Wednesday, January 29, 2014

Daily Links 1-29-14

In today's edition: a road trip any baseball fan would love to take, re-reading The Screwtape Letters, the many ways to educate a child, and more.

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The ideal road trip for any baseball fan would be to visit every ballpark. But imagine visiting all 30 parks in 30 days. Will Leitch figured out how to do it to start out the 2014 season. Looks like a terrific trip to me.

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What do you do when disillusionment sets in? It's bound to happen to everyone at one time or another. Some very practical tips on how to deal with the all too real crises of faith.

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Aaron Armstrong on re-reading The Screwtape Letters:

When I first came to faith, one of the first authors I read was C.S. Lewis. I’d loved Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe as a child, and had read some of the other books in the series, so when I found out he was a Christian, I was pretty darned excited. 
The thing I noticed about Lewis’ theological work in contrast to his fiction, is it tends to be slow-burn material. The kind of stuff that, if you rush through it, you’ll miss something very important. 
In other words, re-reading is necessary.

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Do you want to be someone or do something? Lessons from the life of John Boyd.

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Rod Dreher: There are many ways to educate a child.

We always wanted to try homeschooling, but when our firstborn became of school age, we put him in kindergarten in Dallas, and then in school, just to see how he would do. Because of his Asperger’s, and the accompanying sensory processing disorder, he couldn’t handle it. So we had to embrace homeschooling because our son needed us to. I say “we,” but really, it was 99 percent Julie. It was she who threw herself into researching Matt’s condition, consulting with experts, and working, through trial and error, to find programs that worked for him. It was, and remains, an extraordinary feat of perseverance and love. More than once I have been grateful for the fact that we live in a time and place in which it is possible to educate our son on our own, and tailor his educational experience to his own strengths and weaknesses. I think about how our boy, the squarest of square pegs, would have done in a previous generation, when this wasn’t available, or how he would be doing if he didn’t have a mom like the one he has, and it’s hard to imagine. It would have broken him, most likely.

I have to say that my daughters are blessed because their mother has been so committed to making sure that they both get a proper education. She has certainly done the lion's share of work in homeschooling our girls. She's certainly the reason that they both have done so well with school.

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