Help!

Ok. I now know exactly what I want for Christmas. More Amazon money. Even on the Kindle, books are expensive!
I can buy books used, for pennies to dollars, but then the delivery time is measured in weeks, and there’s still the cost of postage.

I’m not used to actually having to pay for my reading habit. But it feels like the library system has crashed for me. I haven’t seen a book I was looking for available for immediate check-out from a library in years.

Book Reviews

I’ve decided for the time being to pretend that any book which fails to keep my attention to the end is therefore a bad book, and not worth reading. This has greatly sped up the process, but will likely have an adverse effect on my allowance: I’ve finished two books in 3 days.

  1. The first book was I Am Not a Serial Killer, by Dan Wells. The genre is horror, a bit like Silence of the Lambs for Young Adult, which is something I’d really never dabbled in before. But Dan Wells is one of the Writing Excuses Podcast hosts, and I’d gotten a friendly feeling toward him, so I thought I’d give his books a try. It was surprisingly good.

    I won’t go too far into a synopsis of the story. To describe much of it is to give it away. John Cleaver is 15 when he is diagnosed with sociopathy. He doesn’t recognize or process emotions properly, which causes him to tend toward devaluing the lives of other people. He’s plagued by thoughts that he may become a serial killer. Instead of giving himself over to this, he fights it, and in the process stops an actual serial killer. Sort of.

    There was a generally dark tone to the whole story, for obvious reasons. But apparently, the horror genre lends itself very well to intensely moral storytelling (think Frankenstein and Dracula) without drifting into purple preachiness (think Uncle Tom’s Cabin). A couple of parts in the book actually drew tears.

  2. The second book was God Is: How Christianity Explains Everything, by Doug Wilson. This is his short response to Christopher Hitchens’ anti-Christianity book, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. It was short and fun. I recommend it for anybody who enjoys a good smackdown, or for anybody who actually had their faith shaken or hackles raised by Hitchens’ book.

Honor, Respect & Taxes

Honor, Respect & Taxes.

This is a good theological meditation. But it sets me thinking about “Tax Freedom Day.” Whoever does the math for that isn’t paying attention to tax brackets and the idea of a progressive tax system. Not everybody hits tax freedom day at the same time, because not everybody pays the same percentage of their income. Canada as a whole may hit tax freedom day around June 6, but I seriously doubt Tim Challies as a pastor and christian author pays a full 43% of his income.

My tax freedom day, for the last 10 years, I think, has been some time in December of the previous year. I get more back than I put in. That’s what you call *really* progressive, and while I appreciate it, I’m not sure that I approve.

Parenting vs. Schooling? An example

Homeschooling Blind Spots

I’ve been in the army for a little over a year now, and so I’ve acquired a certain set of new vocabulary. For the most part, I haven’t had much use for these new forms of speach. But this article brings some colorful phrases to mind; things that begin with “What the…” and “why in the…” and “who…”

But it boils down to this: Why does everybody always associate every kind of parenting flaw to homeschoolers? And if anyone ever associates homeschooling with the word “sheltered” to my face, they may suffer physical harm.

There is a difference between schooling and parenting. Parenting is what all parents do, either badly or well. Schooling refers to the choices parents make regarding the way that their children learn new information and specific ways of thinking. Sending your children to an institutional school is not a decision to farm out your parenting. If you send your children to a school, you cannot hold the school responsible if your children aren’t raised well. Conversely, a decision to educate your children yourself does not mean that you are suddenly responsible for raising your children in some new sense. Raising children is what parents do. The only difference that homeschooling your children makes toward raising them is that you have more time with which to do it.

This article has some excellent warnings for folks who are inclined think that they can force their children to be good by keeping them from ever seeing anything bad. It’s a silly idea, when you think about it, since we all know that wickedness comes from the heart, and that “folly is bound up in the heart of a child.” But a lot of people want to replace the gospel with a strict disclipline regimine, and attempt to control their childrens minds by controling their experiences. These people believe the gospel applies to themselves, but somehow not to their children, who will be saved not by grace but by strict parenting.

As I say, excellent warnings, but it doesn’t say one word that has anything to do with education. So why the expletive is it addressed to homeschoolers?