Tuesday Random

Yes, I am somewhere other than home, but very busy with childcare, so not a lot of time to think substantively. Here’s some random for you:

• Classically Christian: I enjoy this blog, even though I disagree with the writer’s assessment of historical Christianity and the relative claims of various Christian bodies. It’s entries like this that make it very much worth reading:

Now, making the household “monastic” in other ways, with regular rhythms for corporate and private prayer, doing family devotions, pursuing simplicity in various areas, etc., feels like it should go without saying. It’s really the question of how you deal with your fellow inmates that I want to prod here today.

Take the happy times as grace and find God there.

Take the hard times as grace and find God there.

Consider, as parent, that you are an abbot as St John Cassian describes, and that therefore your greatest concern is the spiritual growth of the monks. Take that more seriously than anything, and then your own times of theoria or lectio divina or whatever your prayer rule includes.

What I’m really pressing at, then, is a combination of Paul Evdokimov’s interior monasticism and Jean-Pierre de Caussade’s sacrament of the present moment. Take hold of the moment that God has thrust you into as a spouse and parent, whether it is cooking food, doing laundry, playing with children, reading a book of your own choosing, gazing longingly at a fast-cooling cup of coffee, and find God in it.

Then you can find holy hesychia and contemplate the Most Holy Trinity.

• I don’t know anything about this writer, but this essay came across some feed or other and it was thought-provoking and worth sharing. He wonders about the contemporary dearth of “geniuses” and ascribes it in part to the decline of individual tutoring as an educational fallback for many (in the elite, of course). Whether or not you agree with him, it’s an essay which might prompt thoughts on education – especially mass education – in general.

Now consider our current situation. Despite all the language professing otherwise, in general the education system of the United States is based entirely on genetic determinism. A child is born assumed to have innate traits, including, for example, a preference as to what they want to be when they grow up (somehow just waiting fully-formed inside of their six-year-old selves). Then they are thrown into the school system, a competitive academic meritocracy wrapped in an obtuse hierarchical bureaucracy, a structure in which they will spend most of their young adult life, forced to learn mostly from their peers, who know as little as they do. Those who can’t sit through it are given drugs until they can. If they happen to test well or their parents spend the money, they might end up in slightly smaller classes, and with slightly better teachers, and with slightly smarter peers, but the structure will be the same. The first real intellectuals that most children meet in person are their college professors—already at eighteen and stuck in a class with dozens of other people (even at Harvard, introductory courses are often in the hundreds). Is it any surprise that such methods don’t reliably produce geniuses? Is it not anathema to how humans normally become interested in things? We sequestered children from great minds, and, perhaps it’s worth briefly noting, we also sequestered great minds from children.

Here’s a muppet for you.