Then, a couple weekends back, my sister married a very awesome guy. I naturally had to write them a long philosophical discourse on the nature of relationships and love.

So, I hope you’ll forgive me if I devote this post the to topic of love. It’s not a homeschool-specific topic, but it’s one homeschoolers definitely have to deal with.

And there are few topics that are more important, in the end.

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I want to talk about romantic love specifically. I feel particularly compelled to talk about this kind of love because (a) I’m married, and (b) I teach college students.

As a married person I want to make sure I get love right. And as a teacher of college students, I get worried that they’re going to get love wrong.

I mean, have you ever listened to the songs about “love” that kids listen to, or seen the shows and movies about love that kids watch? You remember the songs you listened to and the shows/movies you watched when you were young, right? It’s essentially the same stuff: fun (for the most part), shallow (for the most part), and occasionally disturbingly bad.

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So, what is love, exactly?

I think love happens in three levels.

It begins as a desire, not as something you explicitly choose. Specifically, love begins as the desire to spend the rest of your life with someone, helping him/her to achieve his/her goals and to become as awesome as he/she can become.

That’s what falling in love means. It’s something that happens to you. You can’t help it, as it were. (But more on that later.)

And if that’s not what you desire, you haven’t fallen in love. You’ve fallen into something else, which may be perfectly fine, but isn’t love.

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The second (and deeper) level of love is the addition of commitment to desire.

Specifically, love becomes the desire and commitment to spend the rest of your life with someone, helping her/him to achieve her/his goals and to become as awesome as she/he can become.

This level is extremely important. This is where you shift from merely being in love with someone (which is a fine thing to be in, usually), to loving her or him.

This is the level where you engage not just the emotional/desiring side of yourself, but your full self — mind, emotions, soul, body, etc. — since you make a commitment to do whatever is involved in spending the rest of your life helping the other person to achieve his/her goals and to become as awesome as he/she can.

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The third (and perhaps deepest?) level of love is the acting out of your desire and commitment to spend the rest of your life with the other person, helping her/him to achieve her/his goals and to become as awesome as she/he can become.

Until you act out your love, your love isn’t fully actual. To actually love someone, you must act. (The word “actual” has the word “act” in it for a reason!)

And that means you must actually (a) do what is required to spend your life/time with the person you love, (b) do what is required to help him/her achieve his/her goals, and (c) do what is required to help him/her become as awesome as he/she can.

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But now we face two questions.

First, can you control whom you fall in love with?

Second, can you fall out of love?

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The answer to the first question is, “No, and yes.” What you find attractive depends upon your character and personality. You have the power to shape both your character and personality.

If you have a bad character — that is, if you are shallow and vindictive and immature — you’re going to be attracted by a certain type of person. If you work on improving your character, you’ll begin to be attracted by a different type of person.

So, your character determines who you’re going to desire to spend the rest of your life with, helping her/him to achieve her/his goals and to become as awesome as she/he can be. But you determine — and can change — your own character.

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The answer to the second question is, “Yes, but it doesn’t have to be a disaster.”

Love is one part desire, one part commitment, and one part action. The commitment in some sense is the completion or actualization of the desire, and the action is the completion and actualization of the commitment.

To “fall out of love,” I think, simply means losing the desire part of love. Desires are like emotions. They can be fickle. They can come and go. But the “heart” of love is in the commitment and action that actualize the desire, not in the desire itself.

If your desire flickers, therefore, I’d be willing to bet that continued commitment and action (which make love complete and actual) will bring the desire back to life.

And remember: While desire is the only part of love that you don’t control directly, you can control it indirectly by the way you shape your character. And you shape your character by the way you choose to act and think.

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So, that’s my theory about love.

What do you think?

-Micah Tillman

_{[Micah is a Mt. Sophia graduate who is working on his doctoral dissertation at The Catholic University of America. He also gets to teach philosophy (as a "teaching fellow"), which he loves.]}

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A country, in a sense, is just a large organization. Fortunately for us Americans, the large organization we call our country is basically stable and relatively decent.

It’s stable and decent enough, anyway, that we generally have the time and energy to think about the smaller organizations with which we have more personal and direct interaction. The fact that we do not have to spend all our time trying to create a massive change in our country’s organization, and can therefore spend some of our time trying to improve organizations like our churches, co-ops, and youth groups, is a blessing.

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Now, you’ll hear a lot of people talk about organizations as if they were organisms. They think of groups as entities or objects — something over and above the members that make them up.

I, in contrast, would propose we look at organizations as people making decisions togther.

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For instance, the church that my wife and I attend — and of which we are now both officially members — is an organization. Part of what makes it an organization is that all of its members make essentially the same decision every Sunday morning. We — each and every one of us — decide, some time around 10:30, to walk out of our houses or apartments, get in our cars, and drive in the direction of the church building.

Then, once we all get to the church building, we all make another decision: to go and sit in the pews. We then, for some reason or other, all decide — at the same time — to grab the hymnal in the “pocket” of the pew-back in front of us, and open to the same page. And, then we all decide to stand up and start singing (again: at the same time!).

It’s the weirdest thing.

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At any point in that process, each of us could make a different decision. Each of us could decide to go to a different building, or to stay home. Each of us could decide to stand facing various walls in different parts of the church, or to walk or run around, rather than sitting in the pews. Each of us could decide to turn to a different page in the hymnal, to stand up at different times, to speak, shout, or whistle rather than singing.

The reason that our church is an organization is that we all make the same set of decisions together at the same time. And there are certain decisions that members of our church tend to make — decisions about being friendly, about our attitudes toward other people, about taking food to people who are sick, about asking certain kinds of questions — that give our church its distinctive character.

If you wanted to change the “personality” of our church, therefore, you’d have to get us all — each and every one of us — to start making different (kinds of) decisions.

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Leaders are the people who can do this. Leaders are people who get people to make decisions together.

Different leaders have different approaches. Some leaders get people to make decisions by scaring or threatening them. Others get people to make decisions by offering a reward. Still others get people to make decisions by making those decisions themselves, acting as an attractive model for the others to imitate.

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If you like an organization in which you participate, then, ask yourself a few questions: “What are the decisions that we all — each and every one of us — make, and what is good about these decisions? Which persons do we all follow in making these decisions? How do those persons get us to make these decisions?”

Then, learn to celebrate those decisions, and to be grateful for the people who encourage others to make those decisions (whether they realize they’re encouraging others to do so or not).

And if you are uncomfortable with an organization you participate in, then ask yourself the same kinds of questions: “What are the decisions that we all — each and every one of us — make, and what is bad about these decisions? Which persons do we all follow in making these decisions? How do those persons get us to make these decisions?”

Then, figure out what decisions you all should be making, and think about ways in which you can encourage your fellow members to start making those decisions.

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Remember: If I’m right, an organization, or institution, or group is not some kind of impersonal being or force. If I’m right, an organization, or institution, or group is just two or more individual persons, each of whom is making a certain set of decisions with everyone else in the organization/institution/group.

-Micah Tillman

_{[Micah is a Mt. Sophia graduate who is working on his doctoral dissertation at The Catholic University of America. He also gets to teach philosophy (as a "teaching fellow"), which he loves.]}

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Really, they do. (However, the poor things usually don’t get to experience their reign because their philosophies catch on 10 years after they die.)

Every day, you are influenced by what philosophers have philosophized into place for you.

1) How did your doctor tell you about the virus you have? (and who else did he tell?)

2) How did the federal government decide whether to remain in Afganistan and Iraq?

3) How your local government officials decide about who and what to tax?

4) How did the local radio station decide which music to promote?

There is a philosophical thought pattern that underlies each of those decisions.

You have personal philosophies that drive you, even though you might not recognize it:

1) Who do you choose as friends?

2) Where do you go to church?

3) When do you loose your temper?

4) With what charities are you involved?

5) Where do you shop?

6) To what do you read/watch/listen?

I have been reading Hamlet’s Blackberry (developing a personal philosophy about intentional engagement/disengagement with the digital world.) You see- EVERYTHING has a philosophic underpinning.

If we are wise, we will examine our life, our ideas, our choices- and choose/be intentional about what we believe and do.

Socrates first said it: The unexamined life is not worth living.

Philosophers rule the world. How do you rule yourself?

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• Opting Out by Perry Mears II
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And things definitely were different because of Descartes. Philosophers before him thought you should start your explanations (of science, or theology, or art, or whatever) by beginning with God, or by beginning with the world. Descartes, on the other hand, thought you should begin your explanations with yourself. You’ve got to figure yourself out, and why you believe what you believe, before you can come to any firm conclusions about anything else. That’s what Descartes thought, anyway.

In many ways, all philosophy today comes from Descartes. It’s not that all philosophy today is Descartes’s philosophy, mind you. It’s that all philosophers have to respond to Descartes in one way or another. Even if you disagree with Descartes — even if you’ve left him behind — he is where you’re coming from. You only understand where you are and where you’re headed by pointing along the path back to Descartes, and ahead, away from him. As a philosopher today, you are part of a tradition, and that tradition, in many ways, begins with Descartes.

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Before I get to Descartes, however, I’ll be starting a new Sunday School series for the adults at my church (and our sister congregation across the street) on the book of Genesis. What better way to start the new year than with the book that starts the Bible? Before getting to Descartes on Monday, then, I’ll be talking about Moses on Sunday.

Genesis, of course, has had a bigger impact on the world than even Descartes. While all philosophers (and scientists!) today have gotten to where they are by “coming from” Descartes, most of the planet’s general population has gotten to where they are by “coming from” Genesis. They’ve gotten to where they are by accepting Genesis, or rejecting Genesis, or by reading it in one way rather than another. They’ve gotten to where they are by growing up in a culture whose main historical figures thought about the world as coming from — or as explicitly not coming from — the Creation that Genesis describes.

Wherever you turn, the idea that God created the world and humans — and therefore the idea that God should have some kind of say in the world and human life — is lurking in thebackground. Many people accept the idea. Many people reject it. But either way, we’re all responding to it somehow. We’re all part of a tradition, and that tradition begins, in many ways, with Genesis.

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What this means, of course, is that we’re all part of many different traditions all at once. I come from the Christian tradition, and within that, the Anabaptist tradition. But since I now study and teach at a Catholic university, I am in some important ways now part of the Catholic tradition within Christianity as well. I come from the American tradition, and within that, the “backwoods”/”country folk” tradition. But now that I work (and, for all intents and purposes, live) in our nation’s capital, I am also part of the city-living tradition.

And I could go on and on, naming the various traditions from which I come and of which I am now a part. For each of these traditions, I could ask, “Who started it, and where did it start?” In tracing the path of the tradition, back to its beginning, I might gain a little insight into the position I currently occupy. What does one have to do to get to where I am now, forming as I do a kind of intersection point of all these various traditions?

But I also might want to ask myself: What traditions do I want to start, here in this new year, and in what ways do I want people to be “coming from” me? That is, what kind of impact do I want to have on the people around me, such that they will have to respond to me? I mean, the people around me already do have to respond to me — but I have a choice about the occasions I provide for their responses. And I want to be the kind of person who provides good occasions (whether they be in the form of comments, or blog posts, or lectures, or smiles, or whatever).

Happy New Year!

-Micah Tillman

^{[Micah is a Mt. Sophia graduate who is working on his doctoral dissertation at The Catholic University of America. He also gets to teach philosophy (as a "teaching fellow"), which he loves.]}

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It’s Christmas Eve. For many years this was a day of torturous anticipation for me. I would be waiting eagerly to see what was in those boxes under the tree. But it wasn’t just the presents that mattered. I got to spend time with all of my cousins, aunts, and uncles. Yes, I actually enjoy spending holidays with family. I just happen to have the best family there is.

Christmas was always full of fun times! But the worst part was that it always had to end. I had to start school again. And the toys I got were never fun to play with for more than a week. My excitement was built up then brought down. I didn’t feel satisfied.

Then last year the Christmas cheer in my house was overshadowed by the death of a family member. I wondered how we could celebrate Christmas after the tragedy that had taken place. During that season, God taught me a lesson. We expect so much out of Christmas. We expect our families to come home. We expect to get a day off. We expect to get everything on our list. We expect everyone to get along. We expect the food to be good. We expect perfection. How many Christmases have we gotten it?

You see, our attitude toward Christmas is one of the signs that we were made for something better. We have this idea of the way things are “supposed to be.” Apples are supposed to be crisp and sweet. Steak is supposed to be tender and juicy. Christmas is supposed to be joyful and peaceful, and there’s supposed to be snow.

Naturally, when we place such high expectations on everything, we are constantly met with disappointments. The steak is overdone. The apple is soft and mushy. It sleets instead of snowing. What are we supposed to do about it? Just accept that life sucks and resolve to be miserable? Not at all! That’s not the way God wants us to live.

The proper attitude toward life in an imperfect world has two parts. The first part is found in Colossians 3: “Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things.” God has a wicked awesome home prepared for us. It’s called heaven. If you want to know what it’s like read the last chapter or so of Revelation. Yes, it’s poetic language, but it gives us an idea of how wonderful our next life will be. Everything you didn’t get in this life will be repaid tenfold in heaven. You’d have better luck trying to find all your gifts on Christmas eve than you would trying to find heaven on earth. As I learned in one of my college classes, this is called over-realized eschatology. If your wish is for “no more lives torn apart, and wars would never start, and time would heal all hearts” you’re going to have to wait for heaven.

On the other hand, we can still have joy now while we’re on the earth. The second part of our attitude is to appreciate the blessings we have in life. Sometimes we bite into an apple that’s just perfect, or we open a gift that is just so special. These are reflections of heaven. We tend to miss them because they are usually swallowed up by the worries, tragedies, and disappointments of life. Life is not joy-less. To think so is under-realized eschatology. We need to take note of the simple pleasures in life, and thank God for them. As Paul says in 1 Thessalonians “Be joyful always; pray continually; give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.”

So what are we made for? According to my professor, we were made for “now and not yet.” We should appreciate the gifts God has given us now and eagerly await the gifts he has yet to give us. I hope you get a chance to think about this during your Christmas festivities.

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In the first chapter of his book, The Varieties of Religious Experience, he writes:

In the end, it had to come to our empiricist criterion: By their fruits ye shall know them, not by their roots. (p. 34, in my edition; see here for an online edition)

He is, of course, using something Jesus said: A tree is known by its fruit. That is, you can tell what kind of person a person is, by observing how she or he lives.

The point William James is making is similar, though a little different. His point is that you know what something really is more by what it does, and the effects it has, than by studying “where it came from.” You know things more through their fruits than through their roots.

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Monday, you may know, is (or was, depending on when you read this), Labor Day here in America. What are the “roots” of Labor Day?

If you go to Wikipedia, you can read about them. Labor Day comes from a conflict between “Government” and “Labor,” in which employees of “Government” killed some members of “Labor,” and thus “Government” tried to appease “Labor” by creating a holiday for “them.”

But, you might ask, isn’t there already an international holiday for “Labor,” celebrated on May Day? Yes indeed, and this holiday is very important to communists. The “Government” didn’t want the American Labor Day to be associated with that, so they set American Labor Day to be celebrated in September.

Not exactly the best of roots for a holiday.

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But does anyone think about that stuff when they celebrate Labor Day today? What are Labor Day’s fruits?

Labor Day has become a final celebration to mark the end of summer and the beginning of a new school year (and a new sports season). Nobody thinks about it as a celebration of the division of society into the groups “Labor” and “Government,” or of the fact that the holiday started as copy of a communist holiday, just moved to a different date.

To condemn Labor Day because one thinks it has bad roots would be to ignore the good fruits it has come to have.

The same might be said for the question of the “roots” of the Christmas Tree and the dating of Christmas, the “roots” of saying “God bless you” to people who sneeze, the “roots” of engagement rings, and so on. Perhaps such things should be judged by their (actual) fruits in the present, rather than by their (actual or purported) roots in the past.

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If we tried to reject everything with questionable roots, we might find ourselves with nothing left to accept. We live in a flawed world, and everything, in some way or other, has something flawed in its history.

But that’s why one of our central missions is redemption; we “buy back” the things that the forces of misfortune and badness have taken — we, in our turn, take those things as occasions for making and doing good.

This is what we do when we donate money to disaster relief organizations, for example. A disaster is a situation that the forces of misfortune and badness have taken; but we “buy it back” (we redeem it) by using it as an occasion for doing good. We, in a small way, help to take the situation back for the forces of goodness.

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Now, we can’t redeem everything. Some things have such a flawed history that if we tried to take them up, we would end up producing bad fruit. Only God has the power to redeem such things, and our role is to pray that God does (and that we be available to help if and when God calls on us).

Other things, we could partially redeem — allowing them to produce good fruit — and yet they would continue to produce bad fruit as well. These things perhaps we should also leave alone — or rather, continually entrust to God to redeem (while remaining willing to join in the process of redemption should God call on us to do so).

But there are many things — perhaps more than most people realize — that we can redeem now with God’s help, turning them from things with damaged roots into things with good fruit. And Labor Day is one of those things.

So, my best wishes to you all as you help to redeem Labor Day by using it as an occasion for joy and goodness, and as you start the new school year!

-Micah Tillman

^{[Micah is a Mt. Sophia graduate who is working on his doctoral dissertation at The Catholic University of America. He also gets to teach philosophy (as a "teaching fellow"), which he loves.]}

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We philosophers are supposed to be able to deal with death. After all, Socrates — the father of Western Philosophy in general — said philosophy is the activity of preparing to die. Philosophy makes you the kind of person who knows the truth and can face death without fear.

Heidegger, on the other hand — who is the father of contemporary Continental Philosophy specifically — thought that the only way to live authentically is to face the finitude of human nature, which death represents.

While I’ve found Socrates and Heidegger helpful in different ways over the years — and while I found my philosophical training helpful over the past couple weeks — there are two things I’ve been even more grateful for while dealing with losing Mrs. Kitchin.

Those two things are rituals and communities.

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The Kitchin family and I have gone through a string of rituals, beginning with the bedside vigil, the final prayer, the crying-commiserating-and-comforting, the phoning of those who should know, the cleaning of the now-emptier home, the accepting of condolences, the accepting of food, the scheduling of viewing and funeral, the viewing and funeral themselves (which included the giving of eulogies, the placing of flowers, pallbearing, etc.), and so forth.

And the people who share our communities have gone through rituals as well. They’ve gone through the sending of flowers, the sending of condolence cards, the preparing of meals, the attending of the viewing, the attending of the funeral, the phoning to offer assistance, the offering of advice, and so forth.

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All of these things are rituals. They are events or practices or traditions that help us know what to do and how to act in a time that would otherwise leave us listless and confused. And we help each other get through the difficult time by instigating these rituals and going through them with each other.

If we lived in a different culture, of course, we’d have different rituals, and the people in our communities would help us by instigating and going through them with us. But that doesn’t mean the rituals are “all relative” or “not important.” In fact, it shows just how important having rituals in which to participate with the other members of your communities is. It’s so important, in fact, that people in every culture have come up with appropriate rituals for their own cultures.

Whatever the culture we live in, therefore, there is a collection of things it is “fitting and proper” to do — and having something fitting and proper to do together is a great gift. Sometimes it is comforting to know “what happens next,” or “what to do now,” to have other people know the same thing with you, and to have others recognize that you’ve done the right thing (the thing that was fitting and proper).

And it is a wonderful thing to have rituals that help us know how to show each other that we care, and that help us actually take care of each other.

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Even though we homeschool people tend to be willing to break with tradition — in that we are willing to leave behind the traditional school choices (”Public or private? Make your choice!”) and strike out on our own — we also tend to be good at forming communities and setting up traditions and rituals (co-op on Thursdays, choir on Mondays, fieldtrips once a month, going to x activity, meeting with y for portfolio reviews, preparing for the PSATs, etc.) that are fitting and proper for our homeschooling culture.

And while I’ve always been proud of us for our independence, I have a new appreciation of how good we are at “community and ritual.” Let’s keep that up.

^{[PS: I liked my mother's comment so much that I changed "ceremonies" to "rituals" on 08/07/10. "Ritual" is the word I was looking for, and "ceremonies" are a type of "ritual."]}

-Micah Tillman

^{[Micah is a Mt. Sophia graduate who is working on his doctoral dissertation at The Catholic University of America. He also gets to teach philosophy (as a "teaching fellow"), which he loves.]}

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From what? you might ask.

From our oppressors, we would respond.

The English? you ask. (Poor English people. Can you imagine them watching us celebrate being independent from them every year?)

Not really, no, we respond. After all, none of us were ever oppressed by England.

I mean, raise your hand: Have you ever been oppressed by an Englishman or -woman?

Didn’t think so.

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The 4th is not about our freedom from England. It’s about freedom from tyranny — from unjust, exploitative, illegitimate force and violence.

It’s about the day when the leaders of the thirteen “united States” (not, interestingly, the “United States”) said that there are certain fundamental truths that everyone can see — truths about people and governments and God and countries — and that anybody who violates those truths forfeits his (or her) authority to rule.

But notice that they claimed these were truths everyone could see.  And notice how they felt it necessary to explain their actions to the world by writing up a “Declaration.”

And notice that they didn’t declare war on the 4th. They simply claimed to be speaking the truth and explaining themselves.

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Now, the guys who wrote and signed the Declaration of Independence weren’t all good guys. But we can learn something from them, nevertheless.

The Declaration of Independence was an attempt to remind everyone of important truths (important truths they all already knew), to convince them that the government of England had violated those truths, and to convince them that the citizens of the thirteen American colonies were justified — because of those violations — in no longer seeing the government of England as their government.

The road to independence, in other words, begins with truth, reasoning, and argumentation.

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If you want to teach independence to your children, then, what must you do?

First, teach them to see truth.

Second, teach them to understand how others see the world.

Remember, the Declaration of Independence doesn’t appeal to truths that only Americans or Christians could see.  It appeals to truths that everyone could see. The Declaration of Independence tries to start its argument from “common ground.”

But even if you can’t find “common ground” with an opponent, you still need to understand how he or she sees the world.  You can’t help someone get from the wrong place to the right place if you don’t know where he’s coming from!

Third, teach them how to make a case, or construct an argument, that others will find convincing.

Remember, the job of the Declaration of Independence was to convince the rest of the world that the American colonists were right.  The Declaration isn’t a law that forced people to agree.  And it isn’t a declaration of war that threatened violence if they didn’t agree. Its job was to make a rational argument that rational people would find convincing.

Fourth, teach them how to write.

The Declaration is extremely well written. It wouldn’t have had nearly the force it’s had for 200+ years had it not been.

But also, the secret to the Declaration of Independence is John Locke’s Second Treatise of Civil Government.  Everyone had already read John Locke’s book, and been convinced by it.  All the Declaration had to do, then was to remind everyone of what John Locke had said about people and governments and God and countries, and then convince them that what Locke had said applied to the American situation.

John Locke’s book was a culture changer. Without it, there would have never been a Declaration of Independence.

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As homeschoolers, you have already declared your independence from the “normal” school system.  And that means you have the freedom to teach independence to your children.

The 4th of July is here to remind us not to let such opportunities go to waste!

-Micah Tillman

^{[Micah is a Mt. Sophia graduate who is working on his doctoral dissertation at The Catholic University of America. He also gets to teach philosophy (as a "teaching fellow"), which he loves.]}

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I was thinking, the other day, about the Classics. You all make your children read them during the school year, and maybe even over the summer. And I bet you’ve all heard some complaint to the effect of, “Why do we have to read this book? What’s so important about it?”

Where I teach philosophy, we are very much “into” the Classics.  We teach the Classic Philosophical Texts. That is our approach to teaching philosophy.

Other schools might focus on Classic Philosophical Problems, or Recent Philosophical Problems, or Contemporary Questions in Philosophy, or Historical Debates in Philosophy. And we do that too. It’s just our specialty is in teaching the Classic Texts.

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But why focus on classic books?  What do you tell your children?

Here’s some of my thoughts on the subject:

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The classics are, for the most part, very old, and very well-known. They’ve been popular for a very long time, in other words, and have been read by many, many historically-important people

When you sit down to read a classic book, therefore, you’re doing the same thing that countless other people have done before you, are doing right now, and will still be doing in the future.

You’re joining in an activity that spans the ages and the globe. You’re participating in an experience that is shared by thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of people across time and space.

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You’re having the same experience now as the George Washingtons, Winston Churchills, Abraham Lincolns, etc. of history had when you read Shakespeare today. You’re having the same experience now as Cicero and Julius Caesar and maybe even the Apostle Paul had when you read Homer.

When you pick up a Jane Austen novel, you’re joining with a whole sea of unseen others who have picked up the same novel. When you read a C.S. Lewis or J.R.R. Tolkein story, you’re living through the same events that many great people have lived through as they read the same book.

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When you read classic books, therefore, you’re helping to tie history and the world together. You’re participating in the same activities and experiences that many others have. The experience you have, and activity in which you engage, of reading the story is the same as the experience others have had, and the activity in which others have engaged, around the world and through the years.

Furthermore, when you read classic books, you’re becoming part of a tradition. You’re participating in something larger than yourself.

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And, when you read classic books, you’re enabling yourself to better understand the people who have shaped your world, because (a) you’ve now shared some of their experiences with them (the experience of reading the book you’re reading, and of living through the story with its characters), and (b) you now know the characters and plots and stories that helped them to see the structures in their world and to understand the events in their lives.

The stories we read and hear and watch begin to act as metaphors for the events in our lives. We begin to see our world through the stories we’ve experienced. The stories we’ve lived through help us to see the organization and structure of what we live through in the real world.

There’s an important sense, therefore, in which you cannot understand another person unless you understand the stories they see the world through.

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So, we read the Classics in order to participate in the connecting of different times and places with each other, in order to participate in a tradition larger than ourselves, and in order to better understand other people (especially those who have helped to shape our world).

But there are other reasons as well.

What do you think?

-Micah Tillman

^{[Micah is a Mt. Sophia graduate who is working on his doctoral dissertation at The Catholic University of America. He also gets to teach philosophy (as a "teaching fellow"), which he loves.]}

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Students’ Unique Abilities

We firmly believe that God has placed into each child unique and beautiful abilities. No two students are alike, but they are all placed here on purpose by a purposeful God. At MSA, we want to help our kids find and develop those gifts as they learn, love, pray, socialize, serve, and grow.

Creating a Culture for Christ

Our unified and clear purpose is to create a culture that will look like and advance Christ’s kingdom. As the students (and adults) grow, so will that culture. There will be a culture for Christ within each student. Then through those students will come a culture for Christ around them.

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• Mt. Sophia Academy- What is Our Mission?
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