May 10, 2008

Mother's Day 2008
Of Whom the World was Not Worthy
Kevin Swanson

Her hands so tired and rough,
Her heart well-worn with love,
Wearing out h’self on others,
As both wife and mother.
Blindly serving the Lord in the heaven
Who watches more closely than any of them.

She is no loud parade.
She never takes center stage,
Demanding attention
Or predestination.
What precious unassuming modesty
Girds this dear woman called mother by me

She has tasted the curse
Hard and bitter in birth.
But blessed salvation
Was hers in the morning.
Mysterious work of faith and dominion
Proceeds from the womb of a woman.

Some will stand in the gates.
Make a name in the state.
But she’s in the kitchen
Surrounded by children.
Nothing big in the world’s estimation,
Just taking that world with the next generation.

A glorious woman
Jehovah has given.
Worthy of such honor
No mere man could proffer.
In the eyes of the world, there’s nothing to see.
But then, that world was never worthy of these.

May 6, 2008

The Second Wave

U.S. Home Educators Set to Top 15 Million in 40 Years

Several years ago, Dr. Brian Ray, researcher for the National Home Education Research Institute issued a study entitled "Homeschooling Grows Up." Based on interviews with 7200 home school graduates, among the significant findings, Dr. Ray discovered that 90% of home schooled youth planned to continue the vision. They would home school their own children.

Relying on this important finding, I have created a chart projecting the generational growth of home education forty years into the future. The chart makes several assumptions:

1. The birth rate among the second generation will be a little higher than the first (which stands at 3.5). I put it at 4.0.

2. I projected zero growth for first generation home educators beginning in 2008 (2.4 million).

3. Homeschooled graduates marry only homeschooled graduates.

4. The vision continues into the third generation.

Note: The numbers on the left hand side of the graph (ranging from 2 million to 16 million) represent the number of homeschoolers.

Analysis

This movement is not over. In fact, it is bound to grow and grow exponentially. For the next ten years, we will see a plateau effect, if not a slight decline due to the huge influx of government-funded school-at-home programs. But somewhere near the year 2017, another huge wave (not unlike the exponential growth we saw in the 1990s), will take the movement towards 6 million. Then, the third generation will advance the movement towards 15 million.

What does this mean for the parents, leaders, and advocates that make up the movement today? For the next ten years, we must continue to stay vigilant to keep home education free. Leaders in the movement must continue to provide strong encouragement and vision to the movement.

What does this mean for the American society?

While birth implosions are happening everywhere, the Christian faith is dying in the west (and fading in America if you believe the Pew Forum's recent survey of 36,000 Americans); while the family is disintegrating (and this is not likely to slow down for at least another 40 years), the family is re-integrating, the faith is strengthening within the generations of 15 million home educators in America. It doesn't take a majority to change the direction of history - just a principled minority who lead with generation-deep vision. America will not be the same forty years from now because of the homeschooling movement.

An exciting future awaits the home education movement, with significant generational growth coming in the not-to-distant-future.

Of course, all of this assumes that the vision contained in this movement perpetuates from father to son to grandson - something that will only happen if the vision solidifies in the hearts and minds of the millions in the movement. And that is a function of the conventions, the leaders that lead the movement, and the faith of those that disciple those children in the kitchens and living rooms across this land.

Should I still be alive in the year 2050, I will be 83 years old and my grandchildren will be homeschooling their 150 children to make up the third wave of this movement. They will be leading this movement. And those of us who spent our lives travelling the country with a visionary message of family discipleship, the blessing of children, the honor of fathers and mothers, the unity and relevance of the family, and freedom from the state, will look up and see that God has blessed the work of our hands!

April 28, 2008

Christian Classics

I have of recent encouraged my friends in our home schooling ranks to include Christian classics in their high school literature programs. Too often, even Christian schools and curriculum producers will focus on the classic works from "the city of man" - the transcendalists, the Unitarians, the Greeks, etc. in their literature programs, featuring little or nothing from those who write from the perspective of a distinctively Christian orthodoxy. I say, if you're a Christian, why not include a few works from the City of God in those lit programs? After all, the history of the city of man is nothing but a series of empires that rise and fall, and then rise and fall again.

Back in the 1970's, my father gave us lists of the greatest Christian books that have sustained the test of time, books he wanted us reading. I've added to the list, and here's the compendium in its present form:

Note: For those who find some disagreement with an author or two from Christian history, I wonder if they ever disagree with those authors who write from the city of man. Disagreement is fine. But understand that each writer is a product of their times, and their biases and focus will reflect the conditions of the time and the particular battles that waged then. We are products of the times in which we live as well!

General

Augustine's Confessions

A'Kempis' Imitation of Christ

Anselm's Cur Deus Homo

Brother Lawrence's Practice of the Presence of God

John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress

Luther's Bondage of the Will

John Calvin's Institutes

History

Augustine's City of God

Eusebius' Ecclesiastical History

Bede's History of Church of England

Foxe's Book of Martyrs

Paton's Autobiography (Missionary Patriarch)

William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation

Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana

American/English Christian Classics

Milton's Paradise Lost

John Owen's Death of Death and the Death of Christ

Jonathan Edward's Religious Affections

Journals of George Whitfield

Jeremiah Burrough's Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment

Joseph Alleine's Alarm to the Unconverted

J.C. Ryle's Holiness

G.K.Chesterton's Heretics and Orthodoxy

C.S. Lewis Screwtape Letters

April 21, 2008

Our participation in the Prairie States Christian Home Educators Conference over last weekend gave us a wonderful opportunity to witness the solidification of a vision in South Dakota.

Attending the conference was a record-breaking 300+ crowd, substantially more than the 36 that attended the previous year. Under the capable leadership of men like Randy Stofferhahn and Rob Schoon from the Sioux Empire Christian Home Educators Group, as well as those who lead the South Dakota Home Educators group, the movement there is seeing a huge infusion of vision. We trust this will provide strength and growth for a God-centered, parent-directed home-based education system in the years to come.

I have been part of a homeschooling movement for 40 years out of my life, and I have never seen such excitement, generational vision, involvement of fathers, and an all-of-life comprehensive application of the vision as I have seen this year in states where we have participated in conferences (as in Utah, Hawaii, and South Dakota.) God is doing something in the hearts and lives of 100,000s of men and women across this nation, unlike anything we have seen in the 1960's, 70's and 80's.

On to Massachusetts and the MASS-HOPE conference next weekend.

April 17, 2008

Ben Stein's documentary "Expelled" hits the theaters on Friday. The documentary looks at the wide-spread excommunication and shunning of anybody who doesn't take up the orthodox position on Darwinian gradualism. Remember, the scientific elite maintains a very narrow faith system when it comes to origins, and they work hard to keep priesthood pure of any contaminating agent.

The universities and their scientific elite have built a rather flimsy system of knowledge that cannot hardly withstand criticism. Evolution itself is not a theory, hardly a hypothesis, and at best historical guesswork. They have no mechanism, and as far as it is rooted in a naturalistic worldview, they have abandoned coherence in their system of thought.

The standard of rationality is defined by whatever the scientific elite say it is. But for those of us who still want to use our brains, how do we find the answers to the basic metaphysical questions of life? Ultimate metaphysical questions are always a matter of faith, and all forms of apologetic are subject to circular reasoning. But some circles turn out to be better than others. Some systems are better at providing the preconditions of intelligibility.

Let me explain it this way.

Which system of thought would elicit louder laughter?

A system that gets its ideas from chemical processes in the brain that are akin to grass growing the yard, and that tries to argue moral high ground on the basis of no ground at all?

Or a system that claims absolutes because those absolutes are rooted in an absolute called God and that claims personality, justice, and human relational concepts like love, because there is a God who is eternally relational and absolutely just?

The answer should be obvious. The incoherent fairy tales of the naturalists are hilarious!

Be sure to listen to our interview with Mark Mathis, producer of the Documentary Expelled, airing Friday.

April 8, 2008

Evangelicalism is all over the map on economic theory, although among home educated, it seems most would favor the free market approach. Does the biblical system of economics constitute a pure free market or would it include a blend of socialism? Ron Sider, author of Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, insisted on a strong blend of socialism, not to exclude foreign aid, graduated income taxations, international taxation, national health care, and population control. He gravitates towards the Jubilee Law of the OT, but seems to shy away from passages like Exodus 30;15 and Leviticus 19:15, which would severely curtail his Marxist tendencies.

On the other hand, there are those that would enthusiastically endorse a free market without much emphasis on the responsibilities of family, business, and church in relation to the poor.

Biblical economics does not separate the macro from the micro, nor does it isolate the civil magistrate from the other jurisdictional spheres of family and church. Sure, the Bible speaks to the free exchange of goods and services without price controls, graduated taxation, etc. But concurrently it also institutes a poor tithe, household-based economics, gleaning laws for the poor, and care for the widow and orphan on the part of the church (1 Tim. 5). You cannot have one without the other.

Blessings to economic systems only come on obedience to commandments of God (Deut. 28:1) that are adopted as a way of life. One cannot expect a free market system absent of a biblical system of charity, family, and church to survive. What do such things as worshiping God, faith, being grateful, and teaching your children God's Word as you sit in your house have to do with a successful economic system? Everything. The free market would not survive without it.

I made the point on today's broadcast that a people who have turned materials and security into their highest value, will sell their liberty off to big government in a heart beat. Without faith, freedom simply will not survive, and neither will the free market.

March 28, 2008

The kind of church I want to be a part of. . .

A church that preaches the gospel truth hard, in the context of loving, warm shepherding relationships.

A church that preaches a God-centered truth, and maintains a unity of faith and works, grace and law, in the message, music, and liturgy (James 2:26).

A church that is willing to lead a complete abandonment of pagan, godless education, that refuses to teach science in the fear of God.

A church that has the chutzpah to drive a biblical, family discipleship approach that will stop the wholesale hemorrhaging of our youth.

A church that builds real covenant community.

A church where conflicts are resolved, and brothers are willing to lay down their lives for each other.

A church that builds a meaningful diaconate, to displace the statist social security programs, with the goal of 25% of the church income going to widows and orphans.

A church that wants to bring all things under the law order of Jesus Christ.

I often wonder how many of churches would share this vision in my state, or in the entire country for that matter.

If you think that your church would resonate with this manifesto, please let me know by e-mail - host@kevinswanson.com. Just curious.

March 27, 2008

For now, home schooling is back to legal-status in California.

The same California Court of Appeal that issued the initial ruling in the Long case has granted a motion to rehear the case. The court has solicited a number of "friend-of-the-court" briefs from the California Superintendent of Public Instruction, California Department of Education, and three teacher unions.

Homeschool freedoms have been fought hard and won by organizations like Home School Legal Defense Association. A point I made last week with Dr. Brian Ray on the radio program - with more than 2,000,000 home schooled youth in the country now, it will be hard to put this genie back in the bottle. Given that 90% of home schooled youth will home school their own children (a statistic supported by Dr. Ray's recent study, Homeschooling Grows Up), this movement could be 8,000,000 strong in 20 years, and 20,000,000 strong in 40 years. (The birth rate for homeschoolers also happens to be far higher than the national average.)

This is not to say, the battle won't intensify for our children, between those who stand for parental rights and those who are committed to statism. But, if we can keep this door of opportunity jammed open for the next 20 years, we may be able to rein in the modern expansion of the state and firmly establish these freedoms for many generations to come.

March 24, 2008

 

The cracks in the foundations of our present economic system in the west (and other nations affected by the west), are widening, and pieces of building are crashing around us.

The foreclosure rate in America now stands at the highest level in recorded history.

Americans hold the highest debt to equity ratio since the index was first recorded in the 1940s.

The GNP may slide below 0.0% for the first quarter of 08, signaling the beginning of the new recession.

Bill Gross, America's largest bond money manager recently said, "We are witnessing the destruction of the modern banking system." Overstating the case? Who knows?

This round of the Greed Game is almost over. The worldwide derivatives market stands at $681 trillion up from roughly $10 trillion in the early 90's.

Since America is the dealer in this game that has gone international, America's economic demise could precipitate a truly remarkable worldwide collapse.

Never a better time, I say, to take one more look at a biblical system of economics which maintains a different teleology, different ethics, different money systems, and different social structures. As the gods of the marketplace tumble and fall, we might as well start brushing up again on God's approach to economics. Then, we might think about re-building something for our children and grandchildren.

In our Sunday morning fellowship, I began a series on Biblical economics that will continue for a few weeks hence. Accessible at reformationopc.sermonaudio.com.

"And the gods of the copybook headings limp up to explain it once more. . ."

 

March 12, 2008

A little web investigation on the part of our producer Dave Buehner found that the Judge responsible for the ruling that effectively illegalized home schooling in California (in what HSLDA calls the most regressive ruling in the history of the movement), is a Presbyterian elder. Per this website, Judge Walter Croskey serves (or has served) as elder at the Pacific Palisades Presbyterian Church.(PCUSA)

From the chuch website: "Pacific Palisades Presbyterian Church is a caring community of Christians who seek to continually increase our faith in and understanding of Jesus Christ. We seek to provide spiritual growth as we develop our relationship with God, families and friends, and the community in which we live. We are inclusive rather than exclusive. . ."

Inclusive of what, we wonder... What about stuff like truth? God's law...? Deuteronmoy 6:7?

Why is it always religious people that crucify the good guys?

March 12, 2008

A good crowd showed up for the UTCH home schooling conference in Salt Lake City over the weekend, exceeding last year's attendance. Besides myself, speakers included Kim Anderson and her daughter Petra who are very involved in the speech/debate program here in Colorado.

Overall it was a terrific conference, and the reception was as enthusiastic as any we have seen. It was a great blessing to meet UTCH president, Frank Mylar and the rest of the board. I came away convinced that Utah's home school leaders have both the vision and the passion for a movement that will bear much fruit in years to come.

Before traveling home on Sunday afternoon, we hit a television studio with Jason Wallace, pastor of Christ Presbyterian Church. Jason interviewed me on Christian education, home schooling, and family, church, and state relations for an hour of primetime television to be aired on SLC's Christian television station on Wednesday of this week. Assistant Chad and son Daniel handled a couple of the cams in the studio, and Jason's two oldest helped put the thing together in the control room. Now that's a homeschool project!

March 07, 2008

Attacks on home schooling are heating up in legislatures and courts across the country.

Nebraska and Washington DC legist lures are considering bills of especially onerous regulative intent. The recent California appeals court decision has sent ripples through the entire home schooling movement, a chilling reminder to all concerning the precarious nature of freedom in this country. The basis for the ruling was just as threatening towards Christian schools as it was to home schooling.

If home schooling is illegalized or if that freedom is severely curtailed in your state what would you do? Options might include:

1. Finding a loophole.

2. Flying under the radar and risk arrest.

3. Escaping to Idaho. They still let you own guns there too, don't they?

When considering these options, it would seem prudent for home educators to start working a little harder in the primary process in their respective state elections. In the face of these real threats, it seems odd to me that so few Colorado home educating families are even willing to donate a mere $50 to the Colorado Hearth Fund each year for the cause of freedom.

The threats are real. I wonder if your average parent understands the fanatical commitment the likes of Hillary Clinton to illegalize home schooling and abolish parental freedoms via her enthusiastic support of the U.N Convention on the Rights of the Child.

In the short term, I don't think freedom has a chance, for the simple reason that the vast majority of families are not wiling to contribute $50 or 5 hours of their time to back righteous candidates in state elections. And when they do back a conservative candidate, more often than not, he increases the size of government more than any president since LBJ.

The left (wrong) is far more committed to their principles of destroying the family by big government statism and the corruption of morality, than the right is to their values of faith, family, and freedom.

Moreover signing petitions and pleading with liberal legislators for mercy while they busy themselves with trouncing our freedoms is a losing strategy. Electing godly, principled leaders is a winning strategy. Now… if we could just find a few…

March 06, 2008

Our spring speaking tour begins tomorrow at the Utah Christian Home Educators Conference in Salt Lake City. My son Daniel, my assistant Chad and I will be criss-crossing the country, taking a little vision across America in the form of talks and books.

Our objective is to encourage home educators across the nation with a simple message. Don't be weary in well-doing, and the discipleship of your children is the single most important thing you will do in your life on earth. We want to see the hearts of fathers turn back to the children by the hundreds of thousands. We would love to see the fear of God taught as the beginning of wisdom and knowledge in millions of homes. We want to see more people loving God (Deut. 6:4), so much that they will teach their children God's Word as they sit in their house (Deut. 6:7). Nothing high-tech here. Just the basic faith.

March 06, 2008

Praise God my surgery last month yielded good results - biopsy was benign. But it took the good part of a month to recover.

We still continued to broadcast our radio program to 70+ nations around the world straight from our basement. My son found a way to place the microphone such that I could broadcast from where I was lying in bed.

Technology can be a blessing. Web technology has enabled a massive decentralization in the dissemination of information, not to mention just about any area of business trade.

Thanks to the blessings of laptop computers, I continued to work 12+ hour days while horizontally inclined. It is amazing what can be done from home, even if one is bed-bound!

February 28, 2008

One of the things that we are pushing for as part of our reforming work in the 21st century is the renewal of relationships, and the displacement of institutional, statist life with biblical, covenant living in family and church. Unfortunately, the Christian church as a whole has not retained a biblical sociology, largely due to the onslaught of post-modernist humanism via secular education and university.

That said, our church in Castle Rock, Colorado has waded into the debate on family-church-state relations, with the following statement. Certainly, we would not want to claim this to be the final nor the definitive statement on such matters. But hopefully, it will help begin some discussions that will work to reconstruct the family and the church in this generation.

Statement on Church-Family Relations

The twentieth century marked the dissolution of the family in most western countries. America was no exception. As of 2006, the nuclear family (consisting of father, mother, and children) now makes up less than half of the households in America. At the same time 37% of children are born fatherless up from 5% in 1960, and roughly half of marriages end in divorce. What conclusions can we draw from these numbers but that the family is less relevant to American life than it ever has been in the past?

As church attendance remains over 40% in this country, we must place a large part of the blame for the dissolution of the family at the feet of the church. By its sins of omission or commission has the church contributed to the present demise?

Polls conducted by the Southern Baptist Church and other Christian pollsters have identified significant increases in the percentage of children raised Christian homes who leave the church upon leaving the home. Various studies put it anywhere between 75% and 90%.

We do not blame any particular denomination for the fragmentation of the family or the particular weakness of generational, covenantal continuity found in the church at large. Nevertheless, as elders and pastors in Christ’s church, in our own experience we have seen a breakdown of family relationships, family discipleship, and an incidence of covenantal rebellion that we find utterly reprehensible and unacceptable for our families and for our congregation. Our hearts cry out to God for his mercy upon our sheep.

At the root, we believe that as a nation we have neglected the law of God as the source of our ethics, and we do not love him with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength.

A rejection of God’s law is evident when churches turn the exceptional into the normative, and thereby deny and violate the biblical norms that govern family and church relations. The biblical norm for the discipleship of children is unequivocally parental and familial.

Ex. 10:2 And that thou mayest tell in the ears of thy son, and of thy son's son, what things I have wrought in Egypt, and my signs which I have done among them; that ye may know how that I am the LORD.

Deut. 6:7-9 And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart: 7And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. 8And thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thine hand, and they shall be as frontlets between thine eyes. 9And thou shalt write them upon the posts of thy house, and on thy gates

Pr. 1:8 My son, hear the instruction of thy father, and forsake not the law of thy mother:

Pr. 3:1 My son, forget not my law; but let thine heart keep my commandments:

Pr. 4:3 For I was my father's son, tender and only beloved in the sight of my mother. 4 He taught me also, and said unto me, Let thine heart retain my words: keep my commandments, and live. 5 Get wisdom, get understanding: forget it not; neither decline from the words of my mouth.

Pr. 4:20 My son, attend to my words; incline thine ear unto my sayings. 21 Let them not depart from thine eyes; keep them in the midst of thine heart.

Pr. 5:1 My son, attend unto my wisdom, and bow thine ear to my understanding:

Pr. 6:20 My son, keep thy father's commandment, and forsake not the law of thy mother: 21 Bind them continually upon thine heart, and tie them about thy neck.

Pr. 7:1 My son, keep my words, and lay up my commandments with thee.2 Keep my commandments, and live; and my law as the apple of thine eye. 3 Bind them upon thy fingers, write them upon the table of thine heart.

Pr. 23:24 The father of the righteous shall greatly rejoice: and he that begetteth a wise child shall have joy of him. 25 Thy father and thy mother shall be glad, and she that bare thee shall rejoice. 26 My son, give me thine heart, and let thine eyes observe my ways.

Pr. 24:21 My son, fear thou the LORD and the king.

Pr. 31:1 The words of king Lemuel, the prophecy that his mother taught him. 2 What, my son? and what, the son of my womb? and what, the son of my vows?

1 Th. 2:11 As ye know how we exhorted and comforted and charged every one of you, as a father doth his children.

Eph. 6:4 And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.

The Bible clearly lays out responsibilities and obligations by directing its exhortations towards specific people groups - slaves, civil rulers, wives, elders, husbands, fathers, and children.

To the extent that we neglect the specific addressee to which God’s law is directed, we will perpetuate the jurisdictional free-for-all that marks our current age in which the state interferes with the family, the family interferes with the church, and the church interferes with the matters of the family.

The clear mandate of Scripture places the responsibility of the training of a child in the hands of the father. Paul considers this normative in 1 Thess. 2:11 and Eph. 6:4. And there is no perceptible change from the Old Testament mandate and pattern contained in Deuteronomy 6 and the book of Proverbs. In point of fact, this is basic to a biblical social system. The health of the church is dependent upon the presence of godly men who rule their households well. For it is only those who rule their own households first, that are fit to rule in the household of God (1 Tim. 3:5). Thus, rather than circumventing or displacing fathers in their duties, the church is obligated to equip fathers in the congregation for this ministry work which God places upon them (Eph. 4:11-12).

To the extent that the church’s children’s ministries have displaced in the minds and lives of individuals or institutions the father’s responsibilities and the family’s obligations laid out by the biblical normative in Deut. 6:7, Proverbs, 1 Thess. 2:11, Eph. 6:4, etc., those church’s activities should be re-considered and re-configured.

We do not hold to the notion that Sunday Schools, Youth Groups, and other children’s programs are inherently sinful, yet it appears that in the minds of many parents these programs make up the essence of “Christian education” or discipleship for children. Some denominations choose to refer to their committees responsible for children’s ministries and Sunday Schools as “Christian Education” committees. Generally, this sends the wrong message to parents, if parental discipleship is the normative means by which children will be matured in the faith.

Thus, it is a question of emphasis. We believe that the church in aggregate has not adequately emphasized the principles contained in Deut. 6:7, Proverbs, 1 Thess. 2:11, Eph. 6:4, etc.

This does not preclude children from participating in the worship service with their parents. Quite the opposite, God requires children to be present in the congregation of the saints (Deut. 29:10, Deut. 31:12, Josh. 8:35, 2 Chron. 20:13, Neh. 12:43, Joel 2:16, Eph. 6:1).

While this also does not preclude occasional age-segregated activities, we believe that the church and family need to keep in mind that we are emerging out of 100 years of wholesale fragmentation in the family. This fragmentation came about by various means, not to exclude the modern corporate systems that separated the family economically. Husbands and wives pursued their individual career tracks and children were remanded to daycare, kindergarten, and K-12 schools. Siblings were separated by age segregation. Increasingly non-interactive forms of entertainment also prevented cultivation of family relationships. While our purpose is not to criticize any particular element of this list as malum in se, the cumulative effects of such social changes have wrought immeasurable damage upon the sphere of the family in modern life, because it represents a flagrant disregard of God’s law.

Therefore, this is a call to reformation in the church by the reviving of the law of God in the hearts of men, that will manifest itself in the way we live, the way we interact, the way we minister, and the way we worship.

February 25, 2008

Graduating from the Swanson High School

I gave my son a set of graduation requirements last week. Now he knows what he needs to do to graduate from high school. Technically, we don't see graduating from high school as anything more than a rite of passage. It is my certification that he is an adult and competent to make many of his own decisions. I trust he will be studying for the rest of his life. After 25 years of study, he will become a true master in the fields of his calling - in the marketplace, in church, in family, and in politics. When I graduate him from Kevin's School of Learning, he should be in the place where he determines his own course of academic studies, the level and concentrations of study. As he has already completed his mathematics through trigonometry, science through physics, languages, logic, rhetoric, etc, to date; I have assigned him the following (the list is not comprehensive) in order to wrap up his last year of study.

1. Read John Calvin's Institutes, cover to cover (900 pages). This will be his most difficult reading assignment to date.

2. Read Greg Bahnsen's Always Ready, and write a ten page apologetic paper defending the Christian faith against attacks from competing belief systems.

3. Deliver a fifteen minute Bible Study before a group of 20+. Exegete a passage (from the Greek), and draw applications.

4. Work at least one 50 hour week.

Because we are not humanists, but Christians, we did not spend as much time in our high school curriculum working through the thought and writing of humanists, as we did with Christian thinkers and writers. Our curriculum also included a good deal of church history, and I think we did touch on the history of the city of man - the rise and fall of its futile empires throughout the ages. Most of rhetoric training has been in the area of teaching and exhorting in the Bible. My son has exposited 1 Samuel, 2 Samuel, and part of the book of Colossians in our Family Bible Study. Also, singing has been an important element to our education program. We believe that music is essential, and if at possible our children should be able to sing in parts with an ear for the music.

OK. Maybe this isn't a typical high school program. But it is our program.

February 18, 2008

The Second Mayflower and our first Family Bible Study Guide arrived last week, and we're shipping copies right now like hotcakes.

I wrote a thin paperback edition of the Second Mayflower in 1993, and I knew then that it was a book about 20 years before its time. The new hardback edition is about 3 times the size, rewritten from cover to cover, but retains the same basic vision of the first edition. Now it is a book about 6 years before its time.

My long-time friend, Douglas Phillips from Vision Forum provides the foreword to the book. His words resonate exactly to the heart beat of the message contained in the rest of the book. Undoubtedly, God has raised in the hearts of a growing minority a common vision, that represents a tremendous commitment to the principles that beat in the hearts of those who formed the First Mayflower and established this God-blessed nation!

Essentially, what I grapple with in this book is the future of a nation that has lost its moorings, lost its founding principles, lost its family integrity, lost its morality, and lost its freedoms. What will happen to America? Still many Americans aren't even conscious of what is happening, and many don't care. But, it's my bet that a growing remnant is beginning to see the cracks in the foundations and ask the same questions I ask in the book. What will happen to America? How do we salvage an empire like this? Where will our children and grandchildren live, if they prefer to live in freedom? I guarantee there will be hundreds of thousands of people asking these questions within the next few years.

Whether Hillary Clinton is the more conservative of the three leading presidential candidates as Ann Coulter recently claimed or not, it should be plain to any who hold to a biblical worldview that America's future has been and is still set in the wrong direction.

It should also be pretty clear by now that the Christian conservative movement was incapable of providing the right answers, the right agenda, and the right candidates because its fundamental worldview base was wobbily from the beginning. My book reassesses the worldview, presents a new agenda, and a little hope for the future for our children and grandchildren, even as we approach dark days ahead.

If you're ready for a shift in your thinking about the future, go ahead and grab a copy of my book, "The Second Mayflower" - now available here. Otherwise, feel free to wait another six years or so.

February 14, 2008

A Little Advocacy for Christian Thought in Education

I am presently working on a Christian Classics curriculum package for my own children. Unfortunately, most reading and literature curriculum today is drawn from interesting writing that might attract a child's attention, but it is still the trite, the unremarkable, and of little lasting import. High school literature classes and classical approaches often draw from the very best that unbelievers, Unitarians, transcendentalists, and Marxists have produced. That may be fine for the unbelievers, Unitarians, and transcendentalists. But I'm a Christian. Why should my children spend 95% of their time reading what the pagans have produced, and walk away from a high school education with only the lightest grasp of what the greatest Christians have written in the city of God?

To this point, I haven't found any Christian curriculum producer within the home school market who has given comprehensive attention to the work produced in the city of God. So I have launched this project for my own children.

Some might disagree with a doctrinal position or two of some of these Christians who have written some things. I'm hoping that these same Christians have found a point or two within pagan thought as well, with which to disagree.

But the lack of knowledge concerning Christian history and Christian literature in history among Christians is appalling. A good education includes a thorough understanding of the very best writing produced, writings that have stood of the test of time, writings that still speak through the centuries and millennia of human existence.

I've started the project with:

Augustine's Confessions

Calvin's Institutes

Akempis' Imitation of Christ

Bunyan's Pilgrims Progress

We hope to have the Study Guides available on our website for other families interested within a month or two.

February 7, 2008

With John McCain leading in the Republican race for President, contrasts and comparisons are flitting about in the minds of those who were hoping for something better. Is McCain any worse than Nixon, for example? Would he produce more tyranny on any given day than, say Hillary Clinton would? Would he increase the budgets as a percentage of the Gross National Income more than, oh George W., for example? How many contract killings via Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers would he fund through Title X as compared to Obama? Would he require more efficiency or less efficiency of the contract killers? Would this Republican Senator with a voting record as consistent as a sawed-off shotgun make a better president, produce better foreign policy, and protect more of our freedoms than a Democrat who is a declared enemy of family values and political freedoms?

God knows. I don't.

I guess every vote for the better of two evils is a judgment call that you're probably going to miss roughly 50% of the time.

1 Timothy 2 tells us to pray for our civil leaders that we may live a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness. This is my goal for the 2008 elections. We may not be able to halt the abortion holocaust and the massive growth of the socialist state in America. But, if we can keep homeschoolers out of court for teaching their children God's Word as they sit in their house and as they walk by the way, maybe we have accomplished something worthwhile. If we can keep our pastors out of jail for preaching a biblical sermon from Leviticus or Romans on the sin of homosexuality, we're still living that peaceable life in all godliness.

So here's the $100,000 question - What is the likelihood that Barrack Obama or John McCain would veto a hate-crimes bill targeting pastors who preach through Leviticus? To tell you the truth, I wouldn't wager more than a buck or two on either.

I'm still not convinced that a president could fix all of our problems - moral, economic, or otherwise. Is our goal to get a good president in place, who to get more people to live quiet and peaceable lives in all godliness. Our real conundrum is this. How do we get parents to home school their children in the fear of God, and pastors to preach against the most popular sins of the day? Will favorable legislation accommodate such godly living, or do we need something else to stimulate God's people to this kind of faithfulness? I'm not sure our problems are political. Our real problems lie in the hearts, the homes, and the pulpits of this nation.

February 5th, 2008

As I hope that many of you are now aware, Generations is taking some big steps forward with an entirely new website. The current www.kevinswanson.com website will be replaced in the first week of February by this site, www.generationswithvision.com.


Here are a couple of the latest developments for our new website:

1. We are now providing a new RSS feed for the radio program. For those of you who download our radio program daily through iTunes or some other podcatcher, you will want to use the new RSS feed:
http://www.generationswithvision.com/RSS/GetBroadcastRss.aspx


Please update your podcatchers now, as the old RSS feed will be closing down very shortly.

2. Download button. In an easy click of a button, you can download any of our radio shows. You may then either save the program to your computer, or open it with the media player of your choice.

Please take the time now to update any bookmarks or saved links that are currently going to kevinswanson.com. All links should point to our new site at http://generationswithvision.com/default.aspx

In the days and weeks ahead, we plan to continue to make the new website easier to use, including more advanced search features, radio archives, and more. Please continue to send us feedback on the new website at host@kevinswanson.com. We want to know how we can make this site a better tool to serve you and your family.

January 25, 2008

Every Friday, my children are scheduled for piano lessons with my mother. It's a wonderful way to keep the generations connected in our family. The picture below is my daughter Rebekah Joy taking a piano lesson from Grandma (1200 miles away).

Unfortunately, the family-fragmenting/generation-fragmenting vision of modern society has not missed our family. The absence of community, the transience of modern life, and rapidly changing cultural forms all serve to sever the generations. It is rare to find three to four generations worshiping in the same church anymore! Nevertheless, over the last eight years, my mother has been teaching my children piano lessons over the telephone. Technically, its not home schooling. Its phone schooling. My mother, who has taught piano for over 50 years, insists that our children are keeping up to pace with other children she teaches in her own home.

January 21, 2008

Thankfully, homeschooling has not been the recipient of all that much negative press from popular media. But this last weekend the New York Times issued a major hit piece provocatively headlined "Lack of Supervision Noted in Deaths of Home-Schooled." BTW, you can tell the difference between the editorial page and the front page of the New York Times by the word "Editorial" at the top of the editorial page. The difference has always been a little blurry, and present story is not an exception to the rule.

Apparently, some woman from Washington DC who claimed to be homeschooling her children is charged on four counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of her four daughters. Author of the story, Jane Gross interviews an assistant, associate professor of some-kind-of-social science somewhere, who tells us that parents can get away with all kinds of ugly things if they don't have a professional teacher or public administrator assigned to them to snoop into the home life of the children. (I'm paraphrasing here.) A little sniping at Chris Klicka from HSLDA ensues.

But the conclusion to the whole matter appears to be that it's basically HSLDA's fault that this woman is charged with the murder of her four children, and homeschooling needs to be better regulated.

Now. . . I googled the words "Parents murder children," and incredibly, came up with another story issued by the New York Times a few years earlier. The story was entitled, "Murdered Children - in Most Cases a Parent Did It."

Here are a few of the stats I pulled from this particular story: "A recent Justice Department study of 8,063 homicides in urban areas found that parents were charged in 57 percent of the murders of children under 12." About 700 mothers, says the article, kill their children each year in this country.

OK. Now let's do the math. So far, the NYT found a single homeschool mom who is accused of breaking the 6th commandment in 2007. Let's see, that's 1 in 700, roughly 0.14% of the murders committed by mothers in America. If homeschoolers make up 3-5% of the population, there should have been 28 home school moms that killed their kids in 2007 to keep up with the national average of murdering mothers who send their kids off to public schools. Conclusion: Somebody needs to let the NYT know that home schooling moms are still not killing enough to warrant the increased regulations the NYT is calling for.

I would suggest that the NYT search elsewhere for enabling, causal, and aggravating factors in the murder of children by their own parents. The killing of children by millions in the womb comes to mind.

Is the tide beginning to turn against home education on the part of the national media? Hard to say. But stories like this NYT piece aren't helping us all that much.

January 12, 2008

America More Polarized Than Ever

As we approach the 2008 presidential elections, America finds herself more polarized than ever before.

On the left, Hillary Clinton and Barack Hussein Obama lead the pack. These are not the liberal buttercups of the 1980s and 1990s. No way. We've come a long way from Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, and Mike Dukakis. Mike Dukakis might have cottoned to the pro-abortion position, but nothing like Obama who was known as Mr. Infanticide in the Illinois legislature because of his steadfast commitment to death for infants born-alive in abortuaries there. And Hillary? She has been cutting-edge liberalism since she was working her Hillary-care program while her other half was busy with Monica Lewinsky in the oval office. The 2008 democratic front-runners are serious liberals, epistemologically self-conscious and ready to roll.

On the right, you have. . . well. . . Ron Paul - perhaps not the ideal candidate for the conservative, less-government approach - but he appears to be the only candidate who wants less government. From what I can tell, all the other Repubs seem reasonably happy with George W. Bush's record increases in domestic spending.

Now, some of you may remember that Ron Paul ran for president in 1988. I remember, because I voted for him. He appeared to be the only candidate at the time who stood the pro-life position without making the typical, wishy-washy exceptions for rape and incest. But, in 1988, Ron Paul did not run a presidential campaign with $25 million in the coffers! As I recall, he landed a whopping 0.5% of the vote in the general election. In 1988, Ron Paul was a fringe candidate. Granted, today he's still a fringe candidate. But he's a fringe candidate with growing popular support and $25 million. I can speak with some authority here, as a fringe candidate myself. I pulled down close to 4% of the popular vote when I ran for governor of Colorado in 1994. Nobody was giving fringe candidates $25 million in 1994.

What does all this mean, but that America is more polarized than ever. Politically and culturally, America is fast losing all semblance of a common denominator. And we're not helping things all that much. But then again, neither are Hillary and Barack Hussein Obama.

January 3, 2008

What an irony!

The same week one young man who had been homeschooled shot up several ministries in Colorado, another young man, also homeschooled received the Heisman trophy!

In fact, Tim Tebow was the first sophomore to take home the trophy. USA Today called him "a fabulous athletic talent who was homeschooled." Wikipedia gives this brief summary of Tebow's life: "Pam suffered infection with a pathogenic amoeba while pregnant with [Tim], and an abortion was recommended by her doctors. She chose to go through with the pregnancy. All of the Tebow children were homeschooled by their mother, who worked to instill the family's deep Christian beliefs along the way." Sports Illustrated added this comment, "Homeschooled by missionary parents who run an orphanage in the Philippines, Tebow took advantage of a Florida state law to play for Nease [High School], about 90 miles from the University of Florida campus. Tebow has worked and preached at his parents' orphanage since he was 15. He regularly speaks at schools and delivered his message of faith at a prison in Florida earlier this year."

If you saw the speech he gave at the awards ceremony, you heard him say, "I want to put God first and put my Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ first, because he gave me this ability." He even thanked his sister for coming from Bangaledesh where she serves as a missionary.

I rejoice that God raises up men like Tim Tebow to provide outstanding witness to the glory of God in a world that has largely forgotten about God.

While we don't forget the tragedies brought about by the workings of the human heart, we know that the triumphs of grace will forever trump the tragedies of hell!