Tag: history

Always “Sez Who?”

The foundation for the humanities is preaching and synagoguery. Take away the gospel and you have some metaphysics, but no reason for literature and history. You still have the stories people like to tell but no Keystone keeps it altogether.

What I mean is that every narrative has a central point of view or set of values to hold the plot together. No cohesive values means no cohesive narrative: there’s just no human way to even care. But the only way you can have a cohesive narrative that covers all the stories – all of human history and the whole human race – is if you have a single cohesive set of values that are true for all peoples in all places.
The study of the humanities is teasing out of that set of cohesive values. If there is a keystone concept, a singular idea that encompasses all narratives and holds them together, that idea has to be the gospel. If it isn’t the Christian gospel, it must be some other gospel.   If there is no gospel, then we are stuck with that other most basic idea that crowds into all questions of right and wrong, and truth and beauty: “sez who?”

Providing Clarity by Muddying the Waters

I think I can see why this guy never uses the term “Calvinism.” He has successfully proved that if you take in the life experiences of everyone who ever lived from 1550 onward, the term has essentially no meaning. I think my eyes glazed over when he demonstrated that neo-Calvinism must refer specifically to only people who agree with Abraham Kuyper. And there’s a reason why we can’t use the term Kuyperian?

Something missing

A Classical Education designer talks about the classical approach to math and science.  It seems like he’s missing something, though, because his theories on teaching it better sound an awful lot like what I’ve heard about the Common Core Curriculum – prioritizing the idea over the execution. I think it’s because he forgets the magic word – Trivium!

Or it may just be that he’s forgetting that most of science is actually history, the same way that most of music composition is actually piano practice.