A few years ago I picked up J. P. Moreland’s Love Your God with All Your Mind (referral link). It was published in 1997, and is a little bit dated in its lack of references to social media and smartphones. Otherwise, it’s been a helpful look at the role of intellectual growth in the life…
I mentioned that I barely read anything over my family vacation last week. It’s too easy to fall away from a good habit – reading before bed, reading in spare time, etc – and the reading rut followed me home. I can only justify reading so many detective novels, as good as they are at…
Last week my husband and I took a six day/five night trip to Kentucky – without the kids. One could be forgiven for thinking we took it easy, rested, and relaxed. Instead, we hiked about 23 miles over three days, in hot and humid weather. We drank lots of water. Despite all the sweat and…
Charlotte Mason advocated for children to receive a broad and generous education. While we, as educators, see the importance of setting aside planned, structured time to give our children a ‘feast’ of ideas, it can be more challenging to partake as a mother. There is a tension between the practical demands on our time and…
From the last two principles, we see that we have a will, a capacity to make choices about the ideas we accept or reject, and that we also have reason, which justifies the ideas we accept. This brings us to Charlotte Mason’s nineteenth principle: The main responsibility that we have as persons is to accept…
From the last post in the Mother Culture Roadmap, we learned that the will is our means of choosing to do what is right, and that it is easily fatigued. We often try to reason with ourselves in order to work up our will to do the right thing, but this process usually wears us…
In Charlotte Mason’s fourth volume, Ourselves, she describes a country called Mansoul. This country is full of potential – there are fields, natural resources, cities with libraries and art museums. But bounty is not guaranteed. The success of the country depends upon the government, which could just as easily squander its many assets as it…
Mother culture is about the pursuit of education for ourselves. We recognize that ‘education’ is not something we finished years ago. It’s not something our kids need to go through before they hit adulthood. If education is about the formation of our character, then we are still on the journey, pursuing the same goal as…
Does reading broadly, from several living books, on a frequent basis, sound overwhelming? Or to put in another way, does the goal of educating yourself seem so distant that you are reluctant to begin? If we still think of learning as cramming for an exam, answering multiple choice questions, highlighting, and rereading the same chapter…
Once we have brought together a collection of living books that widen our interests, and have carved out a bit of time to read them, what do we do next? How can we engage with our reading in such a way that we are changed people when we put the book down? These questions are…