Sally Thomas

Gregory and Martine Millman did not set out to homeschool their children, at least not consciously. When they became parents in the mid-1980s, their plan to was to lead “a normal yuppie life,” upwardly mobile, working their way into a neighborhood with good schools which of course their . . . . Continue Reading »

I lived, while in England, at a confluence”the intersection of a pedestrian lane, which led to three pubs, and a busy road, which led to practically everywhere else. We could tell the time by the street noise: At eleven, precisely, the pubs closed, the pub goers staggered out into the lane, . . . . Continue Reading »

My reflexive response on reading Diana West’s The Death of the Grown-up has been to keep announcing magisterially to all and sundry that I am one. Pass the salt, because I said so, and I am a grown-up. “We know ,” the children reply wearily, which is a relief. After all, I’ve . . . . Continue Reading »

My teenager was reading the Lego catalog. Not that she herself would ever be interested in her brothers’ geeky obsessions, mind you—she had some Latin sentences waiting to be parsed. So she was idly turning pages and clucking dismissively over the Mindstorms NXT and the Star Wars . . . . Continue Reading »

I am the last person in America to have heard of Walter the Farting Dog . My cousin is the next-to-last, and she heard about Walter from her son, who came home from kindergarten one day recently and actually told her for a change what he had done at school. They had had story time, he said, and . . . . Continue Reading »

Well, Jody, you should, indeed, let the Sussex Carol console you for the Georgetown Hoyas’ defeat by the Memphis Tigers. But I’m afraid that all I can add is: Go Tigers! (The teams of the college I attended amount, as one friend put it, to a really great library. So, living here in . . . . Continue Reading »

I’ve never understood all the fuss about Santa Claus. Not the believing part: We have no problems in that department, being a happily credulous lot at our house. Two of us, after all, are under the age of six, and the rest of us read fiction without stopping every other sentence to say to . . . . Continue Reading »

The winter I was ten, my teacher read A Wrinkle in Time aloud to our class, a chapter a day. It was, in my view, the sole reason for getting up and going to school. I loved the novel’s Meg Murry, a girl neither beautiful nor graceful nor socially gifted—yet entrusted with a dangerous and . . . . Continue Reading »

By withdrawing from the larger culture, homeschoolers aid and abet the culture’s failings—or so, at least, the charge goes. Christians have a responsibility to be not “of the world,” but, we are told, they also have a responsibility to be “in the world.” And therefore . . . . Continue Reading »

The Jesus Movement of the 1960s and 1970s was less a coherent movement than a generalized wave of religious reformation”influenced, as the wider culture was influenced, by aspects of the hippie counterculture. In the late 1960s, its psychedelic brand of Christianity erupted out of spaced-out . . . . Continue Reading »