BevK July 13th, 2007
Harry Potter Christian Literature or Not?
Nancy Brown says it is.
Homeschooling mother and literature expert Nancy Brown once banned all “Harry Potter” books from her home, having heard witness after witness to the book’s “evil” content. … “This was a story about good and evil,” she said. “The choices that Harry Potter had to make were important. His momentary despairs, his aching feelings for his parents – these things resonated with me.”
“I thought, ‘Gee, these books really do have good themes, although they were couched a story about witches and wizards,’” she said.
Caryl Matrisciana says not.
Caryl Matrisciana, a well-known expert on contemporary cults, paganism and the occult, agrees with Brown that parents should serve as a filter for their children, but she feels they should start by banning “Harry Potter” from the home.
“There is no doubt children are being seduced into believing the dark-arts are ‘fun,’ benign and a positive power for personal enablement,” she said. “But responsible parents must be aware that …the supernatural world is a reality and dabbling with its dark-side is not harmless.”
Read the entire article and draw your own conclusions. My opinion is if the leftover tuna fish doesn’t seem quite right, you don’t eat it. Is it really necessary to have children read a book that is on its surface occult to get to Christian themes (if in fact there really are Christian themes to the books)?
BevK April 28th, 2007
CBN has posted an article that takes a look at homeschoolers and socialization from a Christian perspective. It has some interesting things to say including the results of testing homeschoolers and public schoolers with the Vineyard Adaptive Behavior Scale. I don’t know what that tests, but I’ll be looking into it.
Socialization: Homeschooling vs. the Schools
92 percent of superintendents believe that home learners are emotionally unstable, deprived of proper social development and too judgmental of the world around them, according to a California study by researcher Dr. Brian Ray .
Questions about inadequate socialization are often brought up as a means to disqualify homeschooling as a viable alternative form of education, but are the arguments valid?
That really is the question. From the article:
So how do these different settings affect children? Dr. Thomas Smedley believes that homeschoolers have superior socialization skills, and his research supports this claim. He conducted a study in which he administered the Vineyard Adaptive Behavior Scales test to identify mature and well-adapted behaviors in children. Home learners ranked in the 84th percentile, compared to publicly schooled students, who were drastically lower in the 23rd.
The article goes on to look at what makes homeschooling different and why homeschoolers would do so well on such a test.
Perhaps the most important statistic quoted in this article, where Christian parents are concerned, is the percentage of Christian youth disowning their faith.
Consistent with these figures, Christian producer and occult expert Caryl Matrisciana reports that 75 percent of public-schooled American youth brought up in Christian households disown their Christian faith by the first year of college. NHERI finds that this is only true for less than four percent of homeschooled youth.
BevK December 1st, 2006
The bad fruit of misunderstanding God’s foundational purpose is often a form of idolatry. Our family (or worse yet, the family-integrated ministry model) becomes a sort of idol. Idolatry is when we substitute or place a created thing in the rightful place of the Creator. When we get ourselves backwards and pursue as our primary goal the family-integrated thing, the homeschooling thing, the patriarchy thing, the breeding thing, the modesty/home-baked bread thing, or the “making sure our boys are tough warriors and not wimpy” thing, instead of God’s glory, idolatry is just around the corner. Don’t get me wrong. There is nothing wrong with any of these things I have just mentioned. But they are means, not ends.
Article at: http://highlands.gospelcom.net/ETC/Volume_Ten/Issue_Three/FamilyCircle.php
Hat tip: Gospelcom Buzz
http://www.gospelcom.net/buzz/?p=293
BevK November 23rd, 2006
http://www.billygraham.or…p?ArticleID=748
This year as we observe our season of thanksgiving, let us be grateful not only in word but also in deed. Let our gratitude find expression in a resolve to live a life more unselfish and more consecrated to Jesus Christ.
When we sit around our tables laden with sumptuous delicacies, let us not forget that nearly a billion people around the world will go to bed hungry. As we enjoy the comforts of our cozy homes, let us not forget that great numbers have no homes to go to. When we step into our modern cars, let us not forget that many people in the world cannot afford even a bicycle.
As we go to our churches to thank God for material and spiritual blessings, let us remember that millions have never heard the Gospel of salvation. Let us remember the servants of God in many parts of the world who deprive themselves in order to take the Gospel to the multitudes who have not yet been reached with the message of Christ.
Read it all on the Billy Graham website.
BevK January 29th, 2006
This is a really cool site, Chant Art, where you can download for a very nominal fee images digitized from old Catholic holy cards that were collected in Europe. The images are divided into easy to use categories. All Christians, Catholic and non-Catholic, will find these images useful for making their own cards or other graphic design projects.
The blog software won’t let me post the URL in the normal way, so here it is: http://www.holycards.com/
TammyC January 2nd, 2006
http://www.wnd.com/news/a…RTICLE_ID=48001
A WorldNetDaily article by Bruce Shortt asks, "Will your kids be Christian?" His answer, and he supports it with research and statistics from multiple reports, is, "Unless parents and pastors decide to change their priorities, the data from Barna and others demonstrate that the answer is clearly ‘no’ for 90 percent or more of Christian parents." The problem?
As Christ points out, "A disciple is not greater than his teacher, but everyone when fully trained will be like his teacher." (Luke 6:40). We have unthinkingly made an aggressively anti-Christian public school system the teacher of our children, and we should not be surprised that our children emerge from the public schools "like their teacher." If we want a different result, we must provide our children with a thoroughly Christian education–something that public schools are legally prohibited from providing.
This is one article that I strongly urge everyone to read.
BevK October 4th, 2005
http://catholiceducation….ics/ap0195.html
I’m going to give you the conclusion first…but you do really need to read what Peter Kreeft has to say before he gets there. If I didn’t you might tend to wonder where this guy was heading…now you know.
Thus the theology of love gives us a whole new worldview. The apparently abstract and theoretical theology of the inner life of the Trinity as love turns out to have the most radical and revolutionary consequences for our view of everything in the universe and everything in our daily lives. It brings us back to the forgotten wisdom of the myths. It plunges us into a world that really does shout the praises of its Creator. It allows the heavens to really declare the glory of God (Ps 19:1). It is not just clever poetic artifice. It frees us from the dusty, dirty, smelly little dungeon of a universe that “Enlightenment” thought gave us: a universe in which love and beauty and praise and value are mere subjective fictions invented by the human mind, in which the only things that are objectively real are blind bits of energy randomly bumping into each other.
This theology reinforces our own instincts. Our own deepest instincts are to see love as the highest wisdom and ultimate meaning of life. The theology of divine love which anchors this instinct in the nature of ultimate reality itself tells us that our deepest values “go all the way up.” It also extends this instinctive wisdom, that sees love as the ultimate meaning of things, into the entire creation. The arms of the Savior on the cross reach up to the Absolute and down to the depths of the human heart and across the whole universe from atoms to archangels. When Jesus threw open his arms on the cross, he said, in effect: “See? That’s how much I love you.”
