By Way of Throughlines

The primary goal of Christian education is the formation of peculiar people who desire the Kingdom of God and thus undertake their life’s expression of that desire. -James K.A. Smith After a brief detour last month to reiterate the argument for a distinctly Christian model of education, we return again to our introduction of the […]

The High Stakes of Higher Ed

Over the last several months we’ve made the argument that education is anything but neutral. The myth that education can be reduced to a process that strictly seeks to prepare students for a future career wherein they can make money and then own nice things is a disorienting one. Education, instead, is an inherently formative […]

Worship Redefined

You may remember in our last post we introduced the concept of Throughlines (or habits) that we intend to use to produce peculiar people. The sample list included practices such as God worshiping, community building, order discovering, beauty creating, idolatry discerning, truth telling, thanks giving, and joy seeking. At the risk of stating the obvious, […]

Learning by doing

There is a folktale about a corn farmer whose wealth far exceeded that of his peers. Despite having enough money to hire as many workers as he wanted, the farmer was famous for using his sons to harvest the corn instead. Day after day other farmers would pass by his fields and see his two […]

False dualisms & peculiar people

In the first two posts of this series, we did our best to establish how Christian education is distinct in its approach to truth as well as its intended outcomes. Christian schools must first recognize these differences if they are to be faithful to their mission, but this is only the beginning. Redeeming education is […]

Retooling our schooling

If you were to ask the next five people you see what the purpose of education is, you’re likely to get a similar answer from each of them.  Education has been largely reduced to the process by which one is positioned to make a good living.  While there is nothing inherently wrong with this approach, […]

You can handle the truth

People are never more confused about what I do for a living when I tell them I work in Christian education. At best, they take this to mean I teach Sunday school everyday, but usually I just get comments like “Good for you! That must be so nice.” This is not surprising, as few institutions […]