I love following blogs in my RSS Reader. It's so much easier to keep up with all your posts, and I'm able to share interesting stuff as I read it. But technology isn't perfect. Every once in a while a blog will hiccup and show me really old content. I'm so glad the internet got confused for a moment today. My reader showed me a post from a Sonlight student from 2009. This comment about Halloween caught my attention:
I'm a Sonlighter. In second grade, when most kids were having their parents read Narnia to them, my mother was reading Mr. Holzmann's book about Incan, Aztec, and Mayan human sacrifices. Celtic practices do not exactly rock my sheltered world.
Narnia is great. You'll share one from the series in Core F. But two years earlier, like this student, you'll encounter a very real part of history that isn't entirely comfortable. Of course, if you've been reading your Bible, you'll have encountered much of this already. In this case, I remember the first time I heard the story of human sacrifice in Scripture. While it turns out okay -- displaying God's difference from the gods of others -- it gave me goosebumps. But it was good to learn that. The story of God providing the lamb is a precursor to a later passage.
Sacrifice
Put more bluntly: Anyone raised on Scripture isn't going to have their sheltered world rocked by accounts of sin.
Similarly, Sonlight does not shy away from difficult content. We attempt to avoid books that include unnecessarily scary or offensive passages, but we're here to help you build up your children. Like the student above, I find that Sonlighters are inquisitive, interested, and equipped to do what God has called them to do. Their "sheltered world" of homeschooling is not rocked when they encounter the real world.
They are ready for it.
Their parents and the content they have worked through together has prepared them well.
~Luke Holzmann
Filmmaker, Writer, Guardian
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