Fathers and Sons and Fish

Here’s the text with extra space added between the paragraphs for better formatting on your blog: My father is not a fish. I don't believe that he ever will be. But for the past few days it has felt like my father is a fish.I often implore my students to furnish the interior of their hearts, to decorate their minds, to wallpaper their souls with great literature and poetry. It's a hard thing for...

Justin Chiarot, Biblical Studies Dept. ChairOctober 15, 20242024

Word-Bound Creatures

A day or two after walking a group of teachers through a magnificent old fairytale, an old myth: The Handless Maiden, one veteran educator came up to talk to me about the story. But in reality it wasn't a discussion about the story simpliciter, it was about the role of stories—stories told, stories heard, stories written. The teacher said to me, “I…

Justin Chiarot, Biblical Studies Dept. ChairJune 24, 20242024

In Memory of Coach: 2 Years Later

One of my all-time favorite poems is “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” by W.H. Auden. It is just hard to beat one of your poetic heroes writing a dirge for another one of your heroes. This poem was bouncing around my mind all day yesterday, the 2 year anniversary of the passing of Coach Spanjer—the founder and patriarch of Chapel Field Christian Schools. It is poetic, providential, fitting, that a passage from Mark’s gospel was also swirling inside my skull, mixing and…

Justin Chiarot, Biblical Studies Dept. ChairJanuary 19, 20242024

Romantic About Soccer?

“How can you not be romantic about baseball?” Brad Pitt, playing Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane in the 2011 movie MoneyBall posed that rhetorical question. If you haven’t seen MoneyBall, stop reading this immediately and go watch it. Life is all about order and proportion and you clearly lack both (I’m joking, but only slightly). Russian short story master Isaac Babel wrote, “No iron spike…

Justin Chiarot, Biblical Studies Dept. ChairOctober 9, 20232023

Opening Words of Wisdom

Assuredly you have heard the idiom that one should not judge a book by its cover. That piece of practical wisdom is not something I wish to debunk but I might desire to add a layer of nuance to it: One should not judge a book by its cover but one might attempt to judge it by its opening words. This elongation of the old adage certainly causes it to lose its marketable brevity and bite but my hope is that what is lost in economy might be gained in wisdom…

Justin Chiarot, Biblical Studies Dept. ChairFebruary 27, 20232023