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Some Words with Jon Jordan

10 Episodes
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A sermon on rest, interruptions, and what it means to be human. Mark 6 is the primary text. Proper 11, the Ninth Sunday after Pentecost 2024.
By moving Jesus’s words about his body and blood out of the Last Supper and into the context of this chapter, what is John trying to reveal about humanity, and what is John trying to reveal about Jesus? A sermon for Proper 13 2024: the Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost. The primary text is John 6:24-35.
Transcript
Part 2: This world is enchanted.
This is the second exploration of the various realizations that contributed to my conversion into the worlds of Anglicanism and classical education at (roughly) the same time.
This is the (perhaps?) first short exploration of the various realizations that contributed to my conversion into the worlds of Anglicanism and classical education at (roughly) the same time.
A sermon from Lent 2024 on adopting Psalm 22 as a prayer for Lent.
“The inmost significance of the exaggerated value which is set upon hard work appears to be this: man seems to mistrust everything that is effortless; he can only enjoy, with a good conscience, what he has acquired with toil and trouble; he refuses to have anything as a gift.”
Joseph Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture
Transcript
You don’t have to travel across the world
to be baptized in the Jordan River;
only through the space time continuum.
By the power of the Spirit of God
The still clear water of the modern font
Becomes the flow of that ancient river;
Cleansing you as it was itself once cleansed
by him who came after and yet before.
“This is my beloved,” the voice beckons,
Echoing from those first century shores,
And into our very own, and beyond.
Calling out to the called out ones, it rings
Truer than our own truths we held so dear
Before we, too, were brought through that River.
Transcript
This was a letter sent to our student body in May 2023 about the rise of AI in education. You can read an essay of mine that expands on these things here.
Let Them Be Born in Wonder is the title of an excellent article that highlights the work of the storied, but relatively short-lived, Integrated Humanities Program at the University of Kansas.
Part of the reason the program no longer exists is that a disproportionate number of students in the program were converting to Christianity as a result of their studies. The program was closed for this reason in 1979, despite the fact that the investigative committee found “no evidence that the professors of the program have engaged in such activities in the classroom.” It was, in many ways, the mere exposure to great minds and works of the past that drew students to God.
But the three founding professors also noticed something about the students entering the program that is worth us considering today: they had lost an interest in real things. These professors were convinced that before their students could encounter great works, they needed to reencounter, and be drawn again, to reality itself.
Aristotle and St. Thomas teach that the human person, as a union of body and soul, lives an integrated life in which the intellect and will rely on the senses, the imagination, and emotions. The professors recognized that the new generation of students was sensibly and emotionally disconnected from reality. Their technology, their whole environment, pre-internet thought it was, cut them off from God’s creation, and inclined them toward fantasy. Their basic correspondence to reality, to the true, good, and beautiful, had been blunted. They were not interested in real things, were restless, and could not focus.
What makes these observations more poignant is that they were made in 1968. Our world has grown to prefer the virtual and the digital even more in the decades that have followed.
I share all of this for three reasons.
First, I hope that you read the article, and grow to appreciate what the IHP sought to be and do.
Second, I hope this gives you some perspective on why any classical Christian school worth its salt will insist on nature studies, physical activity, art and music appreciation, and a direct encounter with great works from the past. We learn to learn from thinkers who we may not entirely agree with, but who nonetheless had a better picture of ultimate reality than most in our own age.
And finally, I hope this encourages us to remedy our own preference for the virtual and the digital; to sharpen our “blunted correspondence to reality” by seeking to “be born in wonder” by the natural order and human community around us.
If we are all determined to begin this work in our own lives, we might just stand a chance at leading our students to do the same.
On May 18, 2024, the Coram Deo Academy Dallas Campus graduated its first class of Seniors. Below is my message for that class, shared at the Class of 2024 Commencement Ceremony.
There have been many times—perhaps more than I care to admit—that I have stood in the hallway outside the doorway to your classroom thinking to myself “I don’t have time for this. I need this hour for something else.” To reflect on what just happened. To prepare for what is to come. To plan, or to pray, or to respond.
But I stepped inside regardless—mostly because I know you well enough not to trust you in a room alone together.
After spending that hour with you in the classroom, God has not once failed to use each of you as a gift of grace: to refresh, or restore, or challenge, or comfort. I leave time with you thinking, “I needed that hour more than I knew. I don’t have time to not have this time together.”
You—as individuals and as a class—have a gift that our mutual friend C.S. Lewis liked to call “the good infection.” You rub off on people. You are like the house of the patient’s girlfriend that Uncle Screwtape describes in Letter 22:
Could you not see that the very house she lives in is one that he ought never to have entered? The whole place reeks of that deadly odour (of Christian love). The very gardener, though he has only been there five years, is beginning to acquire it. Even guests, after a weekend visit, carry some of the smell away with them. The dog and the cat are tainted with it. It is a house full of the impenetrable mystery.
Whether in the classroom or around campus, at a dinner table or in a living room, in Dallas or Austin or Arkansas—I leave time with you changed for the better.
You have shaped me. You have shaped my family—all of them. You have shaped this community and many others beyond it.
Today is an occasion marked by joy—despite the misty eyes in the room—and here is why: This is a big crowd in a big room full of “the good infection.”
But beyond these walls is a bigger crowd in a bigger room.
Sitting behind you are just some of those who have cared for you in this season of your life at this school. In front of you are even more who have done the same in your homes and in your churches. The older you get the more you will realize the sacrifices they have made for you to be here.
Now it is your turn.
Because beyond those doors, there are people you haven’t even met yet who need you. There are a people yet unborn, who need you.
They need you to witness—in word and deed—to the Good News of God in Christ. To pursue ever more deeply the Truth, Goodness, and Beauty of God. Not to shout into the darkness about how dark it is, but to light a candle, no matter how small, wherever God leads you.
It is a joy to send you out with that mission. And we are at peace in doing so, because you are in excellent hands, hands that have been there all along, hands that I pray you will notice more and more as you grow up: you are safe, no matter what you face, in the wounded hands of our Lord.
Amen.
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