—
by
CONTINUING IN THE WORD
Perspectives on Homeschooling and Classical Christian Education from Scholars Online
Latest Posts
-
December 4: The Mary Celeste
One of the books I remember reading long ago was Patricia Lauber’s Famous Mysteries of the Sea. You can still find used copies of it for under ten dollars. It included a description of the disappearance of the Waratah, a…
-
December 3: The Shape of the Earth
Anders Celsius shows up on today’s list of events, although it is neither the anniversary of his birth nor death, but of an event where he played a minor but crucial role. You may know the Celsius temperature scale from…
-
December 2: Chromatius
December 2 is the feast of Chromatius, bishop of Aquileia in Italy, who died in 406. He is one of those minor early Church Fathers who don’t get a lot of press, and he shows up in only in the…
-
December 1: Anna Komnene
When I was in grammar school, I read a lot of biographies of men and women from different countries and time periods. While women frequently faced specific prejudices because they were women, men faced similar prejudices because they were poor,…
-
November 30: Gregory of Tours
I like Gregory of Tours. His feast is November 17, but I opted to talk about Möbius that day, so we’ll consider Gregory today, on the anniversary of his birth, A.D. November 30, 539. Students at Scholars Online have the…
-
November 29: Anthony Browne
For today: Anthony Browne, First Viscount Montagu, born Nov 29, 1528. He’s important to us as an example of the man who is a member of the loyal opposition. Anthony Browne was the eldest son of a knight of considerable…
-
November 28: The Royal Society
In the 1640s, a group of natural philosophers led by Robert Boyle exchanged correspondence and met informally to discuss scientific ideas. Influenced by Francis Bacon’s empirical emphasis in the “new science”, he described in his essays and his New Atlantis,…
-
November 27: Clovis I
This is rather long, but bear with me. For the past month, I’ve been exploring topics inspired by the lists of events, births, or saints for the day in Wikipedia and the Britannica, trying to see whether one or another…
-
November 26: Hermits and Contemplation
In the Roman Catholic and Orthodox traditions, today is the feast day of several saints who were hermits: St. Stylianos of Paphlagonia (fifth century), and Alypius the Stylite and Basolus of Verzy (both seventh century). Regardless of your views on…
-
November 25: Isaac Watts
Today is the commemoration, in the Lutheran and Anglican traditions, of the death of Isaac Watts in 1748. Regardless of your religious persuasion, if you have been in the United States or Canada or Great Britain at Christmas, you’ve run…
-
November 24: Lucy
On November 24, 1974, two anthropologists working in Ethiopia’s Afar Depression discovered bones from the skeleton of an a hominin, a human-like biological classification group. In particular, this skeleton appeared to be a member of the Australopithecus afarensis subgroup. Only about…
-
November 23: Areopagitica, or Free Speech
In 1644, on November 23, in the midst of England’s Civil War, John Milton published a pamphlet entitled “Areopagitica”. It is a defense of freedom of speech, and an eloquent argument for the fundamental role of civil discourse and rational…