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"Articles on Conservatism"
In considering how the imagination of a child is shaped, we have discussed parental piety, parental roles in the home, routines, rituals, family worship, corporate worship, music, poetry, literature, the plastic arts, the Christian tradition, and language itself. When considered together, shaping the imagination is not an activity here or there, but the bulk of [...]
Continue Reading →To understand reality, a child must think. Thinking that brings understanding is not the thinking that a cow does when it notices a car passing its pasture. It is the kind of thinking about ideas. To think about ideas, a child must know language. Language is the technology of thought.
Language, as we are using it [...]
Continue Reading →No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of æsthetic, not merely historical, [...]
Continue Reading →Non-literary and non-musical arts powerfully shape the imagination. Since the media triumph of television and film, these arts have taken a back seat. Only art aficionados seem to go to galleries anymore, and the popular use of this kind of imaginative work has become an almost exclusively decorative or utilitarian one. Regardless, such works [...]
Continue Reading →When we discuss the Christian imagination, people tend to think of fantasy, story-books and films. Those parents who agree that the imagination ought to be shaped often think in two directions: limit the SNVL, and find ‘good Christian themes’. That is, cut out (or down) the Sex-Nudity-Violence-Language element, and find stories that seem to preach [...]
Continue Reading →To shape a child’s religious imagination means teaching him to rightly understand, use, and judge the arts. For a Christian parent, music is at the top of the list of the arts to be taught. Music is commanded in worship (Eph 5:19, Col 3:16), commended for worship (Ps 150), and has perhaps the greatest power [...]
Continue Reading →When it comes to shaping a child’s imagination – that part of him that will make sense of ultimate reality – little is more crucial than the arts. Music, poetry, literature, the plastic arts and theatre reach the imagination directly and shape it profoundly.
Unfortunately, many Christian parents have a concept of the [...]
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