Trinitas Blog

Classical Christian schools can come across as pretty odd to most folks. While Latin can still be found in other private and public schools, not many schools teach six years of it. (I know of one classical Christian school that teaches eleven years of Latin.) And good books can certainly be found in other private and public schools, but not very many will read Homer, Virgil, Plato, Augustine, Rousseau, and Nietzsche. Memory is part of learning no matter what kind of school one attends, but not many schools will memorize hundreds of lines of prose, poetry, and Scripture every year. So yes, classical Christian schools can come across as odd even if only because of differences like these.

The following is adapted from a faculty address delivered at Convocation by Mr. Varela on August 16, 2024, at Trinitas Christian School.

Our theme for this year at Trinitas is love. Of course, love is a central theme in many of the stories you have read, and it will be a continual theme in your studies because it is a constant in the world God designed. Jane Austen writes of a love that grows over time between Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennett in Pride and Prejudice. In Little Women, Louis May Alcott gives the reader the heartbreak of unrequited love between Laurie Laurence and Jo March. Romeo and Juliet tells of a tragic love, courtesy of Mr. Shakespeare. These are all examples of romantic love. Since dating isn’t a part of our school culture, let’s lay that kind of love aside for now and think about love as it pertains to you, dear senior, and even you, seventh graders.

The following is adapted from an address delivered at Parent Orientation by Mr. Cowart on August 14, 2024, at Trinitas Christian School.

We gather together this evening for orientation. To be oriented. But what does that mean? Perhaps you came here this evening, expecting to hear from your child’s teachers about school supplies, textbooks, class schedules, homework procedures and the like. And, yes, we will get to all of that. But before we do, I want to take a few minutes to speak to you about a different sort of orientation. In the English language, the word “oriented” has four primary uses. It can connote interest in that someone is “oriented” toward a particular thing or activity. Or it can mean designed for, like, for instance, if an industry is “oriented” toward a particular market. Frequently “oriented” is used in terms of adjusting to one’s circumstances or surroundings as we do when we visit a foreign city or country. But tonight, I want to use “orient” in the sense of positioning oneself in relation to a fixed point. As a sailor of old would orient himself by the north star, I want to challenge all of us tonight to orient our school in the coming academic year by the fixed position of the Christian virtues of hospitality and healing.

The following is adapted from the Commencement Address delivered by Dr. Clifford Humphrey on May 17, 2024, at Trinitas Christian School.

Graduation, the word comes from the Latin verb graduari, meaning to take a gradus, a step. You have made it to the last step, the last rung on the ladder. It’s the end. It feels good, right? Like you can practically retire now and take it easy: this long race you’ve been running is over. But wait: this ceremony is also called commencement. What does that mean? Beginning. Why would we call this ceremony that? What might be beginning now?

When the time rolls around for us to talk to the teachers about how our kids have been doing at school, there are only two things we really want to hear: 1) they have been obedient, and 2) they have been cheerful about it. Don’t get me wrong—we love to hear that they are excelling academically or making great improvement in a particular subject. It is just that we care a lot more about how they are behaving at school than we do about what grades they are getting.

There are a few reasons for this. The first and most important is obviously that it honors God. A great education is a gift. But it is a gift that comes with a corresponding gift for sanctification.

I often find myself urging Christian parents to consider Deuteronomy 6:4-9 as a guiding principle for how they educate their children. One common objection to this assertion goes like this: We send our children to non-Christian schools so they can be salt and light to the lost children and teachers. If that’s what you think, I suggest what you’re doing is more like sending your lambs to slaughter.

Thousands of Christian families have to decide about schooling for their children every year. Arguably no other decision parents make in a lifetime will have a greater impact on their children. Should they send them to public school, charter school, private school, private religious school, virtual school, home school, virtual home school, or some other exciting new option? How do Christian parents sift through their choices to make sense of it all? Is there a guiding principle we can use to help make the right decision, one that will provide a hierarchy for ranking all the variables? Scripture is always a good place to start.

Our junior and senior classes have just returned from twelve days in Greece and Italy. Some schools would call it a junior-senior trip; we call it the Classical Heritage Tour. On a Trinitas aesthetics trip the main mission is to discover beauty that we can’t discover at home. For twenty years, these trips were to New York City and Washington DC on alternating years, but now, for the first time, Trinitas students were able to travel abroad and experience the music, dance, art, architecture, and food that has been foundational to their classical education.