I’d like to do something a little odd. I’d like to explain why I always have my shirt untucked at school. I’m about to graduate, I don’t have much to lose in speaking plainly with you people, so I’m going to do it. No doubt, you people have wondered why it’s necessary to tell me […] The post A High School Boy Explains Why He Keeps Untucking His Uniform Shirt appeared first on CiRCE Institute ..read more

A student bends down to shuffle through his backpack for an assignment, only to find papers out of place, pencils missing, and the blood of his peanut butter and jelly seeping through canvas fabric. Zoom out. At a semester training, a teacher is asked to reflect upon why he teaches. He mulls swiftly through the […] The post Scalar Harmony: Institutional Reflections on Mind, Body, and Soul appeared first on CiRCE Institute ..read more

In October of 1939, at St. Mary’s Church in Oxford, C.S. Lewis spoke to an audience of undergrads who were questioning the futility of a college education in the midst of a country at war. To them, attending lectures and writing papers bordered on frivolity and selfishness when their fellow countrymen were fighting, not only […] The post Lessons from Lewis’s “Learning In War-Time” appeared first on CiRCE Institute ..read more

At the crucial moment in Shakespeare’s Henry V, the titular king does something that very few “servant leaders” are capable of doing: he delivers a rousing speech. On the morning when the English are to fight the French at Agincourt, Henry overhears his cousin Westmoreland complaining about how few men they have. The English are […] The post Against Servant Leadership appeared first on CiRCE Institute ..read more

Recently, I concluded my first proper reading of G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy. Exploring the whole of Chesterton’s thinking and argument, I was repeatedly struck by how much Chesterton detests modernity. Modernity for Chesterton is obstinate, an oddity that isolates itself from the rest of history, contradictory, and empty. As I watched him tear down modernity, I […] The post Unmodernizing Ourselves appeared first on CiRCE Institute ..read more

It is a more common fear among Christian high school students than you might think. In the last ten years, I have regularly encountered Christian teenagers who worry that heaven will either be boring or that it won’t be nearly as interesting as life on earth. This was also a worry of mine when I […] The post Talking With Teens About Whether Heaven Will Be Boring appeared first on CiRCE Institute ..read more

“Only a woman can teach girls what it means to be a woman…” (Sax, Girls on the Edge, p. 231) Shortly before I commenced my teaching career back in 2017, it was recommended that I peruse the writing of Leonard Sax, MD, Ph.D., a New York Times best-selling author whose work in researching and documenting […] The post The Blind Leading the Blind…Over a Cultural Cliff appeared first on CiRCE Institute ..read more

Some of my most treasured memories with my children involve me or my husband reading to our wide-eyed brood, sometimes piled on a chair meant for two but holding four, sometimes sprawled out on a sheepskin in front of a roaring fire in midwinter. The stories that have captivated us most are familiar titles, tales […] The post Helping Struggling Readers Access the Classics: 3 CiRCE Resources appeared first on CiRCE Institute ..read more

Many classical Christian classrooms violate an obscure law about Sabbath rest found in Deuteronomy 14:21: “You shall not boil a young goat in its mother’s milk.” The mother goat’s milk exists to nourish her kid, not boil it to death. Likewise, a classical Christian classroom exists to nourish the souls of students with virtue and […] The post Less is Less and That is the Point appeared first on CiRCE Institute ..read more

The day before our seniors boarded the bus for Europe, their 12th-grade humanities teacher read them an excerpt from Allan Bloom’s 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind. In it, Bloom writes: “A trip to Florence or to Athens is one thing for a young man who hopes to meet…his Socrates in the Agora, […] The post Only a Tourist appeared first on CiRCE Institute ..read more