If you haven’t subscribed to Jonathan Haidt’s Substack, After Babel, I highly recommend it. This week, Haidt has a guest post from Dr. Ellen Sandseter on allowing kids to take risks as they play:
In many Norwegian Kindergartens, even toddlers are encouraged to explore nature and manage risk independently. Visiting educators from the U.S. are often surprised, even shocked, by how much freedom Norwegian children are given to roam and play outdoors.
Why this cultural difference?
Part of the answer lies in friluftsliv, a uniquely Scandinavian philosophy that emphasizes life lived in the open air. It’s a cultural value rooted in the belief that experiencing nature, enduring the elements, and navigating challenges helps children build resilience and independence.
Raising our kids in Saskatchewan, then South Carolina, and soon Saskatchewan again, this emphasis on roaming and playing outdoors has been one of things that my husband and I have loved instilling in our kids.
****
What does an Anglican theology of ministry look like? Ben Crosby is over at The Anglican Way looking at two disputes in Reformation-era England that demonstrate that, for these early Anglicans, ministry was “fundamentally concerned with preaching and teaching, and with a power and authority carefully distinguished from that of God’s”:
In the Apology, Jewel makes the ministry primarily about teaching, rather than offering, the sacrifice of the mass or absolving sins. This is particularly clear when Jewel discusses the office of the keys, that is, the power of loosing and binding sins that Jesus gave to His disciples, a power which was used as a proof text for Roman views of the power of the priest to absolve. For Jewel, this power of loosing and binding refers either to the preaching of the Gospel and threatening of God’s punishment to unbelief, or to the minister’s capacity to excommunicate sinners from the communion of the church or restore them upon repentance (that is, to either preaching or church discipline). But Jewel specifically denies that this power was given that ministers ‘should hear private confessions of the people, and listen to their whisperings’ – rather, it was given ‘to the end they should go, they should teach, they should publish abroad the gospel’…
…For many Anglicans today, this account of the ministry – an account that is unconcerned with, even contemptuous of ideas of apostolic succession, that sees the minister as primarily a teacher and preacher of the Word rather than a purveyor of sacramental grace, that is worried about granting too much power to ministers in absolving or ordaining – might seem surprising or even unattractive. But as an Anglican minister, I find it an attractive one indeed, and useful for the present moment. In a contemporary ecclesial context that (in my experience) is often quite dismissive of the minister’s preaching and teaching office and sees the minister’s role as administering sacraments, fostering spiritual experiences, and providing nonjudgmental pastoral care, traditional Anglican teaching on the ministry is a helpful corrective. It roots all that ministers do in the Word of God and sees preaching as our primary function. This does not, of course, mean that sacraments are unimportant – but rather means that they are the visible preaching of the Word, rather than some other means of grace independent of the Word.
****
It was only after I finished my PhD that I finally caved and admitted that it is okay to not finish reading a book. It took awhile to get over the feelings of guilt, but I’ve been learning to accept that not all books are worth finishing or that I may not be in the right frame of mind to finish a certain book. I had to admit defeat this week and return a book to the library. It was a good read, but also a disorienting read, both in terms of its narrative style and also its subject matter, because I don’t know enough about 20th-century Russian history. I had started Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, and got halfway through it, but I spent more time looking up names of Russian politicians and reading summaries of major Russian events from the 1960s to the 1990s than actually reading the book. Ah well, maybe another time!
What are you reading? Let me know in the comments.