Since we have so little wisdom, we are continuously and continually inclined to avoid the need to exercise judgment by replacing it with one of two options: rules or tolerance.

Do not think for a moment that I refer exclusively or even primarily to conventional politics. Indeed, nothing goes untouched by these two impulses (for that is what they are: impulses to take a shortcut).

Think, for example, about the use of correct grammar. Two parties argue for the soul of civilization: the prescriptivists and the descriptivists. The former prescribes, identifying the rules that the masses must follow. The latter describers, noting the moves that the masses make. The former look for authority to the unchanging rule (so they used to become teachers); the latter look to the common usage.

If you would like to follow a humorous and occasionally risible discussion on this matter, follow this link to a dangerously light-hearted blog post by David Bentley Hart called Le Mot Juste. Note the two options that run through the argument.

Since I’ve mentioned David Bentley Hart, I’ll direct your attention to another presentation of his, this one on “tradition and innovation.” This one is a video, but notice his comment at the beginning about the relationship between tradition and innovation. Can you see the same parallel as the grammar/word wars above.

Apparently Hart likes to wade into controversial waters.

That bothers some people, but only because they (we) prefer to keep playing on the beach even though that means nobody will have anything to eat at meal time.

In other words, you can’t avoid these controversies. We all have to make decisions. We all have to exercise judgment if we are going to make decisions. We all need wisdom to exercise that judgment. We all feel inadequately wise to exercise the judgment that enables us to make sound decisions. So we prefer to avoid the controversies. So we turn to rules. Or we turn to tolerance.

But you can’t.

Because everything requires that we resist the two poles that we wish would make life easy. It’s true in grammar and word choice. It’s true in tradition and innovation. It’s true in assessing school work, in raising children, in teaching reading – every where we turn we are confronted with what seems like two choices, but really is an opportunity to gain wisdom by staying between them.

On the one hand, we want rules so we don’t have to think, but can simply do as we are told. We speak of “absolute truth” and think that the truth is absolutely indifferent to the context in which it is embodied. We speak of “absolute right and wrong” and argue that the good is utterly inconsiderate of the circumstances in which it is incarnated. We say that “beauty is absolute,” contending that there are self-evident standards that pay no attention to the material with which it has to work.

On the other hand, we want complete permission so we don’t have to think but can immoderately follow our appetites and passions wherever they lead us. We say that something is “true for you” and refuse to consider that truth must be true if it is true. We focus on the utterly complex circumstances in which moral decisions need to be made, and use them to defend any decision that was sincerely made. Beauty, we contend, is in the eye of the beholder, and nothing can be done to improve something measured by absolutely relative standards.

Is it too much to argue that the first impulse (and please remember that these two options are impulses that all of us possess in our own souls) is expressed by the older brother in Our Lord’s parable of the Two Brothers (Prodigal Son)? Is it too much to argue that the second is the younger brother.

This dichotomy, in other words, is the broken state of our own souls. Neither of them is fitting. But the father went out to both of them.

I need to think about this some more, so I will write about it more. Perhaps it needs to be said that since this dichotomy is universal, I expect it to yield insight into how to teach, learn, govern, assess, and prepare.

For now, it dawns on me that it seems always to lead to the deeper question: “Who are you to judge?” And of course, to provide an answer is to eliminate yourself from the conversation. Which is a shame, because it is a great question.

How does one become qualified to judge anything? For now, I will only point out that it isn’t as if we have a choice. We have to judge.

The art of logic is like math or writing: you can’t learn how to do them without actually doing them.

Most logic books are not logic books; they are books about logic. But doing logic and reading about logic are two very different things.

I noticed a post on a Christian apologetics blog the other day that referred to some logic classes at an online school. And I took a look at the books they were using in their class. One of them was Critical Thinking: A Concise Guide, by Tracy Bowell and Gary Kemp. It looks like a fine book about logic, and one that I will probably pick up for my own enrichment. It defines logic, divides it, and generally explains what logic is. Now that certainly is a part of actually learning logic, but just doing these things will not train you in how to actually use logic yourself.

Another is A Rulebook for Arguments, by Anthony Weston. I actually have this one in my library. Again, it is a useful book for someone who knows logic or generally how to argue. It has a lot of great tips about things you should do when you are actually engaged in argumentation, but it doesn’t actually teach logic.

These are books about logic. They are not a logic books.

I would say the same thing about most books that try to teach fallacies. Of course, they do not really teach fallacies. There wouldn’t be much use in having students learn how to commit fallacies, would there? All these books do is teach students how to identify certain bad argument forms. But students never really learn why these fallacies are mistakes in reasoning because they have not been taught how correct reasoning works.

Identifying something is the most basic step in understanding what something is, but it doesn’t get you very far in the process of actually learning how to use it.

In order to be able to use logic, you have to spend time methodically learning a number of particular concepts and practice them repeatedly. You then have to practice applying these concepts to arguments, and know how to internally manipulate arguments.

The two most valuable drills in logic are

1. Backing in to a missing premise; and
2. Reducing 2nd, 3rd, and 4th figure categorical syllogisms to the 1st figure

If a student is able to do these things competently, then you know he knows all the important aspects of logic. If he can’t, then you cannot say he knows how to “do” logic. The student will still be a spectator of the subject, and not an actual practitioner.

This kind of skill constitutes competence in basic logic. I would add that, if you want to determine whether a student is

It’s interesting to note, by the way, that most modern logic programs pass these things over.

If a logic program doesn’t incorporate these two drills, then it really isn’t a good logic program. Again, it may be a great book about logic, but, as I said, that is a very different thing.

It’s the kind of book that’s better with the aftertaste of (at least some) life lived (and a solid pour of Basil Haydon’s).

But I love it because it’s a challenge, a challenge that keeps me grounded and focused on the reality of teaching.

My job as their teacher isn’t to convince my students that The Moviegoer is great or necessary or even worthwhile. My job is to be faithful and whole hearted and to help them ask the right questions. My job is to be a reflector upon which light shines and through which truth is revealed. I’m a signpost, to appropriate a Percy-ism from elsewhere.

After all, anyone who has kids or who has ever spent time with kids or, shoot, who has ever been a kid, knows that as soon as an authority figure begins to wax eloquent about how such and such or something is meaningful and worth attention ears close and minds shut down. The minute I begin to ask my students to “trust me, this book is worth reading” is the minute I’ve stopped teaching and started preaching. And there is a difference.

I’m not interested in convincing my students that a book like The Moviegoer is good. I’m interested in them discovering it for themselves. Actually, no. I take that back. If they come to love it then that’s great. I hope that happens. But what I’m most interested in is that they discover some truth in it. I want them to find goodness and beauty and to drink deeply of it, to be nourished and to grow and to be alive.

I want to teach my students to read well – and deeply – not because I want them to read good books by the bushels or stock their shelves with well aged classics. I want to teach them to read well because there is a God-breathed universe of truth available to those who, as Binx Bolling recognized in his own broken way, seek it.

I can’t, and shouldn’t, seek it for them. I can, and should, however, join them in their own searches.

That’s my job. That and to pray. The rest is up to them. And God.

I am sure that most of you, like me, have fought hard to overcome a perpetual desire to relax and procrastinate when important tasks loomed. Those of you who have never battled with procrastination–well, your problems are obviously of another sort. In college, I recall several who transformed the practice of putting things off into art. Do you remember the guy in your dorm hall who wouldn’t begin his term paper till the night before it was due–and somehow still got an A? These types make it tempting for all of us.

The etymology of procrastination is worth examining: the word comes from the Latin pro ( forward, on behalf of) and cras (tomorrow). Therefore, at its root, the word means pro-tomorrow. Remember the maxim of the slacker: Why do today what you can put off until tomorrow? In contrast, we find encouragement of a different sort from the German poet Goethe: Cease endlessly striving for what you would like to do and learn to love what must be done.

I can sure do with a little more Goethe; and I am forced to reason that my children must need his advice, too. Many voices call for our attention–and not all of them bad. Sure, there are the typical scoundrels calling for us: hours of mindless TV programs, on-line surfing and chit-chat and other forms of “entertainment” that do little to exalt our minds or souls (no wonder Christopher Wren called TV “chewing gum” for the eyes). There are some good TV programs available too–some unusually good programs on the History Channel. We must admit, too, that amidst the ocean of drivel on the internet there are some exceptionally good sites and resources. Rejecting good things for what is best can be sorely difficult–should the family stay home tonight or take off for a church service or activity?

Finding a routine helps–for the routine answers the questions before they come up. Yes, we are going for a walk this afternoon–we always do. Yes, we will start homework after dinner–that is our routine. Crafting the routine, of course, is not necessarily easy. I know many of you have great, thoughtful, tested and re-tooled routines (could you send me a copy?). Some of you with younger children (or maybe only one young child) are probably still working on crafting your family rhythm and pattern. Establishing a routine that works well is an ongoing enterprise, that keeps answering the question of what must go, stay or be added.

Once we have created a workable routine, another challenges becomes clear. How do we maintain momentum, energy, stability and peace? At least part of the answer comes from Goethe: we should love those things we must do. Once our daily tasks become beloved tasks, the routine become less routine. This, I believe, is something we can pass on to our children, like an attitude, for Goethe is encouraging a mindset not an activity. If they see some measure of joy as we cook, clean, mow and repair, they are apt to find it easier to love (in a manner of speaking) clearing their plates, bathing and doing homework. Strange as it is, they usually grow up to be like us.

Education, after all, is largely a matter of routine. Nothing is mastered without regular visitation, review and study. And education never stops. If we can, we should cast the work our students do at CCA as a labor of love, a life-long love, and we should love what they do too. Education will have its high moments, its epiphanies, break-throughs and moments of joy–much like a marriage. But the larger tranquility of a good education comes from it regular labor of worksheets, translations and reading assignments, in the same way a good marriage grows on preparing a meal, raking the lawn and taking a walk.

Once we have created a routine and learned to love it, we can also find yet even further comfort in knowing that a regular part of our routine must be to break from it. We call these breaks of routine by various names, such as “dinner out,” “week-ends” and “vacations.” These can be holy days in their own right, those special routines that are special largely because they are not daily, and because they are a ritual of celebration. And we celebrate with the most poignant joy when our work is done (the hay is in the barn, the homework is all done–let’s go to dinner). Put another way, when we work well, we rest well.

That question, or one like it, is often asked of homeschoolers. Some parents find the responsibility of educating their own children so great and so intimidating that they can’t even contemplate it.

My answer to the question is Yep! You bet I’m worried that I am going to blow it

But it’s not concerns over my children’s academics that keep me up at night. It’s that other awesome responsibility that I have. The one that God gave me the moment I became a mother. I’m a parent and that means that God has charged me to disciple my children and cultivate their souls. That’s the part that I’m worried I am going to blow. And that’s why I homeschool.

My children were 6 and 4 when we began homeschooling almost 10 years ago. They attended preschool and kindergarten at a classical school where I taught. I felt good about the education they were receiving. But I didn’t feel so good about our frenzied lifestyle, so we returned home.

I confess it was a shock. I went from seeing my children very little—a rushed breakfast and an equally frantic dinner time, homework, bath and bed routine—and learning about them by reading notes from teachers to being with them all day long every day. And I discovered something: they were little sinners. They had character flaws and bad patterns of behavior that I had never seen. It was overwhelming, not to mention exhausting. I had to correct, and disciple, and instruct.

That’s when I realized that coming home was God’s gift to me. Being with my children in such an intimate and prolonged way allowed me to see into their hearts in a way that I never did when they were in school. Educating my children at home provided me with many—many—opportunities for discipleship and cultivation. Opportunities that I would have missed if my children had been with some other teacher all day long.

Now, I am not saying that it is impossible to disciple your children if you don’t homeschool. Not at all. But I do think that the task is more difficult. A parent will have to work harder to find those teachable moments. And no doubt some parents do.

But if I am honest, I don’t think I would have been one of those parents. I was clueless when my kids were in school. They brought home good report cards. Their teachers liked them and praised them. And, frankly, that was good enough for me. I am grateful that it wasn’t good enough for God. He yanked me out of my complacency and put my children’s spiritual needs right in front of my face. Even I couldn’t miss it.

So, for me—and people like me—homeschooling makes us better parents by providing daily opportunities for discipleship. Does that scare me? Absolutely! Do I feel the weight of this awesome responsibility? All the time! Can I alleviate this responsibility by sending my kids to school? No!

A formal education is only one part of a child’s discipleship. Whether or not I put my son on a school bus in the morning does not change my duty as a mother. One day I will have to stand before God and give account. I doubt that He will be much interested in SAT scores. And, yeah, that scares me.

In August, we shove a stack of scribbled-on flashcards off the kitchen table and into a basket of dirty laundry just to make room for the Chinese takeout. Forget about penny candy; whatever happened to Norman Rockwell?

I think one of the mottoes of homeschooling moms might have to be “Fast Food Happens.” No matter how good your intentions may be, sometimes you just don’t have time to cook. If you were raised with the Leave it to Beaver or Happy Days generation, this feels a lot like failure. You ought to be able to teach four children, keep the house sparkling clean, and then “whip something up” for dinner!

I’d like to see Superman or Captain America tackle that battle.

From one homeschool parent to another, let me encourage you today. Even if you never carve a pot roast or toss a salad again, you’re doing something far more important. With every hour you spend educating your children, you are setting before them a veritable feast of truth, goodness, and beauty.

You are whetting their appetites for the study of language. You are satiating their thirst with exquisite art and music that points to the Lord. You are filling their minds and souls with orderly math, stories from history, and the example of faithful scientists and great literary heroes.

What is more, by doing this, you are acculturating their appetite for these wholesome “foods,” so that the fast foods of culture will eventually cease to appeal or satisfy.

Now that is a true feast.

I want to leave you with a few words of encouragement from one of favorite books of the summer, The Supper of the Lamb (1989), by Robert Farrar Capon. He writes this:

“The world may or may not need another cookbook, but it needs all the lovers—amateurs—it can get. It is a gorgeous old place, full of clownish graces and beautiful drolleries, and it has enough textures, tastes, and smells to keep us intrigued for more time than we have. Unfortunately, however, our response to its loveliness is not always delight: It is, far more often than it should be, boredom. And that is not only odd, it is tragic; for boredom is not neutral—it is the fertilizing principle of unloveliness. In such a situation, the amateur—the lover, the man who thinks heedlessness a sin and boredom a heresy—is just the man you need.”

You, a flustered homeschool mom too tired to cook; you, a worried homeschool dad too distracted to go to the grocery store—you are exactly the people this world needs.

I’m certain of that.

So starts one of the most famous poems in English Literature. Famous, yes, and these days debunked. What is the use in an old worn out Tennyson poem full of jingoistic and even dangerous sentiment?

If you don’t mind I would like to tell you. Forgive me if this turns a little weird and maybe maudlin. I have a fever.

Last month I did a workshop at the CiRCE Conference. In preparation I went over years and years of Morning Time (homeschool home room?) papers and thought quite a bit about the hours and hours of Morning Time I have spent with my family. I have already mentioned that several times on my blog and will probably be mentioning it again here.

I made a couple of points during my talk that made me wonder if I wasn’t romanticizing the whole thing. Yes, I made myself wonder.  One point I made was that I don’t worry if my children don’t memorize everything word perfect.  This does not mean we don’t strive for that goal but over the years I noticed that some children naturally memorize very quickly and some children don’t.  Is there some value in memorization when memory fails? It seemed to me that there was.

When I got home from CiRCE I asked one of my sons, who struggled with memorization, if he ever used the stuff we worked on in Morning Time. He said that he had learned to retrieve it from his mind when he was training to run a marathon a few years ago. He said he was running with his oldest brother and noticed how Timothy quoted Bible verses, poems and songs while pushing through a run. Benjamin said, “I don’t remember all the words but I especially like to say the poem about ‘half a league, half a league’ and ‘theirs not to not to make reply.’” So we began quoting it together and he did pretty well.

You might think this is a pretty poor showing for years and years of memory work but then again Dorothy Sayers claims that in spite of years of Latin she didn’t really know the language. What was the use of that?  What I mean is, if you can’t assess something then there must not be any value in it, right?

And yet, at least two of my sons quoted Tennyson when running marathons and Dorothy Sayers created Lord Peter Wimsey, the perfect man 

You may have noticed that I put The Charge of the Light Brigade on my current MT sheetto-be-memorized. It seemed to me that it was an important part of the growing up years of my older boys and should also be that for my younger ones.

And then something else happened which made me love Tennyson and his poetry. I have a bit of an addiction to BBC television shows and Amazon Prime suggested I try London Hospital and the reviews were good. In one episode a British laborer is injured while putting others first in a life threatening situation. He is a hero but he loses both legs. While dealing with the pain this very uneducated man starts trying to say The Charge of the Light Brigade and the nurse joins in and being a bit feverish so do I (and not without tears) and all the while I am thinking, “That’s what I am talking about.”  That is why I have MT!!

That is a romantic story and The Charge of the Light Brigade is a romantic poem and I have, indeed, romanticized Morning Time. And that, my friend, is the point.

There is not a poem in the world that is easier to debunk than The Charge of the Light Brigade. We can tear down its rhyme scheme, its structure, its poet, its last verse, its romanticized view of a terrible thing that happened during the Crimean War, and its entire Victorian view of everything.

We could do that. That’s how it’s done these days-poetry.

But then how would our children grow up to run marathons or climb Mt. Everest or deal with the pain of losing both legs or chose to put others first for no good reason?

It is all about honor and that is something the British poets do very well. Poetry is the perfect vehicle for teaching honor, IF we just let the poetry do its own work in its own time. Entire nations have been born that way. Maybe even most nations.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Note: Cindy originally ran this article on her blog. You should check it out. 

There is a passage in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings in which Aragorn asks for some leaves of athelas, a healing herb brought by the Men of the West into Middle Earth, and which is now called “kingsfoil.” Minis Tirith, the chief city of Gondor, is celebrating its successful defense against the forces of the Dark Lord, whose armies have been crushed in the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, but the wounded of Gondor now lay broken and in need of care. Aragorn, the true king of Gondor, has stolen by night into the city (he is still camped in the field, awaiting the appropriate time to return in glory). Disguised in a cloak, he is helping to care for the sick. Aragorn asks for athelas, a request which is met with scepticism:

“But alas! sir, we do not keep this thing in the Houses of Healing,” says the herb master. “…For it has no virtue that we know of, save perhaps to sweeten a fouled air, or to drive away some passing heaviness.”

Aragorn, however, knows different. He assures the herb master, as he has assured the Hobbit Sam Gamgee earlier in the story, that, indeed, it “has great virtues”:

Then, whether Aragorn had indeed some forgotten power of Westernesse, or whether it was but his words of the Lady Éowyn that wrought on them, as the sweet influence of the herb stole about the chamber it seemed to those who stood by that a keen wind blew through the window, and it bore no scent, but was an air wholly fresh and clean and young, as if it had not before been breathed by any living thing and came new-made from snowy mountains high beneath a dome of stars, or from shores of silver far away washed by seas of foam.

The effect is as Aragorn has predicted: those to whom it is administered are not only refreshed and made clean, but healed. Athelas is an ancient herb, and yet it has the power to bring about healing.

Using the word “virtue” to indicate this kind of power seems natural as we read a skillful writer like Tolkien, and yet, when we reflect back, it seems strange. It doesn’t seem to comply with the definition of the word that we know.

In fact, the word “virtue” has an interesting history. Although in English it has taken on an effeminate tone, the word itself has masculine origins. The English word derives from the Latin virtus, which not only had a masculine connotation, but actually meant “manliness.” Virtusimplies moral strength, an excellence of manhood. The word itself comes from vir, the Latin word meaning man. In his military diary, theGallic Wars, Julius Caesar uses the word virtus to connote courage on the battlefield, and the King James Bible frequently translates the word into the English “power,” the meaning employed by Tolkien.

When we say that a human being has “virtue,” are we not saying that he has a power—a power to do certain things in a certain way appropriate to who he is? Virtue is indeed a power, a power that has to do with what it is to be a man.

It is an idea that has the power to bring about its own kind of healing.

There are many diagnoses of what ails our modern culture and one of them is that we humans think too highly of ourselves. Man, we often hear, has put himself at the center and made himself the measure of all things. It is humanism that has corrupted us, and the sooner we are rid of it, the better. There is a sense in which this is true, but another sense it which it is entirely false. We do, in fact, think too much of actual man; but we think entirely too little of ideal man. In fact, it may be that modern thought is just as detrimentally affected by not thinking highly enough of what man ought to be as in thinking too much of men as we happen to find them in this world.

In Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Ishmael, the narrator, articulates an ancient view of man that has now been all but abandoned:

Men may seem detestable as joint stock-companies and nations; knaves, fools, and murderers there may be; men may have mean and meager faces; but man, in the ideal, is so noble and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature, that over any ignominious blemish in him all his fellows should run to throw their costliest robes. That immaculate manliness we feel within ourselves, so far within us, that it remains intact though all the outer character seem gone; bleeds with keenest anguish at the undraped spectacle of a valor-ruined man. Nor can piety itself, at such a shameful sight, completely stifle her upbraidings against the permitting stars.

This is one of the last echoes of the old order that once held sway in the West: the belief in an ideal man, an ideal which, through education, we once tried to approximate.

In this passage, Melville marks a bold distinction between man and men. Men are what we experience; man is that which we should aspire to be. It is an idea which we can see as far back as Sophocles, who said, “Wonderful are the world’s wonders, but none more wonderful than man.” Melville, like Sophocles before him, used the singular when referring to the human ideal. It is this belief that underlay the entire system of classical morality.

This older classical scheme recognized two things about man: the first was that he had an ideal or essential nature; the second was that each individual man incompletely and imperfectly approximated that ideal. This view was shared by all pre-modern cultures both pagan and Christian. Christianity disagreed in part with paganism in regard to what this ideal man consisted of, but neither the Hebrews, the Greeks, nor the Romans would have ever conceived of denying the existence of this ideal.

For the Greeks the ideal of man was embodied in the Iliad, their great national story. That of the Romans was evoked in the Aeneid, the story of the founding of Rome by Aeneas.

Christian ideals were to be found in the Bible—as well as in the vast treasury of Western literature that was influenced by it. It was a belief articulated in the Biblical book of Genesis and which was held by the earliest Church fathers: that man is God’s highest creation, and is different in kind from the animals by virtue of his being created in the image and likeness of God.

According to the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, the classical view of virtue was simple: It was the power by which man got from man-as-he-happened-to-be to man-as-he-would-be-if-he-achieved-his-telos, or purpose. This telos was connected essentially to man’s nature. To be good, in other words, was to simply act in accordance with your nature. In becoming more virtuous—becoming more like the ideal man as expressed in this human nature—was to become more human. To the Christian, this meant becoming more like what you were created to be.

To the Greeks and the Romans the power to do this can from self-generated manly self-discipline. To the Christians, this power came by grace from the Holy Spirit.

MacIntyre points out that this traditional view of virtue was based on the traditional view of man: He was an incomplete or potential being who had fallen short of the fulfillment of his nature.

Leon Kass has pointed out that, in the creation account of the Biblical book of Genesis, there are only two things that God, in the process of creation, does not call “good”: the heavens and man. Kass points out that the term “good” as it is used throughout Genesis, “cannot mean morally good.” “[W]hen ‘God saw the light that it was good,’” says Kass, “He could not have seen that the light was honest or just or law-abiding.” Rather, “good” seems to mean something more akin to being fit to a particular intention, fully formed, or fully what the thing is by its nature. But this is precisely what men are not. “Let me put it more pointedly,” says Kass: “precisely in the sense that man is in the image of God, man is not good—not determinate, finished, complete or perfect.”

If Kass is correct, then there is some ideal the author of Genesis has in mind from which men fall short—even at this, the beginning of all things. To the Hebrews, this truth had been revealed by God Himself. But the Greeks too knew this, not through any direct word of the God who was unknown to them, but from their own observations of the world their Unknown God had created.

The Greeks had long possessed the concept of what they called arête—a culminating excellence in man which existed as a potentiality which needed to be actualized, of a purpose that must be fulfilled. The concept of arête reached its highest point of expression—it was, in fact, actualized—in the work of othe Greek poets. “Sophocles guided his work by a standard,” said Werner Jaeger, “and in it presented men ‘as they ought to be’ … All the discussions of that age, and all the efforts of the sophists, were directed towards finding and producing man ‘as he ought to be’.”

Christianity, which, in addition to possessing Divine Revelation, inherited the learning of classical culture and saw within it much that was true but incomplete, completed this view of man by incorporating in it the concept of sin: the reason man is not as he should be is because he has fallen from his primordial estate. He once acted in accordance with his nature, but because of the Fall, he is separated from himself. But this fissure in his own being has not destroyed his essential humanity. He is still the same kind of creature as Adam. As Tolkien once put it:

…Though now long estranged
Man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed
Dis-graced he may be, but not dethroned
And keeps the rags of lordship once he owned…

The image and likeness in which he was created, the source of man’s unique dignity, is effaced by sin, but not erased by it. It is still there for goodness to find.

And how do we find it? Athelas, Aragorn tells Sam Gamgee, grows now only sparsely and near places where the Men of the West camped in ancient times. We are the heirs of a great cultural inheritance, and with a little effort, it can still be found.

In the stories of the great deeds of great men, the ideal man was represented by the hero, whom students were encouraged to be like, and who differed from men, who were a mixed lot and fell short in various ways from that ideal. This was embodied by the Hebrews in their Old Testament heroes of faith who were brought again and again to the remembrance of the Jews: Moses the lawgiver, Abraham the man of faith, and David, God’s own king. Christians too, down through the ages, were reminded repeatedly of the great deeds of their saints and martyrs. In addition, there is the great classic  literature, Greek, Roman, and Christian, which helps to teach us who we are and who we should be.

Classic literature is the vehicle by which we propagate and preserve our civilization. “We are the only species that does not know its own nature naturally,” writes Russell Banks, “and with each new generation has to be shown it anew.”

But like athelas in Tolkien’s story, the idea of virtue is seldom spoken of save in the voice of scepticism. The dark forces of modern secularism that now dominate our culture, in an act unique in history, have abandoned the belief in an ideal man. There is no man; there are only men.

Alas, virtue is a thing they do not keep it in their Houses of Education.

The Western intellectual class, in what the French writer Julien Benda has called the La Trahison les Clercs–the “Treason of the Clerks”–have joined the enemies of civilization.

“All about us,” said literary critic George Steiner,

flourishes the new illiteracy, the illiteracy of those who can read short words or words of hatred and tawdriness but cannot grasp the meaning of language when it is in a condition of beauty or of truth.

But virtue still has its virtues.

In his Inaugural lecture at Cambridge in 1954, C.S. Lewis spoke of thinkers like himself–and by implication Tolkien and Chesterton–as “Old Western men,” men who, like Tolkien’s Men of the West, were dying out. As Lewis predicted, they are now all but gone. But if we dig about their camps, there are things still growing that have the cultural power to heal.

IN DECEMBER 1998

As the owner of an independent bookstore dedicated to children’s literature, Ryan’s character, Kathleen Kelly is pushed to the precipice of extinction by the ruthless Joe Fox (Hanks) – with whom she unwittingly falls in love – and his giant Fox Books, clearly an allusion to bookstore chains like Borders and Barnes and Noble who, in the late 1990’s, were at the height of their success. But, like anyone who is faced with the possibility of losing a business they love, Kelly fights to keep her niche alive, to maintain the small business her family started and its place within the fabric of the local community. Unfortunately, that she ultimately fails is of little consequence to the film. After all, she fell in love and this is a love story, not a docu-drama on the difficulties of running a niche bookstore in a market dominated by mega-chains.

But such struggles are real and recent events render You’ve Got Mail almost prophetic.

Even as the large chains begin to falter, themselves unable to adapt to today’s changing marketplace, hundreds of the country’s best independent bookstores have gone under, according to some estimates 50% of them, in fact. In Seattle, the nation’s so-called “most intellectual” city, stores like Baily/Coy and Couth Buzzard have gone under. In New York, the famous Gotham Book Mart and Coliseum Books closed theirs doors, while in California Cody’s Books (of Berekely), Printer’s Inc Bookstore (in Palo Alto), Midnight Special (in Los Angeles), and the aptly named A Clean Well-lighted Place for Books (in San Francisco) all closed their doors for good. Kepler’s, among the most beloved, infamous bookstores in America, closed their doors in 2005, only to reopen them thanks to the efforts of the local community.
Things aren’t exactly looking up either.

In recent months Boise’s A Novel Adventure and Maine’s Port in Storm closed their doors, while a recent report in The Guardian noted that independent bookshops in the UK closed at a rate of two per week during 2009 and the beginning of 2010. Meanwhile, the New England Independent Booksellers Association reported that 10% of independent bookstores in that book-saturated region closed in 2009. Grim numbers indeed for those readers who appreciate the earthy smell of books nestled on shelves, new or used, each with their own story and history.
Yet all is not lost, especially for readers concerned with finding the best in religion, philosophy, history, and literature, who want to read books that last, and especially for readers who would prefer that Orthodoxy and the Church Fathers be brought to the “table of the cultural conversation.”

Eighth Day Books, based in Wichita Kansas, is just such a place and while they haven’t been without their own share of struggles, they have managed to stay afloat, due in part to a successful mail order business and the ability to adapt to the continually changing marketplace.

II.

“I have always loved to read. I have always loved the sense of entering a completely new world,
yet finding points of contact with my own. I have always felt the relentless pull of whatever might
be on the next page of a book. I have often lived through my imagination.” 
- Eighth Day owner Warren Farha | Image Journal, Issue #46

HOUSED in three levels of a “quasi-Dutch barn house,” not counting an attic, Eighth Day Books today carries over 26,000 titles, or 42,000 volumes, 60% of which are new books (compared to a Barnes and Noble which typically stocks closer to two hundred thousand titles). But each of these titles is chosen not for their sell-ability but because they “[conform] to a vision.”

Eighth Day Books is the product of a belief that, as founder/owner Warren Farha puts it, “all things good and true and excellent and beautiful belong together.” He wrote in Image Journal, Issue #46 that he would “live and die for Father Alexander Schmemann’s insistence that you can’t compartmentalize reality – you can’t separate the religious from the secular. I believe that doing so is a denial of God’s good creation.”

So Farha and his staff began to build a catalogue of titles that reflected those beliefs and a place wherein ideas such as these could be discussed and contemplated in the spirit of true camaraderie. They house a large collection of titles by C.S. Lewis and his contemporaries, an impressive assortment of works on the Orthodox and Catholic traditions as well, including books about Patristics and the Desert Tradition. This in addition to classics, modern or otherwise, in literature, poetry, drama, and criticism, especially a rather robust collection of titles by Wendell Berry. Indeed, Eighth Day is the rare bookstore in which each major stream of Christian thought and faith is considered with equal sincerity and seriousness, with a spirit of humility and a deep desire to learn, to discuss true and beautiful things.

But Eighth Day was also born in the wake of great tragedy. Farha admitted in the aforementioned issue of Image that when, in 1987, his wife and unborn child passed away due to the recklessness of a drunk driver, he “felt that [his] life had… ended in certain deep ways, and that [he] had to start [his] life over… With only a BA in religion and Classical Studies and not much desire to teach…the thing that I could look forward to was opening a bookstore.”

So, building upon years of working in his family’s grocery store and his passionate love of good books, he set out to build a new life, a new kind of life altogether, a new career in a market entering a new, challenging phase in its history.

Eighth Day Books first opened in September of 1988 in a rented space of only about fifteen hundred square feet with “a few lovingly-chosen books, staffed by the owner and a one part-time employee.” Since then the staff has expanded to three full-time employees, not including Farha himself, one part-time employee, and a husband-wife duo who help with the website and inventory software.

For the first thirteen years of its existence, Eighth Day Books – named for the day of the week upon which the resurrection took place, that is, the day after the seventh day – leased a space in Wichita. But in 2002 they moved into their current location – that old three thousand square foot “quasi-Dutch” house, painted white and trimmed in blue, with large picture windows that show off many of the store’s titles as any store front window should and surrounded by large Bradford Pear trees, healthy shrubs, and a brick walkway that leads up to double doors. It’s a beautiful, unique building, absurdly midwestern and abundantly appropriate for its purpose.

But, of course, as the book market changed, Eighth Day Books was forced to change with it. As the need for brick and mortar buildings dwindled and book buyers began to purchase via online outlets such as Amazon and other internet bookstores, thereby forgoing the many of pleasures of in-store browsing, Farha and company were forced to adapt. So that the store could remain viable and its vision be fulfilled, they developed their own website which now makes available their entire catalogue and they “increased their presence at theological and literary conferences – a sweaty, time and labor intensive (though rewarding) task that neither the internet nor chains can easily duplicate… a bookseller can’t wait for customers to come to them.” Eighth Day is a fixture at such events as Image’s Glen Workshop, Calvin College’s Festival of Faith and Writing, and Baylor’s Symposium on Faith and Culture. And we are pleased to say that they have joined us for the last few years at our own conference, and will do so again in July, 2011.

III.

“There came a time when I knew that I could not not do this thing.
Whether or not I sold a single book, I knew that this was the thing
that I had to do.”
- Warren Farha | Image Journal, Issue #46

FARHA’S vision is a grand one, and therefore the store’s mission is grand as well.

Maintaining a standard in a messy marketplace is no easy task, and to do so one must stick to one’s proverbial guns. But as he has written, “classics are endlessly fertile; as other writers engage with them down through the centuries, they tend to beget excellence in turn.”

There are too few places left where the classics are taken seriously as tools that allow for the “integration of faith and imagination.” Our universities read them too often purely for the abstractions they present, or even as abstractions themselves – or to deconstruct them. And our high schools take them seriously only inasmuch as they can and do improve test scores. But Eighth Day Books carries the classics in hopes that we will read them and be nourished by them, be guided by them, in hopes that we will be able to live, like Farha, through our imaginations, imaginations enlightened by Faith and Truth and Grace.
According to Farha’s article in Image, one customer referred to Eighth Day Books as an umbilical cord. That sounds about right. Or, perhaps, we should think of it as a well. When one is thirsty one goes to the well. Without the well, the water is less easily accessible. In the same way, Eighth Day Books makes accessible the water that is good books, true and beautiful and excellent books. Books that nourish the soul.

That’s an enduring niche, if ever there was one.

“

 “It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to every three new ones.”
C.S. Lewis on avoiding chronological snobbery

In the first half of the last century both TS Eliot and CS Lewis observed that modern people typically only read modern books. The situation now is of course even worse.

Lewis writes in the introduction to On the Incarnation: “This mistaken preference for the modern books and this shyness of the old ones is nowhere more rampant than in theology. Wherever you find a little study circle of Christian laity you can be almost certain that they are studying not St. Luke or St. Paul or St. Augustine or Thomas Aquinas or Hooker or Butler, but M. Berdyaev or M. Maritain or M. Niebuhr or Miss Sayers or even myself.”

Taking a quick walk through your local Christian bookstore demonstrates the truth of that observation.  Even scanning my Facebook newsfeed shows the same thing.  My Christian friends (the ones who are not involved in classical education) post steady streams of quotes from Beth Moore, Joyce Meyers, and Max Lucado. Sometimes I’m tempted to respond, “Do you read any dead people?”.

It’s pretty ironic given the above quote that C.S. Lewis is likely to be the only dead author modern Christians read. Those of us involved in classical education know what riches await those who seek the wisdom of the past. So, why don’t people read old books?

Yes, older books are hard. They contain difficult, sometimes archaic, vocabulary, sophisticated sentence structure and long paragraphs. Old books demand something from the reader. But I don’t think that’s the real reason people don’t make the effort.  Moderns, yes even modern Christians, have fallen prey to a certain evolutionary bias in their thinking.

Evolution teaches that because man is evolving and progressing from simple to complex, that which is newest is that which is best.  Old books are by definition less worthy than new books. So when moderns want the best thought on any given subject they naturally turn to the latest and therefore best writing. New and improved have become synonymous.

But, as Lewis argues, modern thought is precisely what we don’t need. We are already too steeped in our modern assumptions and biases. We need old books, ancient thoughts, to shake us free from the mass of common assumptions modern authors share. “The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.”

Like Lewis, I too am a writer and therefore, “I do not wish the ordinary reader to read no modern books. But if he must read only the new or only the old, I would advise him to read the old. And I would give him this advice precisely because he is an amateur and therefore much less protected than the expert against the dangers of an exclusive contemporary diet. A new book is still on its trial and the amateur is not in a position to judge it. It has to be tested against the great body of Christian thought down the ages, and all its hidden implications (often unsuspected by the author himself) have to be brought to light.”

I read dead people. How about you?