Articles by author: Andrew Kern

Only the Lover Sings

by Andrew
Friday, 12 October, 2012
categories: Articles, Big Ideas: Truth, Beauty, Goodness and more!, Classical Christian Education

When I read my beloved Odyssey, which I seem, finally, to have learned how to read on its own terms, I find myself filled with admiration at the almost miraculous creativity of Homer and Odysseus, of Athene and Demodokos and Hephaistos, and (maybe my favorite) of...

A Radiant Surface

by Andrew
Thursday, 30 August, 2012
categories: Articles, Big Ideas: Truth, Beauty, Goodness and more!, Classical Christian Education

Dr. Glen Arbery may well be right when he suggests in his book, Why Literature Matters: Permanence and the Politics of Reputation, that “of all the poems in the history of the West, actual scripture aside.... God loves the Iliad most.” But if so, Homer’s other poem,...

Why We Must Conquer Age Segregation

by Andrew
Wednesday, 22 February, 2012
categories: Articles, Big Ideas: Truth, Beauty, Goodness and more!, Classical Christian Education

In the introduction to her book, The Core: Teaching Your Child the Foundations of Classical Education, Leigh Bortins makes a radical and disorienting statement that makes the book worth reading. She says, “This curriculum works for a student of any age, but that is a...

How to Read a Great Book

by Andrew
Sunday, 17 July, 2011
categories: Articles, Big Ideas: Truth, Beauty, Goodness and more!, Classical Christian Education

Before plays had acts and novels had chapters, people still had to figure out the form of the things they read. In the ancient world, writers seem to have treated the structure of their writing as a game. They used it to hide meanings and to give the reader clues to...

Is Your Writing Organic or Rational?

by Andrew
Tuesday, 17 May, 2011
categories: Articles, Big Ideas: Truth, Beauty, Goodness and more!, Classical Christian Education

In How to Write a Sentence Stanley Fish quotes this opening sentence from Laurence Sterne’s ”novel” Tristram Shandy: I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they...

To know God and to make Him known.