us in the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. We are offered more than just the avoidance of death, but participation in the very life of God. In Him we have the promise a coming day in which we will share in His indestructible life and be fully delivered from sin. In other words, there is real, objective hope for a day in which human beings treat one another with perfect love.

This should fuel our social concerns. Though some claim that to be too heavenly minded is to be of no earthly good, the truth is exactly the opposite. We who live in a hope that surpasses what we can accomplish in this life have a remedy for the despair that causes us to give up or compromise along the way, and we can work without giving in to fear for our own welfare.

I end with the question: What is your hope in? Can the object of your hope bear the weight of your life and surpass your death?

Marketplace Religion

A homily for the Dartmouth Ecumenical Christian Chapel, given Thursday, April 3, 2008.


I appreciated Kurt's introduction to our theme last week, and I think that the rampant consumerism we live and breathe every day is perhaps the greatest challenge to our faith we face today. Indeed, I think that the "consumer as king" mindset affects us far more deeply than we are usually aware, touching every area of life, not just he buying and selling of goods and services. I believe that we are often deceived by our own selfishness when confronted by the array of options we find even in our own supermarkets into relativizing our choices and believing them to have no significant consequences. We think it makes no difference what we choose to eat and drink, until our waistlines and health insurance costs prove otherwise. We are prone to take this kind of thinking into all areas of life, even matters of spirituality and religion. This is not an issue of philosophical relativism having an impact on us so much as our natural desire to carry "consumer-king" thinking with us wherever we go. I would call this "Consumer Religion."


For this reason, the account we find in Acts 17 is a great help to us. Here we see the apostle Paul proclaiming Christ in a context not unlike our own. A great array of religious and spiritual options were enjoyed by the people of Athens, much as in our own community. I would call this "Marketplace Religion," and it is a good thing. If truth be truth, and religious expression genuine, our choices in these matters cannot be compelled or inappropriately restricted.

Note that Paul critiques what I call "consumer religion", not the marketplace in which it is found. He does not take a hammer to the idols that disturb him, but instead speaks truth to the hearts of the men and women there.


Because of our current cultural obsession with choice and consumption, I suggest we listen to Paul's critique of consumer religion for three reasons:


1) A consumer mindset in religion will lead us to produce a God or a Jesus that suits our tastes and cultural values. For example, Albert Schweitzer critiqued the attempts to recover the "historical Jesus" in his day as merely a way of producing a picture of the searchers themselves; their Jesus looks remarkably bohemian and German.


2) Further, a consumer mindset will allow us to ignore what God requires of us. This is a perpetual problem on every part of the spectrum, from liberal to conservative. There are temptations to culturally accommodate biblical teaching in such a way that our present cultural moment reinvents Jesus, as well as temptations to emphasize only certain aspects of His teaching while ignoring others. Instead of speaking truth to power, Jesus is now merely a truth subjected to our power. He cannot change us or call us to greater love and faithfulness because he cannot offend us. He is domesticated. Religion becomes a tool to change or oppress others, one to which we are immune because we made it to suit ourselves.


3) Consumer religion obscures the beauty of the God who is, as Kurt put it last week, the true object of our desire. As Paul put it: "Being then God's offspring, we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man. The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead." We cannot see the beauty of a God who surpasses our greatest imaginings if we are intent on suiting ourselves.


Nor can we appreciate the love of a God who would die even for "consumer worshippers," worshippers who prefer to reinvent God than see Him as He is, if we will not bear the offense of His critique of us. Such a God does not suit us; rather, we were made to suit Him. Thus, we are dethroned before the true king, and become servants of all, instead of living to obtain greater service for ourselves. Not only that, but to wonder at the generous love of Christ empowers us to likewise love, forgive, and be generous even to those we might regard as enemies.


Thus can we pray: Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever. Amen.

Implicit vs. Explicit

Here are some thoughts inspired by my reflection on the Gospels, particularly the difference between the Synoptics and John. The Synoptics seem to put you in the story and leave you, to some degree, to figure out its meaning, whereas John is far more theologically reflective and didactic. Note: my use of the terms "implicit" and "explicit" is overly absolute. Both John and the Synoptics are on the "implicit" side of this, and most of our texts today are "explicit."

An implicit text, such as the Synoptics, is often more versatile and effective as a teaching tool, as the reader must interact more directly with the material and think for himself. The writer's explicit judgments and values in an explicit text may clarify the subject for the moment, but will inevitably present and obstacle to the future reader who does not share the immediate context of the writer. Thus, an implicit text can be more challenging, as well as "timeless."

An explicit text, of the sort we favor in our post-Enlightenment era, makes a good introduction to a subject, or a good corrective to an erroneous understanding of a prior implicit text.