Classical Homes, The Road to Character, & Christ the Educator
by Erin Doom
Feast of St Irene the Great Martyr
Anno Dominin 2020, May 5
1. Essays et al: "A Classical Home"
Nikki Boyle is the mother of five. Her husband is a Lutheran priest (he also happens to be the President of Eighth Day Institute!). Like most American families, their family is very busy. So how does classical education work in a large, busy family? Boyle gives four suggestions:
- No time scheduled for TV; instead, play time outside first, then with board games or whatever else kids may find inside.
- Eating together, and preparing meals together.
- Reading aloud as a family.
- Work hard to keep a structure.
According to Boyle, "Whether it’s limiting screen time, or arranging your schedules to eat together, or finding a family book, there are little things you can do to make your family more classical, which simply means, more family."
2. Books & Culture: "Profiles in Humility"
James K. A. Smith reviews The Road to Character
by David Brooks (2015). Here’s Smith’s opening paragraph:
David Brooks clearly intends his newest book to be nothing less than a moral education, an invitation into a different "moral ecology," as he puts it. What’s sad is that such a remedial offering is necessary. In a healthy culture, we don’t need such books: We have parents and teachers and aunts and uncles and priests and rabbis who walk with us on the road to character. Our moral educations should happen at dinner tables, in classrooms, on football fields, in synagogues and churches. But when an entire society’s moral ecology is captive to self-expression and the nurturance of "Big Me," even these traditional spaces become outposts of Self-Esteem, Inc. That’s why we need books like The Road to Character—as a summons to remember what even our "traditional" schools of virtue have forgot.
Read the full review here. And get a copy of The Road to Character
from Eighth Day Books.
3. Bible & Fathers: "Christ the Educator"
St. Clement of Alexandria (d. c. A.D. 215) wrote a work titled Christ the Educator. Here’s a short sample from an excerpt in today’s Patristic Word:
Let us call Him, then, by the one title: Educator of little ones, an Educator who does not simply follow behind, but who leads the way, for His aim is to improve the soul, not just to instruct it; to guide to a life of virtue, not merely to one of knowledge. Yet, that same Word does teach. It is simply that in this work we are not considering Him in that light. As Teacher, he explains and reveals through instructions, but as Educator, He is practical. First He persuades men to form habits of life, then He encourages them to fulfill their duties by laying down clear-cut counsels and by holding up, for us who follow, examples of those who have erred in the past. Both are most useful: the advice, that it may be obeyed; the other, given in the form of example, has a twofold object—either that we may choose the good and imitate it or condemn and avoid the bad.
Read the whole excerpt here. You can get the full text from Eighth Day Books, available in a paper edition in the Fathers of the Church series from Catholic University of America Press, or in a cloth interlinear (English and original Greek) edition in the Loeb Classical Library from Harvard University Press.
*If you’d like to receive the Daily Synaxis
in your inbox each Mon-Fri, you can subscribe here.
**All books (and icons) in print available from Eighth Day Books.
Please support an independent bookstore that believes in the eighth day resurrection of our God and Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Give them a call at 1.800.841.2541 or visit their website here. And don’t forget Eighth Day Members (Patrons+) receive 10% discount, plus many other perks! Learn more and become a member here.
Share this Post on Your Preferred Platform
"What is it that has ordered the things of heaven and those of earth, the things which move through the air and those which move in the water; nay, rather the things which proceeded them: heaven and earth and the natures of fire and water? What is it that combined and arranged them...set them into motion and put them on their unceasing and unhindered course?..But who is the architect of these things? Or did not he who made them also bring them into being? We shall certainly not attribute such power to spontaneity." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 3 This comes after St. John of Damascus sets out to delineate between the created and the uncreated, a fact which, while at the core of existence, seems for him to be, for this very reason, the simplest to believe. Everything but God is created and, thus, susceptible to change. This means people, but this also means demons, angels, the rest of the created order across the entire cosmos. Everything is vulnerable to unrest. Except for God. If you have ever tried to explain the Holy Trinity to a child for the first time, maybe you have felt as I have the weightier, inexpressible side of God's unchangeability: how do I possibly communicate this essential fact to the person in front of me? (This is usually when my faint stutter starts to pop up again.) I like that here, like St. Patrick reaching for a three-leaf clover, St. John brings us back to earth to better understand the cosmos. Fire and water are no less mysteries than heaven and earth. And yet here we are, cooking and washing, eating and drinking, filled and sustained on what we can neither fully explain nor claim to have created. Only God is unchanging. Vice versa, God is the only constant we need. Maybe the rest is better left unsaid. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
"Now, one who would speak or hear about God should know beyond any doubt that in what concerns theology and the Incarnation not all things are inexpressible and not all are capable of expression, and neither are all things unknowable nor are they all knowable. That which can be known is one thing, whereas that which can be said is another, just as it is one thing to speak and another to know. Furthermore, many of those things about God which are not clearly perceived cannot be fittingly described, so that we are obliged to express in human terms things which transcend the human order. Thus, for example, in speaking about God we attribute to Him sleep, anger, indifference, hands and feet, and the like." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 2 When I was studying Fiction in graduate school, one of the first methods I learned to really situate the reader in the story you were about to tell them was disorientation; if you wanted to ground them in one story, first you had pull the rug out from under their feet. So it's fitting that in the beginning of St. John Damascene's On the Orthodox Faith, before rebuilding our foundation, he first puts us squarely in limbo, seesawing back and forth between certainty and uncertainty. To paraphrase, there is no doubt (certainty) that about God some things can be expressed...but not all things (uncertainty). Some things about God are truly knowable (certainty), but some are unknowable (uncertainty). Oh, and while we're speaking about God (certainty), let's admit there's a gap, too, between what we say and what we know (uncertainty). My favorite line in this spiraling excerpt, "...it is one thing to speak, and another to know," takes me back to the final lines in Wendell Berry's poem, "How to Be a Poet," which he wrote primarily as a reminder to himself: Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. Wherever your preferences fall on the cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology (whether you lean more toward what we can say about God or what we cannot), Berry's poem, I think, would nod along with St. John: before we say too much, let our words be preserved by the silence from which they came. I'm thinking of the silence, that filling, restorative quiet I feel when I step into a cathedral or in some of my favorite moments with my kids in the early hours. Even before praying, can we hear the One already praying in us? Let's start there. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
Late-Night Bookstores and Spiritual Reading
On St. Benedict and the Making of Vows
The Pursuit of Truth in the Age of AI
On the Theology of Raising Chickens
G.K. Chesterton and Raising Small Children
"Seal of the Fathers"
In Memory of Warren Farha, 1955-2026
An Ode to St. Brendan the Voyager
