I am writing this from a restaurant in Orvieto, Italy. Emily and I are spending a week here mixing work and pleasure—a mix that makes both better, but more on that later. We are in search of a classical Christian education in the heart of Italy. Today, we are having dinner with John Skillen from Gordon College who runs an art program here in this ancient town in a monastery that was built before Dante was born and before St. Thomas penned the Summa. By the way, he penned some of the Summa while living at one of the other monasteries here in Orvieto. He also wrote the liturgy for the Feast of Corpus Christi here in Orvieto—the feast was first celebrated here in this place. Now, as a Protestant I have all sorts of problems with transubstantiation and some of Aristotelian mix with theology that occurs in Thomas’ mind. As an historian, I cannot believe I am here. Emily is napping now. I cannot sleep. I just want to walk endlessly around.

Anyway, as for the work. We are exploring ways that high school students from Veritas can travel here for a visit—taking in Orvieto, Rome and Florence. Also, however, I am discovering more and more about a classical education—and the problems with our ideas about education in modern times. Students at Veritas Academy are unapologetically broad. We are not giving them a narrow technical education. We want them to be excellent generalists before they start digging into particular areas in college and career. Veritas and the other classical Christian schools are countercultural when it comes to this. What I have found, however, is that we are not nearly broad enough yet. In preparation for this trip I read Brunelleschi’s Dome chronicling the building of the Dome at the il Duomo in Florence (I will sleep 350 yards from it tomorrow…(horah!). The architect Fillipo Brunelleschi was not really an architect—or it might be better to say that he was so much more than an architect. He was an inventor, a reader, a builder of boats. He radically changed construction by figuring out how to build the biggest dome in the history of the world. He also used Caesar’s cipher to encrypt everything he wrote—he was terrified of having people steal his inventions (they still tried). He has rivals who attacked his ideas at every turn. How did he answer? He wrote sonnets that savaged them publicly. Classical trained architects of that day were so broad that their main attacks were done in poetry! Classical Christian education has produced exceeding broad and apt people. We are only at the beginning of the beginning of its revival. May God stretch us and make us broad and humble.