Trinitas Blog

Routines help to define a people. A group of market traders begins combing the news even before the trading bell rings at 9:30 a.m., hungry to get an edge on making the right move at the right time. A covey of construction workers share donuts and coffee before hitting the site for the day’s labor. A pack of public school kids rise from their seats to recite the pledge of allegiance and hear the crackle of morning announcements over the intercom. Routines do not require much attention to the routine itself—routines become second nature, an involuntary way of being in the world. Because we know that routines have the power to shape our orientation to the world, Trinitas starts the day with our own routine to orient and shape our way of being for the day ahead.

As Trinitas enters its twenty-third year this fall, there will be a host of new faces on our campus. In addition to over twenty new families, we are welcoming a number of new faculty members to the Trinitas community. We thank God for his blessings on our faculty and are eager to introduce these fine folks to you.

The classical school approach offers a fundamentally different vision of education that families fed up with a factory approach to learning find compelling.

As varsity sports seasons get underway this weekend, I want to remind you what it means to represent Trinitas as a fan. You can find a thorough explanation of “The Ideal Trinitas Sports Fan” in the Family Handbook, but I want to give you a few quick reminders.

Last week I introduced the term father famine to this blog. The term I have only recently heard from my pastor; the idea the term denotes I have observed for years. The term fitly describes the absence of fathers and fathering in our culture. We have developed cultural amnesia, and one of the things we’ve forgotten, which is key to any culture, is fathering. By “we” I mean western culture generally, but to be more specific, I mean Christians seem to have forgotten the importance of fathering and, therefore, how to father. There is a dark irony in this Christian forgetfulness. The obvious irony is that fathering ought to be on our minds all the time because we speak of and look to God as our Heavenly Father; the subtler irony is that remembering is a predominant theme throughout Scripture.

The Trinitas seniors recently finished their senior thesis project. It was as if the weight of the world fell off them on that day. They have been living with their topics and all the research and writing and re-writing for a year now. It felt good for them to turn in those papers and defend them before a panel of board members and faculty. It felt good for them to look back on their work well done and know they had accomplished that massive and daunting project they set out to accomplish a year ago.

Our junior and senior classes have just returned from five days in New York City. Some schools would call it a junior-senior trip; we call it an aesthetics trip. On a Trinitas aesthetics trip the main mission is to discover beauty that we can’t discover at home. We go in search of music, dance, art, architecture, and food. It isn’t that we don’t have those things in Pensacola; it’s just that we can find more of them in places like New York City and Washington DC.

In Eph 4:3, Paul says the Ephesians ought to be “eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.” While we know Paul wrote this letter specifically to the church at Ephesus, and with a specific context in mind, we also know that if Paul’s exhortation was true for Christians at Ephesus, it is true for us at Trinitas. Maintaining the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace is no easy task, though, no matter where it is being attempted because we’re all sinners, especially talented at offending each other, hurting each other’s feelings, and generally getting in each other’s way. But when the place you’re attempting to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace is a school where 200 people are living in community each day, it is a difficult task to say the least.