BOOKS AND LETTERS Podcast

In 1947, the English writer Dorothy Sayers stood before an audience at Oxford and asked a question that continues to haunt modern education to this day. In some ways, the question has become the catalyst for the growth of classical Christian education over the past 30 years. “Do you often come across people,” she asked, for whom, all their lives, a ‘subject’ remains a ‘subject,’ divided by waterti...

Do you often come across people for whom, all their lives, a “subject” remains a “subject,” divided by water-tight bulkheads from all other “subjects,” so that they experience very great difficulty in making an immediate mental connection between, let us say, algebra and detective fiction, sewage disposal and the price of salmon, cellulose and the distribution of rainfall—or, more generally, betwe...

The Invitation, the Investment, and the Door This is the video where I ask you to make a decision. Over the past couple of weeks, I have shared five lessons on classical Christian education. I’ve also shared with you the crisis , the wisdom impoverishment that afflicts our modern generation, what actually changes in a person who recovers the reading life, and exactly how the six weeks of The Chris...

The Course, the Structure, and the Book In the first two videos I told you about the crisis : the profound impoverishment of wisdom in our modern age that afflicts even the most educated people in our society. And, I also talked about what actually changes in a person who recovers the reading life of a Christian Humanist. Today I want to show you exactly what we are going to do together over six w...

What Happens When Wisdom is Recovered I want to tell you about a former adult student of mine. I'll call him Mike. Mike came to me several years ago. He was a retired professional in his fifties, successful, and genuinely intelligent. He was fairly well read, politically engaged. He kept up with the news. He thought of himself as an educated person, and by every conventional measure, he was. But h...

There’s a paradox at the heart of modern life and I think you’ve probably felt it even if you haven’t had the words to explain it. We are, by nearly every metric and standard, the most educated generation in human history. Ours has issued more college degrees, distributed more information, and provided more access to more content than any people group or generation who have ever lived. Yet, we all...

Lesson 5:b Easing Yourself Into the Classical Christian Tradition in 15 Minutes A Day In lesson 5, I want to address a final matter essential to this whole series of lessons, the education of the parents or adults. In the first place, I don’t think it’s wise for parents who are educating their children classically to neglect the tradition themselves. Of course, it’s understandable that many parent...

Lesson 4: Measuring Success: Beyond Assessments, Achievements, and Accomplishments I want to ask you a question that I suspect no one involved in your child's education has ever directly asked you. What does success look like—not at the end of the school year, not at graduation, not when they enter college, not at their first job—but at forty-five? What does success look like at forty-five? What k...

Lesson 3: Consider the Alternative: The High Price of NOT Educating Children Classically Here in lesson three, I want to make an argument that might make you slightly uncomfortable. I'm going to make it anyway, because it's true — and because if we're being thoughtful, we'll recognize that the discomfort that comes with wrestling with this argument is itself instructive. Here is my argument: choos...

There is a word that has almost entirely lost its meaning in our culture, and I want to try to give it back to you before summer slips away into another season of busyness dressed up as rest. The word is leisure . Now, I know what you’re probably thinking: I know what leisure means. It means time off. Vacation. The weekend. And you wouldn’t be alone in thinking that—most people in our culture use...

Let me begin this lesson with a confession. When I first started working in Christian education—more than thirty years ago now—I made all three of the mistakes I’m about to describe. It wasn’t because I was a bad parent or a careless educator. I made these mistakes because I had not yet been taught to think differently. I hadn’t yet discovered, at least in any meaningful way, the older Christian i...

In episode 4 of the BOOKS AND LETTERS Podcast, I was privileged to chat with Curtis Miller, and discuss his journey from being a high school English teacher to becoming a full-time professional writer. C. M. Miller is a columnist, playwright, and kids writer who enjoys tackling books and ideas for a Christian-contrarian audience. He writes professionally for PragerU Kids but his writing has also a...

The BOOKS AND LETTERS podcast explores the fullness of what it means to live as a steward of words in this modern world, in an age dominated by fleeting trends and digital noise. It’s no secret that Western culture is fragmented, transient, and untethered from the language and ethical norms that once grounded society. Granted there has never been a univocal posture toward the perennial human quest...

The Consortium: A Journal of Classical Christian Education is currently accepting submissions for the Summer 2025 issue which will focus on writing and rhetoric in Classical Christian Education . If you would like to submit an article for consideration, please send it along with a short bio of yourself to submissions@theconsortiumjournal.com. Article submissions should be between 2000-6000 words;...