Browsing Tag

Nature

Educational Philosophy, Home Education
Nature Study in Suburbia: An Un-Wild Approach

Some of us live in places that aren’t considered Instagram-worthy. I’ve heard folks call this place — our place — ugly. It’s so brown, they say. It’s so smoggy, they say. Other places are so much better, they say. So what? I say. I love this place. It’s home. I belong to it and it belongs to me and it’s been that way ever since I can remember. It’s a great place to worship God and raise children, and the Continue Reading…
April 16, 2019
Educational Philosophy
The Art of Belonging: Nature (Part 3)

Community, then, is an indispensable term in any discussion of the connection between people and land. A healthy community is a form that includes all the local things that are connected by the larger, ultimately mysterious form of the Creation. In speaking of community, then, we are speaking of a complex connection not only among human beings or between humans and their homeland but also between human economy and nature, between forest or prairie and field or orchard, and between Continue Reading…
October 8, 2018
Home Education
Out to the Back Forty

My mom grew up on a wheat farm outside a small town in north Texas. She’s got a store of tall tales about killing rattlesnakes and pulling calves, our own family mythology. My siblings and I are city kids, raised in suburbia, but we spent lots of time at my grandparents’ farm growing up. It was a kind of dual citizenship: we were just countrified enough to be venturesome, just citified enough to be easily unnerved by this rugged, beautiful Continue Reading…
May 7, 2018
Educational Philosophy, Home Education, Mother's Education
The Stones Cry Out

I ’ve been thinking lately about a story told me by one of my favorite teachers, a professor from England who wore tweed hats and occasionally teared up while reading poetry aloud to his classes. It was the story of his first encounter with the divine as a child raised in an atheistic household. His parents were researchers in a remote, rural area, and one day he was riding in the back of his parents’ vehicle across a wide expanse Continue Reading…
April 3, 2018