Christian Worldview Curriculums.... Tell me about your favorite and least favorite...

[SonshineLearner]

Christian Worldview Curriculums.... Tell me about your favorite and least favorite...

 

I'd like to know for personal as well as for thinking about church situations. (Youth group and such...)

 

I've been thinking about this for the last few weeks, how it shouldn't be a dividing line between those who homeschool and don't. How all of us who are Christian Parents, should want to teach our children what a Christian Worldview looks like.

 

Thanks!:D

[FaithManor]

What are your theological views? There isn't necessarily a Christian Worldview Curriculum that would be pleasing to all.

 

We don't use a curriculum. But, our kids read and discuss "Mere Christianity" as the first step, followed by selections from Augustine, followed by other C.S. Lewis Writings, followed then by "How Should We then Live" by Francis Schaeffer and then before graduating they will read some of Nancy Pearcy's books. I have just read "Saving Leonardo" by N.P. and it was fantastic. All of this is after they've had several years of basic Bible study.

 

Faith

[SonshineLearner]

Hmmmm... well... I'm kinda Baptist :)

[FaithManor]

Oh, well then, hopefully some one else will chime in. We are kind of Arminian. Sorry.

 

Faith

[PeterPan]

Well I was raised full-blooded Baptist (not even just kinda), and I would have no problem with those books. :) Haven't heard of the N.P., but own the rest and plan to use them with my dd. Don't fail to get "How to Be Your Own Selfish Pig"!!!!! And as far as curricula, well Omnibus is another way to get there.

[Sophia]

I've been thinking about this for the last few weeks, how it shouldn't be a dividing line between those who homeschool and don't. How all of us who are Christian Parents, should want to teach our children what a Christian Worldview looks like.

Thanks!:D

 

I think the Truth Project is excellent.

[wingedradical]

We're kind of Arminian neo-anabaptist, lol. I have found many of the "world view curriculums" are very Reformed. I mentioned Reformed in another post and so want to make sure to say I am not against Reformed people - I just don't agree with some of the doctrine and emphases.

 

Anyway, we used The Universe Next Door by James Sire as a jump off point for World View. Actually, we had a basement full of teens we used it with. After we finished the books, we continued to meet and talk about various related topics. The group had kids from Bible Church, a couple of Baptists (before the Baptists were quite as visibly divided as to Reform and not), charismatics, anabaptists, one Nazarene, and two non-believers. It was one of the most fun times in my life.

[Slache]

I plan to use For Such A Time As This Language Arts which uses classic literature to show opposing worldviews, but my kids are still rather young.

 

 

Books I recommend for high schoolers:

 

The Ultimate Proof of Creation, Jason Lisle (A logical look at worldviews)

The Consequences of Ideas, R.C. Sproul

 

 

Books I haven't read yet, but will probably be fantastic:

 

Thinking Like a Christian from the Worldview in Focus Series

How Should We Then Live, Francis Schaeffer

[dhudson]

Thinking Like A Christian.

 

We also sent our son to a 2 week Worldview Camp at Summit Ministries which was amazing.

www.summit.org

 

Oh and I really love how MFW has it integrated into year 3 of High School.

[Julie in MN]

That basement group sounds like a great thing.  There's something about teen discussion that sticks longer than parent discussion, KWIM?  I had explained Reformed/Arminianism to my ds, but when another student asked him, So which are you, that's when he decided to figure out, What were those again...?

 

I don't have a favorite or not, but I can contribute some comparisons, based on my tendency to obsessively read when I'm looking into something.  Here are some of the things I've read.

 

1. How to Be Your Own Selfish Pig, by the daughter of Francis Schaeffer.  This is pretty short and topical.  A chapter will bring up a question that young people at L'Abri have often asked, and discuss it.  What's it all about, is every view okay, are Eastern religions okay, etc.  The title comes from reading a magazine with her mother and concluding that "How to Be Your Own Selfish Pig" would be a better title for the magazine, and wondering if that part of our culture is okay. The topics seemed based on a lot of experience with the issues teens struggle with, but it's more of a conversational intro.

 

2. The Deadliest Monster, An Intro to Worldviews, by J.F. Baldwin.  This uses Frankenstein and Jekyll/Hyde to teach that worldview differences can seem subtle but actually be very vast.  He basically says that every view of the world is either a Frankenstein view (problems caused by society, we can be completely good) or a Jekyll/Hyde view (conflict of good and bad comes from within each of us), and that Christianity is the only worldview that can help us understand the truth of Jekyll/Hyde in this world.  (This is used in Starting Points.)

 

3. Thinking Like a Christian, by David Noebel.  Summit Ministries also has Lightbearers for junior high, and the full-year Understanding the Times for high school; Thinking Like a Christian was designed for Sunday School/small groups rather than for Christian schools, so it’s shorter – MFW uses it for one semester of high school so that other materials can be added.  I do have Understanding the Times on my shelf, but it is just more than I’ve ever wanted to read from one author’s viewpoint; maybe some day.

 

Thinking Like a Christian has chapters on 10 “disciplines†that are easily understandable to teens – biology, ethics, law, economics, etc.  A little of the scholarly worldview vocabulary crept in, such as a quick overview of how the Christian worldview fits into the various ideas of philosophy (which has the most dense vocab, to me), but the discipline-based topics made it easy for my ds to understand what he had just learned.  Within each discipline, the book looks at “worldview questions†– e.g. the discipline of history asks “How should we interpret human events?†

 

I did the “teacher option†and did the activities that introduce each chapter.  In one of the first activities, I was to cut out random newspaper articles on not only political and science issues, but sports events, craft fairs, whatever.  Then I was to ask my son to separate the articles into things related to your worldview and things that don’t have a worldview.  The basic goal was that by the end of the year, the student would realize that EVERYthing comes from a worldview.  (This is scheduled in MFW year 3.)

 

4. Transforming Your Worldview: How to Think Like a Christian, by Michael J. Ericson.  This is a comb-bound, home-published type of program.  I think it’s the one that was sold on Vegsource for many years.  This one is very philosophy-based, looking at underlying philosophical worldviews as influencing all areas of society.  To me, this would be good for a family that wants to build on philosophy terminology (ontology/being, epistemology/truth, ethics), delve into the philosophy of science and such, and become more familiar with philosophers (from Aristotle through Kant).

 

5. Assumptions That Affect Our Lives, by Christian Overman.  This is a novel-sized book with questions at the end of each chapter.  His perspective is to divide worldviews into Greek (the worldview that affected Rome and eventually America, and is the most influential on most of our students) and Hebrew (the worldview of the Bible).  He uses a lot of good examples to draw you into seeing the similarity between issues today and issues of anient Greece, a few hundred years B.C.  He then compares the worldview that encompasses all of that, vs. the worldview as taught in the Bible (Old and New Testament, not an issue of Greek language but of culture).  (This book is scheduled in Starting Points and in MFW year 3.)

 

6. The Universe Next Door, by James Sire, divides worldviews into 6-10 what I’d call “scholarly faith categories,†such as deism, nihilism, and eastern pantheistic monism.  It reads more like a chapter book than a textbook, and each chapter takes one worldview out to its limits, and compares it with the answers that Christian theism would give.  I felt it brought up a lot of thoughts and ideas that students may confront in college but not necessarily things high schoolers would be asking yet.  In homeschooling my kids, I always found it tough to know where the line falls between “prep for the questions that are coming†and “waiting until the material speaks to you.† (This book is scheduled in WVWW-1.)

 

7. Stobaugh’s American Literature.  Not technically a worldview program, this text (at least as adapted for MFW) begins with worldviews and continues to plug worldview ideas into literature study.  He also divides worldviews into scholarly categories, with 7 including Naturalism, Existentialism, Romanticism, Theism, and Deism.  Then American early documents and literature are studied with a bit of worldview evaluation thrown in.  His are dense categories that could each be studied extensively, but my student got exposure to one of these more scholarly systems of categorizing worldviews without too much effort.  (This is scheduled in MFW year 3.)

 

8. Teaching the Classics, Worldview Supplement, by Adam & Missy Andrews.  They suggest reading literature, absorbing what the author is saying, and then learning to ask whether the author is telling the truth (and they discuss physical truth vs. poetic truth, that an author can depict a worldview truthfully or falsely, etc.).  TTC courses are short and then depend on your using a long list of ideas for drawing out a student evaluation using the Socratic method of questioning.  This supplement adds Socratic questions on what an author says about God, society, nature, evil, death, etc.

 

9. Francis Schaeffer’s video series, How Should We Then Life (close to 6 hours, if you include the ending interviews, now I believe all on Youtube). Schaeffer doesn't so much label worldviews in scholarly ways, as he addresses cultural values like personal peace, affluence, apathy, and oppression.  He also has an interesting point for kids to realize, in that other worldviews can "borrow" Christian views in faulty ways.  I personally began by thinking the series was cheesy and ended by almost crying that someone finally helped me understand the absolute flop that my well-intentioned generation ended up as (at least that was my perspective).  The gradual loss of a worldview in the society I grew up in was very much my experience, and led to a deep searching in very strange and unfulfilling directions for many of my peers (myself included L ).  I think he “spoke to me†because he spent his life discussing the questions asked by young people of my generation.  Anyways, I digress… I showed a few of the final videos to my son, but felt he was already quite familiar with the history topics of the earlier videos through homeschooling. (This is scheduled gradually in WVWW.)

 

10. WVWW, by David Quine.  I went through part of year 1 as teacher-ed while homeschooling my older dd.  It’s more of a chronological study of major Western worldviews, rather than categorizing worldviews.  It includes studying whole books outside of the text, including lots of Schaeffer that first year, lots of audios on various models of government and economic, plus whole books of the Bible (not the whole Bible straight through as is my preference, but at least not jumping around to small verses).   Quine to me is similar to “inductive Bible studies,†in that he is putting you into the original works to draw conclusions using evidence, but on the other hand he is carefully scripting exactly what you do in order to lead you to certain conclusions.  For instance, if you do his art program alongside WVWW-1, you will line up the art in a specific order and make conclusions about the rise of the worship of human form, and then the deterioration of society into impressionism, abstract, and modern art.  So, if you find yourself enjoying impressionism, I don’t think there’s a study strand for that, so maybe it’s more about reading an author’s text after all.

 

Wow, sorry so long!

Julie

[MorningGlory]

So helpful!!! Thank you very much for sharing this information, Julie. This is a post I will return to multiple times as I plan the final two years of my older son's home school.

[momto2blessings]

Yes, Julie...thanks!!!  I copied it and sent to my inbox for reference:) I'd forgotten about the Selfish Pig book. We were at the English L'Abri this summer and a worker let me peruse hers and I thought it was a great book and completely forgot:) Thanks!

[BlsdMama]

Hey mama, you have a great worldview teacher in your area. ;) He used Summit Ministries' Understanding the Times with Ana and I can't say enough good things about the class or the teacher. :)

[Lori D.]

Some ideas for you:

Comparative Religions / Philosophy
- The Universe Next Door (Sire) -- Christian author
- Sophie's World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy (Gaarder) -- secular author; explores how one philosophical thinker/movement led to the next
- Message in the Bottle (Walker) -- Christian author; more cerebral / for adult or late high school
- Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (Hofstadter) -- more cerebral / for adult or late high school
- The World's Great Religions (Bowker) -- secular author; visual encyclopedia 2-page spreads describing basic tenants and make-up of major religions of the world; middle school and up

Worldview (all are comparisons of various worldviews to Biblical Christian worldview)
- How to Be Your Own Selfish Pig (Macauley) -- conversational Q&A starting point for worldview for middle/high school
- The Truth Project (series of DVDs) -- video series; great for groups/family discussion, down into middle school level
- The Deadliest Monster: Introduction to Worldview (Baldwin) -- Worldview Academy instructor; beginner-accessible
- Rethinking Worldview (Bertrand) -- Worldview Academy instructor; more cerebral & in-depth
- Understanding the Times (Noebel) -- Summit Ministries; late high-school level
- How Now Shall We Live (Colson/Pearcy) -- written to adults, but accessible to high schoolers
- Seven Men Who Rule From the Grave (Breese) -- annoyingly uses charged/emotionally laden language which really weakens the author's points, IMO; while I appreciated that each of the 7 men triggered a change in the thinking of the world, ultimately the writing is so clearly trying to cheer Christianity and put down these other views that I don't feel comfortable recommending this one, without that strong caveat

Christian Apologetics/Beliefs
- Mere Christianity (Lewis)
- The Great Divorce (Lewis)
- Orthodoxy (Chesterton)
- City of God (Augustine)
- More Than a Carpenter (McDowell)
- Know What You Believe; Know Why You Believe (Little) -- some dated arguments

Worldview Academy
Both DSs attended Worldview Academy Summer Leadership camps several times, and DS#1 went on to be a staffer for 2 summers. We are partial to WVA, as next door neighbor is one of the WVA instructors, and it is what really transformed DS#1's life, making his faith "real", helping him take ownership of his relationship with the Lord, and giving him tools for thinking critically and rationally about faith, philosophy, etc.   🙂

Just so you know, WVA is not strictly about a comparison of worldviews, but is also about discipleship. WVA is evangelical, and does include evangelism as part of its summer camp and some of the book materials. Other materials focus on living out the Christian faith, esp. with the concept of servant-leadership.  Worldview Academy -- DVD of Apologetics lectures or Worldview lectures would be usable with groups or at home; books; podcasts as discussion starters.

 

Some past threads with more suggestions:
- First Worldview study recommendations? Thinking like a Christian?
- Apologetics/Worldview for teen girls?
- Worldview: critical thinking vs. indoctrination

I also have found these Wikipedia thumbnail definition lists to be helpful as a quick reference for discussions:
- list of philosophies/school of philosophical movements
- list of literary movements
- list of art movements

Edited February 22, 2021 by Lori D.