National De-Lurking Week!

Taking a cue from the ever-resourceful Julie D. (who takes a cue from Paper Napkin), I want to extend an invitation to all lurkers to stand up and shout, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!" or whatever it is that you lurkers do.

Tell us what you really think of DarwinCatholic! (And Mrs. Darwin as well!) Been reading us long? Just found us? Think we're sublime or stupid? Get your fifteen minutes of comment box fame right here!

I think that about says it all.

Further Adventures in Reading

Noogs (one of these days I'll have to respect the dignity of an almost-four-year-old and just use her real name) is making merry progress through 100 Easy Lessons, with lesson 7 taking place this morning. She's just learned the "t" sound and took great delight in writing a pageful of "t"s -- t is an easy letter for small hands to master. We have one more review lesson and then the curriculum introduces words, not just combinations of sounds. I can't wait for lesson 13, which is the first lesson to present a small story for the child to read. (The story is merely the sentence "See me eat" accompanied by a picture, but I think that Noogs will be thrilled.)

One concept she's having a little trouble assimilating is the rhyming section of the lessons. You start with a sound, say "m", and then rhyme it with various endings, such as "eat". She can do it with me, but when it's her turn to rhyme she only wants to say the ending. Since there's so much review included in each lesson, I haven't been pushing it. I'm sure she'll pick it up eventually.

Since we seem to be progressing well (so far!) with basic reading instruction, I'm wondering if anyone has any recommendations for beginning math books. Noogs can count to twenty and do some very basic addition and subtraction with blocks or little toys. She recognizes all her numbers as well.

(Amber -- did you start with 100 Easy Lessons? How did that go?)

No Catholics Need Apply

I was going to blog about The Wall Street Journal's Saturday front-page article about professor Joshua Hochschild, who lost his job at a Protestant college for converting to Catholicsm, but Scott Carson has beaten me to the punch:

In today's Wall Street Journal there's a front-page story about Joshua Hochschild, an assistant professor of philosophy at Wheaton College whose contract has not been renewed because of his recent converson to Roman Catholicism. The story emphasizes the growing trend towards "mission purity" at some religious campuses: for many years plenty of Protestant and Catholic schools looked for academic excellence as their primary criterion for new hires and tenure decisions, but there have been lots of recent cases in which adherence to some doctrinal or credal affiliation has played a major role both in hiring and in tenure decisions. The case of Baylor's recent president, Robert Sloan, has come in for much discussion over at the Reform Club, where resident Baylor almunus Hunter Baker has had much to say on the topic that is both interesting and important.

Hochschild was hired by Wheaton when he was an Episcopalian, but he was already tempted by Roman Catholicism. Even when he was hired, he discussed the meaning of "Biblical inerrancy" with the president of Wheaton, Duane Liftin. Liftin has a rather impoverished notion of what Roman Catholicism entails, but his understanding of it is not all that different from what is widely beleived among certain Evangelical circles, so it's difficult to fault him for his decision to consider Hochschild a person who could not, in principle, sign the Wheaton statement of faith, and it was on the basis of this that he terminated Hochschild's contract. Academically, apparently, Hochschild was a keeper: the chairman of the philosophy department is quoted as having a favorable opinion of him, and the suggestion appears to be that he was on-track for a positive tenure decision.

Hochschild had been a professor of medieval philosphy; the end of the article notes that Wheaton has not hired another medieval philosophy professor because most of them are Catholic. Ha! Hochschild is now teaching at Mount St. Mary's in Emmitsburg, MD, about which I've heard generally good things.

(Note: Amy Welborn has a link to the article, I believe, and quotes it extensively in her post.)

On a sillier note: Noogs and Babs were convinced that Daddy was in the paper, because the cover photo of Hochschild bears a very superficial resemblance to Darwin -- dark hair, glasses, and a blue shirt that looks like one Darwin owns. The girls were pleased and agitated by turns.

10,000 Visitors!

I see that sometime yesterday we hit 10,000 visitors to DarwinCatholic. Whoo-hoo! Many thanks to all our readers for, well, reading us. Keep up the good work!!!!! (The extra exclamation points are courtesy of Noogs, who wanted to push a key.)

Fideist and Materialist?

As a controversy of sorts has played out on the pages of First Things between Cardinal Schonborn and Catholic physicist Stephen M. Barr over the topic of intelligent design, a number of people have found themselves fearing that Barr is a Fideist, someone who believes that one can only know about the existence of God by mean of a leap of faith, and that evidence for this cannot be found within the created world.

This has caused Mark Shea, among others, to fear that perhaps the thinking of Catholics such as Barr is not in line with the statement of Vatican I that God may be known from His creation by means of human reason.

Now, to a great extent I inherited my interest in the alleged "science vs. religion" clash from my father, a life-long science educator and devout Catholic. Having just flown out to the ancestral roost to help get ready for the funeral, I was looking through my dad's shelf of books on the topic (the family library runs to some four to five thousand volumes) and one caught my eye: Modern Physics and Ancient Faith by Stephen M. Barr.

The book jacket says, among other things: A considerable amount of public debate and media print has been devoted to the "war between science and religion." In his....book, ....Barr demonstrates that what is really at war with religion is not science itself, but a philosophy called scientific materialism. [This book] argues that the great discoveries of modern physics are more compatible with the central teachings of Christianity and Judaism about God, the cosmos, and the human soul than with the atheistic viewpoint of scientific materialism.

Clearly, I'm going to have to read this book, and this also makes me all the more eager to see Barr's article on Intelligent Design which is due out in the next issue of First Things.

I have several other books in the queue to finish first, so it may be a while before I'm able to write a review, but a couple things strike me right off from the bits that I've been able to skim this morning:

1) Barr is doing something rather different from what 'scientific' Intelligent Design of the Behe or Dembski variety attempts to do with biology. Barr is not claiming that specific theories in modern physics "prove" there is a God, but rather that they describe the sort of world that human reason suggests God would have created. Further, he points out that in many ways the philosophy of materialism is required to provide more complicated glosses upon current physics to justify its conclusions than Christians are to justify theirs.

2) Barr seems to be quite clear on the distinction between scientific theories themselves and the philosophical beliefs that one must layer onto them in order to make cohesive sense of the world. Thus, he seems quite clear that there is one body of current scientific knowledge with Christians and materialists then interpret in different ways to support their differing beliefs about the nature of the world.

3) People often complain that Catholic's who argue against the Intelligent Design movement spend all their energy arguing against other Christians and little energy arguing against the forces of materialism. Here Barr is spending an entire book on arguing against exactly those forces.

As I said, I'm very curious to see exactly what Barr has to say about Intelligent Design generally in the next issue of First Things. I don't know that we would fully agree on the issue, but I'm very much encouraged by his general philosophical stance.

Who cares if it's science?

Mark Shea advises readers to have a look at Cardinal Schonborn's article in this month's First Things dealing with the question of discerning the creation through 'natural philosophy'. It's an interesting article, and I'll write more on it shortly.

However, the main thing that seems to bother Shea about the intelligent design debate is: "Fine and dandy. It is not science. And that is cause for a judge to banish it from the classroom why?"

Well, the most immediate response that occurs to me is: Because it made the strategic mistake of pretending to be science in order to get into the classroom.

Remember, the Dover trial wasn't a grand showdown of elemental principles. It was a specific question of whether a school board had violated the Supreme Court's current understanding of the separation of church and state (which, of course, is a pretty idiotic understanding) in mandating the use of a science textbook called Of Pandas And People, which (from the selections I've read, I haven't read the whole thing) appears to contain a pretty broad brush version of the scientific form of 'Intelligent Design' exemplified by the Discovery Institute.

So the reason why intelligent design (as presented in Of Pandas And People) was banished for not being science is, at the most basic level, that it made the mistake of being presented as science, and rather badly done science at that.

The problem probably has a great deal to do with the historic roots of the scientific Intelligent Design movement (as distinguished from the philosophical points that Schonborn seeks to make). It's fairly clear that the Discover Institute and scientific intelligent design were developed in the late 80s and early 90s in order to provide a replacement for "scientific creationism" which had been ruled as too religious to be taught in public schools. ID used significantly more sophisticated scientific methods (most of them wrapped in the terminology of statistics and information science) than scientific creationism, and it remained studiously silent on the nature of the designer that is posited.

However, like scientific creationism, the strongest support for ID first came from the ranks of bible Christians -- a group not known for its philosophical chops. (Dang it if getting too far into philosophy didn't tend to lead bible Christians to become Catholics or Orthodox...) So instead of recognizing that polemicists who attempt to use the evolutionary narrative or Earth's history to "disprove" the existence of God are making very, very basic philosophical mistakes, the ID movement set out to prove that evolution was scientifically mistaken, and that God's "thumb print" could found "proved" scientifically.

If we want to try to provide public school students with arguments that will make them less likely to be seduced by the arguments of "scientific" materialists like Richard Dawkins, our goal should be to attack the philosophical roots of the problem, not evolutionary science. Additionally, if we want to play in the public school sand box, we need to play by their rules. Unless the last 50 years worth of "establishment clause" jurisprudence is overturned (and I don't see that happening real soon) any text that follows a straight through-line to "and that's how we know that God exists" is not going to make it. Nor need an introduction to philosophy book necessarily be so one sided in its assertions. If we are right in our understanding of the universe and of human nature, the arguments for God will naturally win out of the arguments against. We don't need to write the conclusion, many of the students will discover it just fine by themselves.

Indeed, if there's a target out there that we should replace, it's not the science curriculum, but rather the "Critical Thinking" texts that have become popular in many sectors -- including a number of public schools. The texts that I've seen definitely have a number of things to recommend them. They provide good lessons in addressing texts critically and the construction of logical syllogisms. However, many of them are written by skeptics or "brights" and have a bias towards materialistic philosophy. As such, they also ignore most of the great philosophers throughout history, starting with Plato and Aristotle.

What I would love to see if a good book on "Thinking About the World" which tackles basics like "How do we know about the world?", "What kinds of thought do we employ in making everyday decisions?" and "What do we mean by 'good'?" It could also deal with issues like efficient versus final causality, realism vs. nominalism, essence versus accidents, etc. All of these are tools which would allow students to put assertions such as "we know that human evolved from single-celled organisms and therefore there is no God" in their place, without explicitly teaching religious conclusions to major questions. And getting students to think about these kinds of philosophical issues will not only open a whole new world of understanding to them in later life, but set them on the road that has led countless souls to God.

Egg as art

A co-worker of Darwin's raises chickens and sends us some farm-fresh eggs every now and then. This morning, as Darwin fried up an egg for himself, I contemplated these minature works of art. They came in all shades except white -- camel, umber, light cocoa, robin's egg blue, pale blue, and even a rosy beige speckled with pink. One was a mix of blue and brown that defies description but was gorgeous. I have a weakness for swathes of color and can spend hours perusing paint chips, so the carton of many-hued eggs was music to my eyes. It almost makes me want to repaint the kitchen using the eggs as my color bases.

Of course, Darwin, I don't really want to repaint the kitchen, especially since I painted it a cheerful shade of green (Lowes, Eddie Bauer Colors, Lakeside Cottage collection, Apple Green) just this year. But the eggs inspire me! The pinks, the blues, the browns -- all this season's hottest colors, according to the Wall Street Journal's fashion editor earlier this year.

Why don't we see these kind of colors on eggs at the store? There it's either straight white or straight brown, with nary a variation. I bet egg consumption would rise if the eggs sold at the supermarket looked as irresistable as the farm eggs in my fridge. Marketers, you heard it here first.

Time Warp

Here's what the stars, as interpreted by the good seers at The Onion, have in store for me:

Sagittarius November 22 - December 21

Due to conditions beyond fate's control, Sagittarius will be required to repeat February 1992.

I have no idea what I was doing in February 1992, but as I'd recently turned 13, I'm sure it was lame and involved a lack of fashion sense. Agh.

100 Easy Lessons -- Lesson 4

Noogs continues to show interest in doing her "schoolwork", so we've progressed to Lesson 4 of Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons, as well as chapter 3 of Stuart Little. I'm enjoying the lessons, because it's giving a structure to our morning -- something we've lacked before. And I've gone ahead and bought the book, so that we don't have to keep renewing the library's copy. (Plus, I know that at some point, someone is going to write in it or spill something on it.)

Yesterday, Noog unexpectedly balked at putting sounds together. She'd enjoyed making "m" and "s" sounds, and learning "a". However, when it came time to read "a" and "m" together ("am", of course), she was indignant and insisted on making each sound separately. I didn't push it, because each new lesson is followed by a review lesson. This morning, we did the review and it didn't seem to bother her anymore. She doesn't put the sounds together smoothly, and I don't think it has really dawned on her that she's reading the word "am", but that's okay.

The end of each lesson involves writing sounds. She enjoys making "m", but has trouble with the "s". I found I have to tear a page out of the lined school paper notebook I bought for her and just give her one page a day, because otherwise she'll write on every page of her notebook. You can't limit the artistic muse, I guess.

Here are my thoughts on 100 Easy Lessons, so far:
I'm enjoying the brevity of the lessons, and the clarity of the instructions in the book. I read the introduction pretty thoroughly to get a feel for what I was about to do, and everything seems to be laid out fairly neatly. I was worried at first about the orthography, but then I recalled my time studying Old English -- at first the vowels were marked as to long and short sounds, and the easier reading selections were all printed that way. As your vocabulary grew and the selections became more difficult, the vowels were printed as originally written, and you used context and your knowledge of the vocabulary to properly translate the word. Makes sense.

The authors of the book want the children to learn to write "a" as you see it here -- with a crook up top and a litte ball below. Noogs doesn't like this, and knows that "a" can be written either like that or in the more simple fashion with a circle and a line next to it. That's how we've been practicing it in our writing exercises. Outside of calligraphy, who learns to write "a" in font-style? Seeing as the authors use their own orthography for other letters, I don't see why they couldn't have used the simpler "a", unless it's just that that's not how it's printed in most books.

We tried reading a bit of "Green Eggs and Ham" with its famous opening salvo: "I am Sam. Sam I am." She could sound it out, but didn't quite connect the sounds with words. Well, give it time...

A Grief Observed

My father, Jonathon Hodge, died quietly yesterday morning, January 4th. It is, in fact, the same day on which my younger brother, Jonathon Hodge, died eighteen years before.

I'd held off on saying anything because several of my father's old friends read the blog occasionally, and I wanted to make sure that people heard through the appropriate channels first.

Thank you all for your prayers throughout this period. As Catholics we believe that it is a good and noble thing to pray for the dead, and so I would ask that you continue to include my father in your prayers, especially when attending mass.

COSMOS-LITURGY-SEX

I came accross an interesting blog the other day titled COSMOS-LITURGY-SEX. Although I ran into them via the comments of some of the contributors contra evolution and pro Intelligent Design, I suspect that there's a great deal of philosophical aggreement between CTS and DarwinCatholic.

I hope to get some thoughts up in reaction to some of their recent posts over the coming days.

Militant Islam's Futile Rage

Scott Carson of An Examined Life links to a Crisis article by fellow Ohio University professor David Curp about Jihad and the Islamic world's resentment towards the West. Curp's thesis is that the resentment of the Islamic world towards the West is not so much a result of their "oppression" by Westerners from the Crusades through the colonial period, but rather a sense of futility and frustration that the world is now upside down. For centuries the Dar al-Islam could, almost at will, conquer more territory from the Christian world, and realistically looked forward to the prospect of a Muslim empire stretching the length and breadth of the known world.

Until Turkey's decisive defeat by Western forces in the 1600s, and the West's explosion of political and economic growth resulting from the colonization of the Americas, Islam could realistically imagine a future in which all infidels would be brought Allah's banner. However, as the Islamic world quickly moved from being a major threat to a near forgotten curiosity in the 18th and 19th centuries, the forces of Islam were left with a sense of frustration and futility. If Allah rewards virtue with military victory, how could the Dar al-Islam be so completely left behind by the Western world?

The more westernized segments of Islam have responded to this new world order by further personalizing the Islamic faith, more or less dropping the idea of the Lesser Jihad (the struggle to militarily subdue the infidel) to emphasize the Greater Jihad (the struggle against one's own sinful inclinations). In this direction (to the extent that Islam does contain elements of real revealed truth) lies stability and sanity. With the possibility of traditional, successful military Jihad all but gone, the choice for Islam is between this personalized version of Islam, and the conspiracy-minded rantings and resentments of groups like al-Qaeda and Islamic Jihad.

Educational Delights

The elder of our monkeys did the second lesson of How to Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons this morning over breakfast (at her insistence) and howled for more (almost literally). We told her that if she was good she could do another lesson tonight. There was much sssss-ing and mmmmmm-ing around the Darwin household this morning.

The only catch is, she doesn't really like writing the letters herself. She'd much rather instruct us in writing them for her. Still, she gamely filled a page with some M and S of her own construction, with regular variations in design just to keep things interesting.

We're thinking we'll launch into another chapter book that we already have, so Stewart Little or Charlotte's Web is probably next up on that front. I'm thinking probably Stewart Little.

Father Fox Talks Sex

That should increase our search engine hits...

Fr. Fox of Bonfire of the Vanities had a pair of really good posts last week about sex (as in gender) and sex (as in intercourse).

The first post deals with the question of "what's the big deal about sex?" As well as explaining why the Church considers sex something worth having moral rules about, he also points out the inherent inconsistency of those who insist both that sex is "just a little thing" that no one should bother making rules about and yet having your sexual desires denied is somehow an incredible injustice that "cuts to the very center of my being".

The second post deals with something I think could use more attention than it gets, that at the completely materialistic, biological level, humans are designed to have heterosexual intercourse. Indeed, that's why our species (and any species not capable of asexual reproduction) exists. Pull out a basic biology or anthropology textbook and look up the definition of evolutionary success and you will find something along the lines of "the number of second generation descendants an organism produces". Clearly this had a lot to do with heterosexual intercourse, and very little to do with homosexual intercourse.

The second post also provides an interesting case study in that a commenter turns up who attempts to make the case that forbidding gay marriage is like saying people with brown eyes can get married but people with blue eyes can't.

If you have a moment, you may want to scroll farther up to see some of Fr. Fox's other recent posts, including a link to some of the worst angel art that man can find. (Actually, I'm pretty sure I've seen worse, but this is moderately bad.)

Weird Habits Meme

I've been tagged by Rick for the weird habits meme -- list five weird habits, then inflict the meme on others. You all know the drill.

1. Not exactly weird, but just a bad habit -- I, like Rick, bite my nails. That's why I never wear any rings but my wedding ring -- no sense in drawing any unneccessary attention to my hands.

2. Here's weird for you. When I was young, my family lived in a trailer on nine acres of Virginia countryside, and we had a shared well with the neighbors. Consequently, the water pressure was low. To this day I never flush the toilet before taking a shower, scarred by childhood memories of no water pressure and no hot water.

3. I never brush my hair. Brushing makes it frizz and float. Instead, after a shower I run my fingers through it and then put a bit of Frizz-ease and gel in, then let it dry. This comes from having Naturally Curly hair -- my sisters can sympathize.

4. I eat my cereal without milk, generally -- I picked that one up from Darwin.

5. I make the sign of the cross after the Penitential Rite during Mass. Many other people do it as well, but I've never known why, and it's always slightly bothered me that if I were pressed as to why that sign of the cross is there, I couldn't answer. Anyone who knows, please tell me!

If a meme has worked its way down to me, that means that all the other bloggers have already been tagged. I'll just invite anyone who wants to list their weird habits to do so in the comment box, with a special invitation to commenter Barbfromcincy -- not because I think she has any weird habits, but because it's always a pleasure to hear from her!

Hello, 2006!

Thanks to everyone who's offered words of encouragement lately. Even though we've been slow to respond (this is the first day I've read my own blog in almost a week!), we are paying attention and grateful for all your prayers.

Coming up soon, look for my response to Rick Lugari's latest meme (I am NOT aging, Rick!); our continuing thoughts on homeschooling as well as some of our latest reading ventures in that direction; updates on Darwin's father (not much to tell, really -- he's still hanging on, God love him); and New Horizons in Organization for the New Year. Plus, it's time to start getting things ready for the homebirth and young Smaskig's advent in about two months. (What, oh what to do with the placenta? Bury it, freeze it. toss it, barbeque it?)

So the long and short of it is that blogging will be getting back to a regular schedule, and we appreciate your patience with our sporadic posts over the past month.

Christianity and Self-Pity

A few weeks back, everyone was quoting a piece by some bitter little British woman about how angry she was over the Christian allegory in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. Nothing, she insisted, was worse than Christ's effrontery in going and dying for everyone. Who asked him to do that?

Who indeed...

I think one of the most offensive things about Christianity for those who have chosen to hate it is that there's really no room for self pity in the Christian framework.

The pagan gods of the Greeks and Romans were easy to resent. They didn't die, they dallied endlessly with mortals, and although humans suffered from their caprices as well and enjoying their occasional favors, the gods actually had less claim to nobility, certainly less claim to suffering than men did. Indeed, reading Homer (before Hesiod and later writers began to abstract the gods, turning Zeus into a type for justice) one gets a certain sense that men are (despite their weakness and mortality) above the gods, because they know what it is to suffer and overcome.

This must have had a certain (though rather cold) sort of comfort. While on the one hand begging the gods for favors (and bribing them with sacrifices) one could also rage against them. "You don't know what it is we suffer. You don't know what it is to lose a loved one, to sicken, to starve, to lose a child, to suffer all the innumerable trails of frail humanity."

Christ denies us that self-indulgence, by having drunk deeper from the cup of human suffering than any of us. We cannot cry to the Christian God that He knows not how we suffer. He does, and more, and he was there first.

I think is what offended the British authoress: having humanity's collective thunder stolen by a God was betrayed by one of his close friends, imprisoned, beaten to within an inch of his life, tortured, mocked, and died a death of unimaginable suffering. In his self sacrifice, Christ rendered any attempt at self pity, any attempt to rail that the gods don't understand, any attempt to lash out at Him inherently ridiculous. Anyone who looks at a crucifix knows that he has nothing over God. And for those who don't want God, who would rather see Man as the great tragic yet noble figure of our world, that must be the most upsetting thing of all.

I was thinking of all this while looking back over the past year, as I myself was coming dangerously close to self pity.

It's been a year of trails and blessings. I landed a good job at a good company, ending a year of freelance work and chronic under-pay. However on Good Friday my wife and I lost our unborn child at three months. Yet God blessed us with another child, baby Smaskig who alerts us daily to her health with kicks and surges, and who is due at the end of February. As the year ends, my father is in the last stages of dying of cancer. The costs of time off work and visits to Los Angeles are sitting on the credit cards. After being separated from my wife and daughters for two weeks while spending time with my father, I came back and came down sick with what MrsDarwin had. The doctor helpfully loaded up our credit cards with a pharmacy worth of prescriptions (which happily are working) and my wife's father and five siblings came out for a long planned visit through New Years, and we promptly got half of them sick. (House population 10, sick list 5) So I'm desperately trying to get well in time to return to work on Tuesday, knowing all the while that by that time my father will quite probably be dead, and I'll soon have to take a couple more days off work to fly out for the funeral.

And just as I was getting up a really good head of steam for my self pity, I thought of whom I address my cares and hopes to each morning and evening, and realized I had nothing over Him.

There really is a limit to the self pity that we as Christians can muster. Our whole religion cries out against it, for our savior has taken all these sufferings to Himself and more, upon the one person who can be said truly not to deserve any suffering at all.

Still Waiting for a Christian Death

As the year ends, my father still awaits the Lord's call. His pulse and blood pressure are now so low, the hospice nurses say that the end could come at any time. But so far, it hasn't.

I was thinking last night about how there are two very distinct phases to all this.

Right now, we are all united in praying that Christ will soon lead my father into His kingdom.

And yet, when all is finished, we will all miss him and wish that he were here. Dad is 57, and so given modern average life expectancy, we will have lost him 20 years early. That's hard by any stretch, and Dad is in many ways the lynch pin of the family. Dinner was always much quieter on nights when he was working late -- not because he did all the talking, but because everyone talked more when he was there.

In the months and years to come, that is what we'll miss -- and wish that cancer had never reared its ugly head, or that the remissions had lasted longer. Yet in the meantime, we pray that it will all be over soon, and God will call him to eternal peace.

A Classical Education

My mom is finally beginning to clear out some of her homeschooling resources (with her youngest kid now 21, the need is clearly past, and with over 5000 other books, space is limited) and so during my recent visits I've taken home some of the potential discards that we plan to use ourselves eventually.

Among these is a copy of Laura Berquist's book Designing Your Own Classical Curriculum. Right now MrsDarwin and I are looking for ideas on good resources for teaching reading and very basic arithmetic, as the oldest monkey approaches four and it seems like time to get started on such things before too much longer.

We may well end up using some of the resources she mentions in those earlier grades (one of our challenges is that we mostly only have opinions about education in the later years, say 4th grade plus.) However, reading through the rest of the book, I'm reminded of some of the issues I had with the book when I read parts of it back when it came out ten years ago, reading it as a homeschooler in the latter years of high school.

Berquist's aim is provide a basic classical education that will then allow the student to go on to a small Catholic liberal arts college, specifically Thomas Aquinas College in California, which has a program based solely on the Great Books model. (Berquist herself went to TAC and she mentions in the book that her oldest child had just been admitted there.)

I think there's a lot of good to be found in reading the Great Books at a college level. (MrsDarwin and I both took part in Steubenville's Great Books-based Honors Program, which made up one of our five classes every semester throughout college and got a bunch of our core requirements out of the way.) However, doing nothing but the Great Books in college seems to me to be a mistake. I think it's important to have an academic major, belong to a department, and do at least a little bit of in-depth study (a thesis or senior project) while getting your bachelor's degree. It's especially important to do independent research and become more expert on a few specific areas of study within your field than your professors are.

The approach that my parents took, which we hope to emulate with our own children, was to provide a solid basic education by the end of eighth grade (essentially doing in K-8 what Berquist does in K-12) and then work through a unified humanities (history, literature, philosophy and theology all rolled into one) program in 9-12, while doing college prep math, science and foreign language as separate subjects. Certainly, a 14-year-old isn't old enough to get all there is to get in Homer, Plato, Virgil and Cicero, nor is a 16-year-old going to understand all there is to know about Aquinas, Dante or Thomas More, but they are old enough to give it a decent shot, and if they encounter those authors again in a more advanced setting, they'll be able to get much more out of it on a second go-around.

Indeed, I think you're pretty much guaranteed not to "get" these authors fully on a first read (in college or high school) so it's best to get the first, unenlightened pass out of the way early. And although I may not have come out of the humanities program knowing everything there is to know about the works I'd read, I certainly think I was far better off for having read them.

Now clearly, your kid needs to be a reading powerhouse by 9th grade to push through stuff like the Iliad in a reasonable period of time, but if you've been homeschooled through eighth grade that shouldn't exactly be a problem. (It helps to be already familiar with the story, either from hearing it read aloud or from reading an abbreviated version at a younger age.)

Right now, however, we're mostly in search of good materials for teaching reading in the first place, plus some added inspiration on chapter books that would be interesting read-alouds for the monkeys (Little House in the Big Woods was a big hit, but we're not sure if the other Laura books might still be a bit over their heads, so we're looking for new ideas, since nothing currently on my self seems to be a good fit, unless perhaps Charlotte's Web.) and in that regard Berquist's book looks like it may have some good leads.

The Great Divorce

An old friend had given me a copy of C. S. Lewis' The Great Divorce for Christmas, so I pulled it out after finishing Farrell's book and read through it during the remainder of the flight. (Like most Lewis, it's a very quick read.)

You can get a great introductory education reading Lewis, because he has an incredible grasp of the great ideas of Western Culture, and conveys them in a clear and simple fashion, without for a moment being dull about it.

At the same time, Great Divorce contains some of the same traits that annoy me about a number of Lewis' books. It's got a brilliant set of images that convey Christian truths in a truly memorable fashion, and yet as a whole it has kind of a thrown-together feel. The end, especially, is abrupt, almost as if Lewis had taken it as far as he knew what to do with and so dropped it unceremoniously. Perhaps this ties in well with the frame which (though sketchy) is apparently that of a dream the author has during an air raid. The book has something of the rushed quality of something dashed off in a fit of brilliance during said air raid.

I don't want any of this to seem like a put-down of Lewis' primary point and his use of imagery. Figures like the Episcopal Ghost, the mother who loves her son to the exclusion of all else and the husband who feeds on pity, indeed leading it around on a chain in the form of an aging actor, until it finally consumes him (literally) will stick with me for a very long time. Lewis has a unique ability to distill characters who (while not filled out enough to seem like a fully rounded person) nonetheless instantly evoke real people and situations that you are familiar with.

The immediate comparison that occurred to me was to Niven and Pournelle's Inferno, a novel in which an unbelieving Science Fiction author wakes up dead to find himself in Dante's hell, but with a difference: It's possible to escape hell if you are willing to follow Dante's route, rejecting each sin as you go deeper, until climbing through the center of the world to Purgatory. Lewis has written a theologically deeper work with much more memorable images of the nature of sin, and the dangers of setting up another good in place of God's. Niven and Pournelle's book, however, is much more tightly written, with a clearer story arc, characterization and a feeling of finality when one reaches the end.

That said, I'm certainly very glad I read The Great Divorce. But if you get the chance, read Inferno as well.