Great news has reached me from my good friends in the C. S. Lewis Foundation.
A few days before Christmas it was announced at a press conference that the site of the campus of the soon-to-be-launched C. S. Lewis College had been purchased.
The new college will be located in the greater Amherst area of northern Massachusetts, just east of the Connecticut River, on the beautiful and historic former site of Dwight L. Moody’s Northfield Seminary for Young Women (later, part of the Northfield Mount Hermon School, which has since consolidated its operation onto its Mount Hermon campus, five miles away).
For further details of this exciting development, you are encouraged to visit http://www.cslewiscollege.org.
Lovely news. The home page describes it as “an institution of Great Books and the visual and performing arts.” I’d like to believe it signals a return to real education. The decline of quality in higher education has increased in velocity as the momentum of utilitarian secularism has increased. It is left to small private institutions to keep education alive in these new dark ages, just as it is left to home-schooling to keep real learning alive, now that public schools have become little more than centers of mandatory political and social indoctrination.
As I age, the term “remnant” occurs to me ever more frequently–as it is used in Scripture. And I often see an image of a tiny green shoot surviving among rubble in moments of reflection.
There will (always) be a return of faith in God. And life will (always) survive, even in this modern darkness of humankind’s self-worship. Because God will (always) love us. Indeed, it seems the less we deserve it, the more he loves us.
Nice project… and what a lovely campus! One often is saddened that many institutions that are inspired by the True, the Good, and the Beautiful, seem to have plenty of the first two, but can’t afford much of the third. That said, I think the name is a bit unfortunate… it just doesn’t sound like a real college, somehow. I mean, I absolutely love love love Tolkien, but would you want to be an alumni of J.R.R. Tolkien University? Doesn’t sound too good on a resume. I guess I just have the feeling that someone so contemporary doesn’t make a good namesake for an institution… it smacks a little much of fan-boy-ness, or a cult of personality, or something.
But anyway, that nitpick aside, this looks really nice.