I was getting really tired of not being able to add things using script, so I’ve moved: Ordinary Saint on Blogger. Please note that the address is now anordinarysaint instead of just ordinarysaint, and update those bookmarks!
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See you there!
An excerpt from the article by Lisa Russell:
I can’t believe I am writing an article about socialization. The word makes my skin crawl. As homeschoolers, we are often accosted by people who assume that since we’re homeschooling, our kids won’t be “socialized.” The word has become such a catch phrase that it has entirely lost any meaning.
The first time I heard the word, I was attending a Catholic day school as a first grader. Having been a ‘reader’ for almost 2 years, I found the phonics and reading lessons to be incredibly boring. Luckily the girl behind me felt the same way, and when we were done with our silly little worksheets, we would chat back and forth. I’ve never known two 6 yr. olds who could maintain a quiet conversation, so naturally a ruler-carrying nun interrupted us with a few strong raps on our desk. We were both asked to stay in at recess, and sit quietly in our desks for the entire 25 minutes, because “We are not here to socialize, young ladies.”
Those words were repeated over and over throughout my education, by just about every teacher I’ve ever had. If we’re not there to socialize, then why were we there? I learned to read at home. If I finished my work early (which I always did,) could I have gone home? If I were already familiar with the subject matter, would I have been excused from class that day? If schools weren’t made for socializing, then why on earth would anyone assume that homeschoolers were missing out?
As a society full of people whose childhood’s were spent waiting anxiously for recess time, and trying desperately to “socialize” with the kids in class; It is often difficult for people to have an image of a child whose social life is NOT based on school buddies. Do you ever remember sitting in class, and wanting desperately to speak to your friend?
Now…flash forward to ‘real life.’ Imagine the following scenes:
Your employer is auditing the Inter-Office Email system and comes across a personal note between you and a coworker. You are required to stand at the podium in the next sales meeting to read it aloud to your coworkers. The police knock on your door, and announce that because you and your neighbor have gotten so close, they’re separating you. You must move your home and your belongings to the other side of town, and you may only meet at public places on weekends.
You’re sitting at a booth waiting for a coworker to arrive for a scheduled lunch date. Suddenly a member of upper management sits down across from you and demands your credit cards. When your friend arrives, you just order water and claim you’re not hungry, since he stole your lunch money.
You’re applying for a job and in an unconventional hiring practice, you are made to line up with other applicants, and wait patiently while representatives from two competing companies take their pick from the lineup.
You’re taking your parents out for an anniversary dinner. After you find a table, a waiter tells you that seniors have a separate dining room, lest they “corrupt” the younger members of society.
You go to the grocery store only to find that since you are 32 years old you must shop at the store for 32 year olds. It’s 8 miles away and they don’t sell meat because the manager is a vegetarian, but your birthday is coming up and soon you’ll be able to shop at the store for 33 yr. olds.
You’d like to learn about aviation history. You go to the library and check out a book on the subject only to be given a list of ‘other subjects’ that you must read about before you are permitted to check out the aviation book.
You’re having a hard time finding what you need in the local department store. The saleslady explains that each item is arranged alphabetically in the store, so instead of having a section for shoes, you will find the men’s shoes in between the maternity clothes and the mirrors.
Your cable company announces that anyone wishing to watch the Superbowl this year must log on a certain number of hours watching the Discovery Channel before they can be permitted to watch the game.
In a group project, your boss decides to pair you up with the person you don’t ‘click’ with. His hope is that you’ll get learn to get along with each other, regardless of how the project turns out.
These absurd examples were created to point out how absolutely ridiculous the idea of ‘socializing’ in schools is. Many people had a friend who they stayed friends with all through grammar school. WHY? Because their names were alphabetically similar, and they always ended up in line with each other. As an adult, have you ever made friends with someone simply because your names were similar? How long would such a friendship last and how meaningful would it be, providing you had nothing else in common?
Tagged education, homeschool, socialization, unschooling
I’m one of those people that doesn’t wait to cross a bridge until I come to it. I try to picture features of the bridge, design tests for determining the soundness of construction, etc. That’s why, as a lifelong learner and educator, I’m already researching different educational options for my Loveyou’s and my unborn children.
I believe that how we learn shapes what we learn, and subsequently, how we see the world. I’m not making a secret of the fact that I abhor the current state of public schools and testing; and I don’t believe one should need to pay large amounts of money for their children to have a top-notch education, either. By top-notch, I mean one in which: peers and mentors instill a passion for learning through self-directed projects; rankings are irrelevant; self-esteem is healthy; and family bonds remain strong. You’ll notice I have no interest in dividing education into particular subjects. Life isn’t segregated. Why should learning be? Living is learning.
My philosophy has brought me, a former preschool teacher, to the concept of unschooling as an option. The wikipedia definition is as follows:
Unschooling is a range of educational philosophies and practices centered on allowing children to learn through their natural life experiences, including child directed play, game play, household responsibilities, work experience, and social interaction, rather than through a more traditional school curriculum. Unschooling encourages exploration of activities led by the children themselves, facilitated by the adults. Unschooling differs from conventional schooling principally in the thesis that standard curricula and conventional grading methods, as well as other features of traditional schooling, are counterproductive to the goal of maximizing the education of each child.
The term “unschooling” was coined in the 1970s and used by educator John Holt, widely regarded as the “father” of unschooling. While often considered to be a subset of homeschooling, unschoolers may be as philosophically estranged from homeschoolers as they are from advocates of conventional schooling. While homeschooling has been subject to widespread public debate, little media attention has been given to unschooling in particular. Popular critics of unschooling tend to view it as an extreme educational philosophy, with concerns that unschooled children will lack the social skills, structure, and motivation of their peers, especially in the job market, while proponents of unschooling say exactly the opposite is true: self-directed education in a natural environment makes a child more equipped to handle the “real world.”
I still have tons of practical application questions, but I’m excited by the prospect. I may post more comments and/or resources later.
There’s a church down the street from my house for sale, and they have electronic signage saying so. Being a church, they also promote peace. Unfortunately, (and hilariously) they inadvertently put those two pieces together on the sign, so it reads: Peace on earth for sale. I bet beauty pageant contestants will be anxious to put in a bid.
When I first started this blog, my goal was to write and/or post content every day. Yeah. Those of you who know me best are probably laughing. But I REALLY wanted to be disciplined and consistent. Then…I wasn’t. Life happened, and I don’t even remember why I skipped a few days. Then the house-buying/fixing happened, and I felt justified in missing a few weeks.
Now, I realize that I won’t write every day. I was trying to do it for an audience, not for myself. I need to tame my “disease to please.” Plus, trying to update daily adds too much stress and pressure on to a life that is about to get even busier. My seminary classes begin in less than two weeks, and having gone through grad programs twice before, I can tell you that I won’t have oodles of time to post.
BUT…
I will post when I have something to say, theologically-related or not (since God is in everything, IMHO). So please keep checking in. I have not forsaken you.
In love and laughter,
Stacy (ordinarysaint)
Part 3 of 6 from Emergent Church Road Trip with Tony Jones and Trucker Frank.
From The Huffington Post:
Of all the characters who appear in the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ birth, the “Three Wise Men” are by far the most fascinating. Even someone who has never cracked open a Bible is very likely to know about the Wise Men, the star they followed and the gifts they brought to the infant Jesus on the first Christmas. But the story of these figures is found only in Matthew among the four canonical Gospels, and leaves many questions unanswered. Who were these mysterious foreigners? Where exactly did they come from? What was their star? And were there even three of them, since Matthew never gives a specific number, only tells us that there were three gifts?
Many early Christian writings attempted to provide answers to these questions, but one stands out as truly exceptional. Known as the Revelation of the Magi, it is a complex, rich, and strange narrative that purports to be the Wise Men’s personal testimony about the birth of Jesus. According to this writing, the Wise Men (or better, Magi) are mystical sages living at the eastern edge of the world, guarding an ancient prophecy about a coming star that will signify the birth of God in human form. The appearance of the star, their miraculous journey to Bethlehem, and what became of them afterwards — all of these events are presented in vivid detail in the Revelation of the Magi. There are no other early Christian writings that provide such a complete explanation of these mysterious figures.
My dissertation, completed in 2008, was the first English translation and study of this intriguing apocryphal Christian text. The newly released HarperOne edition of the Revelation of the Magi includes my fully annotated translation, along with a new introduction and conclusion designed for a more general readership. As a scholar, I feel incredibly fortunate to have stumbled upon such an intriguing and neglected text. I do not claim, however, to have “discovered” it, since that makes it sound as if I unearthed it from the sands of Egypt. In reality, it was sitting on a shelf in the Vatican Library, waiting for someone to pay closer attention to it. This should serve as a reminder to biblical scholars: important — even revolutionary — texts may be not truly be “lost” at all, but simply languishing in a library or a monastery, hidden in plain sight.
As a newly translated apocryphal Christian writing, the Revelation of the Magi will surely receive attention mostly for what it tells us about the Magi (or, to speak more precisely, what early Christians thought about them). But here, I would like to explore what this writing says about the scope of Christ’s revelation to the world. At first glance, the text seems to display a much more tolerant attitude toward non-Christian religions than what is found in other early Christian writings. But how tolerant is it, actually? Does it still ultimately claim Christianity to be the only path to salvation?
Before addressing such questions, let me explain part of the story in a bit more detail. In my very brief summary of the plot above, I left out a crucial detail about the Magi’s star. When their star finally appears, it descends from heaven and transforms into a small, luminous human being. It is not quite a star, and not exactly human either, but something else — a star-child, if you will. Although the text never explicitly identifies this being as Christ, his words to the Magi and the overall narrative make this point clear. The Magi, naturally, rejoice that their long-awaited prophecy has finally come to pass. Surprisingly, however, the star-child tells them that his epiphany to them is only one small part of his revelation to the people of the world:
“And I am everywhere, because I am a ray of light whose light has shown in this world from the majesty of the Father, who has sent me to fulfill everything that was spoken about me in the entire world and in every land by unspeakable mysteries, and to accomplish the commandment of my glorious Father, who by the prophets preached about me to the contentious house, in the same way as for you, as befits your faith, it was revealed to you about me.”
Further statements by Christ, the Magi, and even God himself reinforce this conception of Christ’s boundless revelation throughout the world. In sum, the Revelation of the Magi contends that Christ is actually the hidden source of all or most of humanity’s religious systems. Therefore, according to this text, non-Christian religions do not actually exist, since Christ pervades them all.
One does not have to be an expert in early Christian literature to recognize just how unusual and extraordinary this text’s attitude toward other religions is. Although there are Christian churches and organizations that have made great contributions to inter-religious dialogue, it still remains true that traditional Christian thought rejects the validity of all other religions. The dominant attitude for much of the last two thousand years has been that of Jesus’ words in John 14:6, still frequently quoted in Christian conversations about other religions: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”
In the earliest days of the Christian movement, there were two main ways of conceptualizing the gods of other peoples: they were demonic beings, or they were the products of human imagination. Neither of these outlooks seem to have been part of Jesus’ teaching (see the intriguing story in Mark 9:38-40); instead, they were a standard feature of Judaism that the first Christians simply took over. In the second century, some philosophically-minded Christians allowed for the possibility that a few pagan luminaries, such as Socrates and Plato, were partly inspired by Christ. But such Christians were just as firm that these previews of Christ were quite vague and limited in comparison with the full revelation in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.
So, the outlook of the Revelation of the Magi goes far beyond what any other Christians of the time thought about other religions. In fact, its view seems rather comparable to the notion of “anonymous Christians” developed by Karl Rahner, one of the greatest Catholic theologians of the twentieth century and a key architect of Vatican II. In a nutshell, Rahner believed that non-Christians who diligently pursued their own paths to enlightenment or salvation were recipients of God’s grace.
Yet Rahner’s theory has encountered significant criticism, and not just from fundamentalist Christianity. Liberal Christian theologians such as Hans Küng and John Hick have found the idea of “anonymous Christians” to be condescending. After all, how many Buddhists, Muslims, or atheists do you know who would appreciate being told that they were actually worshipers of Christ without realizing it?
The same problem also potentially hampers the effectiveness of the Revelation of the Magi’s theology. For it is absolutely clear, despite the text’s steadfast avoidance of the names “Jesus” and “Christ,” that the being whom the Magi encounter is the same one who appears in the Gospels of the New Testament.
Yet there is another way of reading the Revelation of the Magi that may yield a message that is more pluralistic. It is possible to argue that just because the Revelation of the Magi presents the Magi’s star-child as the Christ of Judeo-Christian tradition, this does not necessarily mean that the text views these “Christian” qualities as essential and definitive for the identity of this divine being. Put more simply, the text may no more understand this being to be intrinsically “Christ” than to be intrinsically “Krishna” or “Buddha” or “Lao Tzu.” In such a reading, the star-child would simply express itself in whatever a given culture values and comprehends, without privileging one of these revelations over another.
Of course, this alternative interpretation may not at all be what the text intends of its readers (though there are some very influential literary theorists who would say that what the author of a text meant is irrelevant, and that the reader is the one who really makes the meaning). But the very fact that such an interpretation is possible is an indication of the theological complexity of this text, and part of the reason this text is so fascinating.
At the very least, the Revelation of the Magi is an important and thoughtful exception to most early Christian attitudes toward other religions. Moreover, it is a narrative that embodies, I believe, a key idea of the Advent and Christmas season. Perhaps the key watchword of Advent is “mystery,” a belief that God is at work in the world, but a realization that God’s work is ultimately beyond human comprehension. In fact, one early Christian theologian says that the coming of Christ into the world is one of the great mysteries of the faith — and the birth of a child, any child, is indeed an event filled with awe, hope, and mystery.
Evidently, Heaven is just one long David Lynch dream sequence…
Stumble It! 
Ordinary Saint 