Saturday Good Reads - Dec. 3, 2022

The COVID pandemic had one completely unexpected effect. School classrooms switched to Zoom, and parents discovered the state of education in America. In some cases, t was good. In far too many cases, it wasn’t. Many parents learned their children didn’t know how to read. And the reason goes back to an educational theory from 60 years ago. APM Reports has the story on how teaching kids to read went so wrong. 

And while we’re on the topic of education, the idea of the university had undergone a profound shift in meaning and practice. Once places where ideas could be discussed, debated, and analyzed, universities appear to have become strict enforcers of a particular orthodoxy. John Ellis at City Journal discusses the decline of higher education and how it happened. 

 

I’ve always considered the two genealogies of Jesus in the New Testament, found in the gospels of Matthew and Luke, to show Jesus’s messianic descent and the connections to King David through both the lines of Mary and Joseph. And they do demonstrate that. But as Jesse Johnson at The Cripplegate points out, they show something else, too – and it’s in the meanings of the listed names.

 

More Good Reads

 

Life and Culture

 

No, It Wasn’t the Vaccine – Tom Challies.

 

Disney’s ‘Strange World’ Embodies Strange New World – Brett McCracken at The Gospel Coalition.

 

The Withering of Persuasion – Ian Olson at Mere Orthodoxy.

 

Faith

 

Small and Afraid and Without Knowledge – Noah Karger at Mere Orthodoxy. 

 

The Truth is Not Mine – Seth Lewis.

 

Pressing Forward by Looking Back – W. Robert Godfrey at Tabletalk.

 

News Media

 

5 Rules of Ethical Journalism – Alison Hill at Writer’s Digest.

 

Ukraine

 

Read a New Translation of “The Caucasus” by Ukrainian Poet-Hero Taras Shevchenko – Literary Hub.

 

Puncturing Putin’s dangerous myths – Victor Sebestyen at The Spectator. 

 

British Stuff

 

Less than half of England and Wales population Christian, Census 2021 shows – Rachel Russell and Harry Farley at BBC News.

 

Piotr Frac, Stained Glass Artist – Spitalfields Life.

 

Writing and Literature

 

Fictional Saints and Sinners – Joseph Pearce at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

Poetry

 

Paterson and Poetic Fidelity – Stephen Knepper at Front Porch Republic.

 

Yet Not I But Through Christ in Me – City Alight

Painting: The Magdalen Reading, oil on canvas (circa 1525) by Ambrosius Benson (1500-1550).