Renascentes Musae: Practical Models

13 December, 2009

Practical Models

In some of the following posts, I plan to outline the various practical models for implementing confessional Lutheran liberal higher education in North America in the 21st century. Along with those outlines, I hope to consider the pitfalls and promises of each. These include, but are not limited to, the following:

(1) Reform of one or several existing institutions

(2) Establishment, within or connected to one or several of the existing institutions, of a separate unit, department, or school

(3) The St. Catharine's/Brock University model

(4) Establishment, with other groups of other denominationally orthodox Christians, of a university comprised of colleges sponsored and run each according to its own confession

(5) Establishment of a self-standing, independent institution that adopts either:

(a) a classical American liberal arts college curriculum (departmental structure with distributive core) or

(b) a lock-step curriculum

For each, I plan to consider feasibility in financing, personnel, curriculum, facilities, and other such things. Stay posted.

Other good ideas are always welcomed, and better and best ideas encouraged!

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How you say 'dat?

Renascentes Musae (reh-nah-SKEN-tays MOO-sigh). That's right. Reh-nah-SKEN-tays MOO-sigh. "The rebirth of the Muses," or, literally, "the Muses in the process of being re-born." That was Reformation-Era code for the kind of university reform that accompanied the Reformation, a revitalization of higher education that eschewed the scholasticism of the Late Medieval world for a bracing encounter with the classics, the literae humaniores, of both the pagan and Christian world, along with the intellectual tools needed for such study: the ancient languages (classical Greek, classical Latin, and Hebrew), rhetoric & dialectic. This blog is devoted to searching for and articulating a theologically faithful and intellectually responsible rationale for Lutheran higher education on the basis of Wittenberg Christian Humanism and to imagining what renascentes Musae might look like in 21st-century North American confessional Lutheranism. Need we mention it? Opinions expressed by an individual author are not necessarily those of all authors. Not only that--if we can't vouch for one another's opinion--it goes without saying that authors also speak on their own behalf and do not necessarily reflect the views of the institutions that employ them.