First Week

Last week we kicked off the Center, held our first lecture, our first tutorials, our first discussion group meeting, and even had a special lecture on Sire's worldview questions. We are off and running. Dr. Callis gave us a great first look at Homer, using a bit of reverse psychology to get the students to take a closer look at the book, and begin questioning from the outset the applicability of the work to our day.

Much of what we discussed last week had to do with the comparing a Christian mind with the Greek pagan one. What does virtue look like -- that is, what do the gods approve of? And what sort of powers do the gods have over circumstances in the world they inhabit, compared with the sovereignty of the God of the Bible? We discussed how sovereignty is at best divided up among the various gods, and perhaps even beyond or behind them we find the Fates, spinning out fate without direct contact with men in the world.

Athena's love of Odysseus was another topic of discussion. How is it that she has such affection for him? Is it that she is taken with his abilities? He is so powerful, able, crafty, smart, et c? Or is it that the gods have made him that way first? What part does Athena's encouragement play in his successes that make him such a favorite? Which came first?

Books 7-12 tonight, and on we go! Planning for a trip to L'abri in Rochester starting Sept 15th. I can't wait for the students to get to know our friends the Snyders and the MacGregors.

We've kicked off!

Well, we have done it -- we have begun the first week of our year-long tutorial with our new students. Last night we had a kickoff dinner with students, their families, the faculty, and some of our supporters. Director Hodges gave a short speech on what we are doing, and why we are doing it, describing our unusual year of study as a combination of a Christian view of the world with a study of the history of ideas in the West, through the great books. He told us to think of the work more as an apprenticeship than a class -- the idea is to pass on what the faculty has grown to love in the books we will be reading, and in so doing light the flame of enthusiasm (or fan it!) in our students. Here's a short excerpt from his talk:


"Even 100 years ago these great books still had a strong position in our culture, although they were slowly losing ground. Now, in 2008 some colleges and universities consider these works backward-looking, or even oppressive and negative because they refer to certain visions of the good life that are no longer in vogue. The result has been, sadly, that we are losing what was once a cohesive cultural foundation set in the common stories of our education that for centuries has been communicated through these books.

1598 years ago, the barbarians were closing on the gates of Rome, after overwhelming the outposts of the Holy Roman Empire in Eastern Europe and Britannia over the previous century. Just 66 years later, the last emperor abdicated, and night fell on Western Europe. The barbarians were vicious, cruel, and technologically inept. They tore down buildings they didn’t know how to rebuild, killed citizens they didn’t understand, drove people into the wilderness but wouldn’t live in their homes, and destroyed a culture they had no way of rebuilding. Just imagine an angry inner city gang, a few hundred Islamic terrorists, and a tribe of New Guinea headhunters all attacking your neighborhood church. They wouldn’t have any interest in the sanctuary, the organ, the beauty of the architecture, the silly robes the pastors wear, the pastors themselves, or the people praying. They could no more create the civilization that inspired the church they destroy than fly to the moon. The trouble is, they couldn’t even imagine wanting to create such a thing. At that point, they don’t have the cultural framework even to imagine a Chartres, much less build one.

Yet – in the end, the story of the barbarian invasions is a story of God’s redemption, because no sooner had those barbarians taken over but they began to be converted to Christianity, and it is from those Barbarian ancestors that we have the great artworks of England, France, and Germany – think of Beowulf, the Lindisfarne Gospels, the Book of Kells, and ultimately, the great Romanesque cathedrals followed by the Gothic ones (including Chartres) – that the Italians never did like much because they were, well, of the Goths. But the Goths became Christians, and they made some of the most beautiful and profound art the world has known. What will the art of the 20th century converts from Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Animism, and Atheism create in the years to come?

I have no doubt that God is in the business of bringing the unbelievers into contact with Westerners today in order that they too might hear the Gospel and be redeemed. It may be a slow and difficult process, but in the end, Islam will bow the knee to Jesus, and so will the pagans, the atheists, and the syncratists who are flooding into our country today.

So what, in the midst of a potential Dark Age, should Christians do? We should pass on what we know. The faithful ones in the 2nd half of the first millenium were the ones who kept the books: those who copied and taught the books they knew until such time that the culture would once again be interested in the questions those books answer. When folks come to their wits’ end and once again long to know the definitions of important words – words like, love, truth, trust, goodness, beauty, justice, mercy, grace…they will again need God to define these words for them, and they will find the definitions in marvelous books written over the centuries that can again help present generations remember what once was known by many but was lost.

And this is what we are hoping to do at the Center for Western Studies: not save Western civilization just because it is Western – but pass on Western civilization because it is civilized. We want to pass its ideas on to our students in faith that one day they will be needed again, and you will both be able to live in accordance with them yourselves (which will give great joy and peace) and pass them on to colleagues, peers, and children when the time comes. This is to glorify God.

Why do this, students? Not so that you can get this over with and get on with your lives. Rather so that you can begin to get a good idea of what your lives should be like. What are you going to value? What are you going to love? After this year, we hope that you have a better picture of what you have in common with Augustine and Dante and Shakespeare. These fellows are writing TO YOU. You are not listening in on a conversation they are having with someone else, hoping that you will remember enough to put down on a test and move on to the next thing – you are listening to them talk directly to you. You are going to learn to listen to their hearts through these books and music and paintings – you are going to realize that they had you in mind when they wrote. Dr. Jenkins, and Dr. Callis and I are not going to be telling you what you ought to know (as if there were a finite amount that can be known and we are going to give you a percentage of it), we are going to tell you what we love about these writers and the ideas they describe. We are not giving you a year of telling you what you need to know to pass a test – we want to infect you with a love for learning itself, and teach you what we know in hopes that you might go on learning the rest of your life. Think of it more as an apprenticeship than an education, though it will be both."


Tonight, Dr. Callis gave our first lecture on Homer's Odyssey, laying out 10+ reasons why we should NOT bother reading this work. This week we are going to prove him wrong! We will post notes on that lecture soon.

If you would like to be able to join us for some of our lectures, discussions, or cultural outings (plays, concerts, films, et c) please respond here and leave your email address so that we can send you the details. For suggested donations to the Center, interested folks can become auditors and participate in what is going to be a great first year.

Saving the West

Saving the West through good grammar.

Actually, what this blogger argues is more than using good grammar to be a proper person. She argues for the reality of underlying structures of the cosmos, laws and patterns society is capable of recognizing and adapting to, and thus building a civilization worth inhabiting.

A. Solzhenitsyn

Alexander Solzhenitsyn was a man from the East. Not in the sense of being from Asian culture, but in the sense of being someone formed by Russian culture and spirituality, someone who could look at the West as something of an outsider and tell us what we had let go of to the danger of our souls.

When Solzhenitsyn first came to America, he was hailed by liberals and conservatives, but many people, both left and right, quickly turned against him as he began outlining the failures of the West. Much of what he said still resonates painfully today.

An example of this is his Nobel Prize speech of 1970.

Tradition Isn't a Bad Word

Though some Protestants have taken an extremely negative view of the concept of tradition--some to the point of rejecting anything even a few years old--other, more informed, Protestants have understood that a biblical faith does not entail automatic rejection of something just because it is old. A good example of this is John Milton, the British poet who swallowed whole the entire Western tradition as a Protestant and made great poetry out of it.

James Kurth, a political science professor and a Presbyterian Elder, shows how we can again go about this biblically shaped conservancy in his article "Western Tradition, Our Tradition". Tradition is not a dirty word.