Ep. 43 – Brent Pinkall and Redeeming the Six Arts
This is Episode 43 of the Consortium Podcast, an academic audio blog sponsored by Kepler Education.
In this episode, Brent Pinkall, a lecturer in rhetoric at New St. Andrews College and author of the new book, Redeeming the Six Arts: A Christian Approach to Chinese Classical Education joins Scott Postma to talk about the characteristics of the six classical Chinese arts and how they relate to the Western liberal arts.
Brent argues that classical Christian education is not fundamentally a canon of fixed texts or subjects but rather an approach rooted in the Fifth Commandment: Honor thy father and thy mother. Insofar as our ancestors differ, the languages, literature, and arts we study will also differ. Although Chinese Christians share the same “spiritual” fathers as their Western counterparts, their “earthly” fathers are different, and therefore their curriculum must reflect not only a shared “Christian” heritage but also a unique “classical” heritage.
