Hello All!
Tomorrow morning, bright and early (5am flight, pray for me) I am heading out to Pittsburgh, PA for the Repairing the Ruins Conference. Classical Christian educators from all over the United States, and beyond, will be showing up in record numbers to the annual conference of The Association of Classical Christian Schools. This year they will hear from keynote speakers like Albert Mohler, Rosaria Butterfield, Ben Carson, and Kyle Mann. They will also have numerous options for breakout sessions on various elements of classical pedagogy (teaching methodology) and how to teach more effectively in their classrooms and engage their students. You can see a full list of speakers and breakout sessions here.
Last but not least there is the exhibitor’s hall where various publishing houses, curriculum developers, colleges, and organizations involved with education can display their products and services. That’s where I will be this year! I am so pleased to be representing Study The Great Books at the conference this year and it is you who have made it possible! Your support and encouragement has fanned the flames of this project and now even more people will get to know about the new curriculum in development. This is an incredible opportunity to engage with more than 1,300 classical Christian educators and administrators and to gain more support and momentum. Please be praying that God would bless our time and effort at Repairing the Ruins and that our curriculum project would be received with favor and excitement.
It’s been a busy summer! I have printed and bound 125 study guides for the conference. The plan is to give them away to new subscribers who sign up while at the conference (as long as supplies last). In addition to this, work on my doctoral dissertation continues to advance well, our first STGB online hangout (a logic crash course) went great, just yesterday I recorded a new podcast episode for Tolle Lege with Joel Ellis on H. G. Wells’ Time Machine, the Beza Institute for Reformed Classical Education has just launched and I have accepted a role as Editor-in-Chief and Fellow of Classical Humanities, and I am also preparing for a student apologetics conference. Oh, and I am moving to a new house in the area at the end of the month. So, like I said, it’s been and continues to be a busy summer.
As such the volume of articles on CCE and new study guide material has slowed a bit but I want to assure you things are moving forward strongly. Here are some things you can do if you are craving more Great Books content.
Listen to the backlog of podcast episodes from Tolle Lege discussing great books.
Episode #1 C. S. Lewis’ Introduction to Athanasius’ On the Incarnation (Part 1)
Episode #2 C. S. Lewis’ Introduction to Athanasius’ On the Incarnation (Part 2)
Episode #3 Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book
Episode #4 Lewis Lowry’s The Giver
Episode #5 Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol
Episode #6 C. S. Lewis’ Abolition of Man
Episode #7 will be out soon on H. G. Wells’ Time Machine and we have decided that we are going to do Beowulf next for Episode 8. Our podcast can also be found on iTunes and all major podcasting apps.
Sign up for a summer online hangout and discuss a great short work of literature.
We have four more hangouts scheduled for this summer season and all of them are quick reads and tons of fun. The next hangout, on Plutarch’s life of Romulus, is a week from today but that is plenty of time to read the text and be ready for our discussion. After that will be Gilgamesh, then Beowulf, and we will end the summer with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. You can go HERE to learn more about dates and content and to sign up.
There is no time like the present to upgrade to a paid membership and dive into the growing number of great books study guides.
Whether you are a teacher, parent, or just like to read great literature and would like to go deeper, the STGB study guides are a great resource for digging deeper into great books. Because of the Repairing the Ruins Conference I am offering the deepest discount I’ve done to date on paid memberships. Upgrade to paid now and gain access to PDF study guides (which come with additional study/teaching tools over and above the free online versions) and you can sign up for as many online hangouts as you’d like to participate in. By upgrading to a paid subscription you are not only getting access to great material (with more content being added all the time) but you are also supporting an endeavor to reinforce the classical Christian education movement with a high quality and fully integrated classical humanities curriculum which will always be faithful to Scripture and socially conservative. You can learn more about the project HERE.
Thanks again for being a subscriber, at any level, to Study The Great Books! I appreciate your prayers and shares as this ministry grows.
Soli Deo Gloria,
Jacob Allee