After The LinkedIn TED Talk Bros Came to Classical Education

“You attend a classical education conference this summer and, while perusing the speaker biographies in the conference program, you come across the following:

“Harge Manning is the founder of the Diluvian Consortium, a group of Christian thought leaders who specialize in dynamic vision forwarding, cognitive missional flexibility, core value development, servant viral marketing ethics, and integrated ethno-mindful solution differentials. Under Harge’s leadership, the Diluvian Consortium has helped church ecosystems across the globe reposition themselves for optimal market/Gospel outreach. Harge owes his success to his ability to be comfortable being uncomfortable and his confidence in the Church’s antifragile entrepreneurship. He enjoys equipping tomorrow’s leaders today, energizing today’s leaders for tomorrow, and tomorrowing today’s energy for leaders. Harge is a member of many boards, groups, councils, panels, committees, and clubs. He is married to Desiree, who is the executive director of the Cross Wellness Initiative. They live in a heavily gentrified Houston neighborhood.”

You flip over a few pages to see what Harge is lecturing on. It’s a plenary session.

“Futureproofing the Dynamics of Your Vision’s Marketability by Harge Manning. Is your vision outfitted for the dynamics of marketability in a post-COVID world? In this engaging lecture, Manning offers strategies for vision-outfitting your institution so you can optimize the Kingdom’s next steps.”

There was a time when classical Christian education laughed at guys like Harge Manning—and yet I’d swear that guys like Harge have become an increasingly regular feature of the classical Christian world over the last ten years or so. Maybe Harge wasn’t interested in the movement when it was small, maybe we couldn’t afford Harge’s services when the movement was small, but by this point, I think it’s fair to say Harge has settled in. And not just at conferences.”

-from my latest for CiRCE

The Worst Super Bowl Halftime Show Of All Time

“The badness of the show is easy to see twenty-four years later, and yet it’s not exactly true that it has “aged poorly.” Raw meat ages poorly, but the 2000 Halftime Show was quite, quite rancid on the day it aired—and this was obvious at the time to anyone who had even a modicum of good taste.  The passage of time makes it easy for everyone to see the stupidity of stupid things, but a wise man can see that foolish things are foolish immediately. A fool judges a foolish thing foolish only after it becomes popular opinion. By the point a foolish thing is commonly thought foolish, though, it has already done its harm. The people who needed twenty-four years to see the 2000 Halftime Show was stupid are going to need another twenty-four years to see the stuff they like today is stupid.

The question, then, is this: how do you acquire the ability to see things here and now with the perspective that twenty-four additional years grants? How about the perspective which fifty more years grants? How about a hundred?”

-from my latest for CiRCE

Divine Justice

“[Subjects] want crimes to be punished, [citizens] want them prevented.”

-Rousseau

And why do subjects want crimes punished? Because a monarchy is an inherently religious form of government, and God Himself is far more concerned with punishing crimes than preventing them.

God has relatively little interest in crime prevention.

Teachers Are Fed Up With No-Consequence Discipline

“Why enforce attendance or discipline a child for talking out of turn when there’s a fight in the cafeteria? “We’ve got bigger fish to fry!” But if school staff do not hold the line on small fights, bigger fish come along. Highly successful charter schools adopt a “broken windows” approach to school order—even paying staff whose job it is to replace every burnt out lightbulb, wipe up every scuff on the floor, and reorder any school display. Sweating the small stuff communicates to students that school buildings are not places that tolerate disorder, and that instead they expect excellence from everyone who walks through their doors.”

-from an article lately out of the Fordham Institute (read it here)

On Worship & Idolatry

The average modern Christian’s understanding of worship is so vague and undefined, it isn’t helpful to talk about “worshipping the creator, not the creation.” It would be better (and more to the point) to speak of serving the creator or adoring the creator, not the creation.

Our vague understanding of worship has led to a vague understanding of idolatry, as well. When I hear homiletic use of the word “idolatry,” I find it is typically too high a standard or too low; in other words, “idolatry” is typically defined in such a way that nearly everything is idolatry or nearly nothing is. As such, we very rarely think ourselves guilty of idolatry–either because idolatry is too common and omnipresent a sin to worry about (given that many happy, successful people must necessarily be idolaters), or because idolatry is too esoteric and bizarre a sin for the average man to fear committing.

The USPS Is Terrible

I buy and sell things online on secondary platforms. In the last two months, the USPS has regularly taken three weeks or more to deliver packages that are supposed to arrive in two to five days.

Today, nineteen days after shipping it, a package I sent to Texas was delivered to a buyer and the contents had been completely destroyed en route. The buyer demanded a refund through the secondary platform, it was granted, and my claim on the insurance was denied. The package had taken more than seven days to arrive, which voids the warranty.

Not all that surprising the USPS posted a $6.5 billion loss in 2023.