Each year, New Aberdeen students pore over a single work of literature from the classical Christian tradition. This fall, they are becoming well acquainted with John Milton’s Paradise Lost: Of Man’s First Disobedience, and the Fruit Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tast(e) Brought Death into the World, and…
This quip in classical education does not accurately express the educational goals. According to many of its proponents, classical education teaches students “how to think, not what to think.” This axiom juxtaposes the tendency in modern education to indoctrinate students into an ideology without offering them time-tested tools to interact with ideas on their own….
Something peculiar is brewing in higher education. Enrollment trends are shifting as four-year colleges are declining. In fact, high school grads are skipping tertiary education altogether. What caused these changes? Ultimately, the flaws in traditional higher education are plentiful, even at Christian colleges. Substance abuse. Sexual licentiousness. Ideological indoctrination. Antisemitism and other forms of racism….
When I was in graduate school, I strolled through our church’s cemetery each Sunday before worship. I reveled in the tangible connection to previous generations of believers. But one plot haunted me. Rev. Joseph Wilson was a staunch nineteenth-century Southern Presbyterian minister who preached at First Presbyterian Church in Columbia. His son, Woodrow, spent his…
Last weekend I watched The Return to the Hiding Place, a film tracing college students’ role in the Dutch Resistance during World War II. The movie contains a powerful scene in which a German officer confronts and threatens the student body president. The Nazi’s dictum struck a chord: “As goes the will of the students,…
He is currently writing a Systematic Theology as well as a Doctrine of God for Baker Academic. He is the author of Simply Trinity: The Unmanipulated Father, Son, and Spirit(Baker), which won the Christianity Today Book of the Year award in theology and ethics. He is also the author of many other books such as The Reformation as…
“None of these benefits of a classical education are more basic to ministry in the Church than the graces and gifts of Christ. But they can be the means that the Spirit of Christ uses to better equip the preacher, pastor, and churchman for his noble task.”
The DEI movement is neither “classical,” in that it promotes values that are contrary to traditional Western civilization, nor “Christian,” in that it is necessarily discriminatory based on such factors as race, gender, and unbiblical sexual preferences (e.g. Gal. 3:28; Rom. 1:26-27). DEI threatens the integrity of the CCE programs because it undermines the West’s legitimate cultural accomplishments and the Judeo-Christian values that underline them.
When educators intentionally omit God from the classroom for the alleged purpose of moral neutrality, another organizing principle and telos will necessarily fill the resulting vacuum. Many Christians have naively accepted what they thought was agnosticism in their educational models, but it turns out to be much worse.
Join us for a day of (re)discovery, where you can explore New Aberdeen, a brand new classical Christian college that is passionate about pursuing truth, goodness, and beauty in the Southeast.