​The following essay is excerpted from Christine Norvell’s recent book The Sycomore Fig Tree: Biblical Botany & Scriptural Truth.

I read the Book of Amos several times one summer, drawn in by how the land responded to what was spoken. Years ago, in my master’s thesis, I explored the land as a character in the early works of American author Willa Cather. Call it land, call it setting, in fiction it was not a very original thesis idea—I argued that the land was essentially human. Never neutral and never static, it could change its mind. It could act for good or ill for those who presumed to control it or who thought they could tend it. But the image of nature as a person is ancient.

In the Book of Amos, the land felt judgment, a human response. Amaziah the priest complained to Jeroboam, “The land cannot bear all [Amos’s] words” (7:10 NIV). It could not sustain or endure it. The land trembled with agitation, rising and falling like the Nile River (8:8). It was as if the land God created knew that He would release an unimaginably horrific famine. No one would be able to hear the words of Adonai (8:11). Amaziah was right.

In my early research I quickly realized that Amos drew the attention of many biblical scholars for one reason, a reason I was eager to investigate as well—no one knew for certain what he did for a living. What was his true occupation? Amos claimed, “I was no prophet, nor a prophet’s son, but I was a herdsman and a dresser of sycamore figs” (7:14 ESV). (Note that Sycomore is a kind of fig, deriving its spelling from the fruit syconium and the Greek word sykomoraia. It is not to be confused with the American sycamore, Plantanus occidentalis L., or the British sycamore tree, an actual maple, Acer pseudoplatanus L.) But what does that mean?
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Opinions swirled over centuries of research. . . .

I have long loved teaching the letters and poetry of Phillis Wheatley to high school students, but I have not had the opportunity yet to share her life and work with middle schoolers. Biographer K.A. Ellis is an able and inspiring guide who welcomes younger readers into Wheatley’s life while also offering many spiritual lessons.

From the Gold Coast of Senegambia to a glimpse of village life in 1760, author K.A. Ellis depicts the riches and traditions of West Africa. She imagines the moments of a little girl’s capture and her march through the final fort as she boards the slave ship Phillis with hundreds of slaves of every age.

Colonies of every country were greedy and passed laws to that end. It soon became common to kidnap children and pregnant mothers. The younger the slave, the more years of service. In the graphic reality of this horror-filled trade, Ellis’s chapters make clear that these ship owners and crews had been “blinded by Satan” to see people as cargo. Yet Ellis turns the tide at the end of each chapter and returns to the potential and hope of Phillis’s life to come.
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Once the ship is in Boston, seven-year-old Phillis stands on the auction block. Her tribal name has disappeared, and her new owners, John and Susannah Wheatley, are the ones to first call her Phillis. Phillis is quickly befriended by their daughter Mary, and the family educates her at home when she is not doing housework. Learning English and Latin, Phillis writes her first poetry. Here, Ellis’s storytelling shines in her paraphrases of Wheatley’s verses and in the account of Phillis’s coming to Christ at Old South Meeting House.

 A Presbyterian minister told me that many of the young parents in her inner city church were and are in great need of basic training, so she extended help by offering a Sunday afternoon class. No, not the kind of class with a popular Christian parenting book or a video channel with the latest blend of faith and child psychology. Rather, her session centered on healthy family habits, beginning with the most basic interactions.

In this class, she described a typical parenting day with ups and downs and casually mentioned bedtime prayer and stories. By the expressions she saw, she instantly knew that few of the parents and guardians prayed or regularly read to their children. She hadn’t even made it to the point in her notes where she asked them to read the Bible. And so, a solitary parenting class became a full year of discipleship.

Yes, studies show that the ease and rise of screen time competes for these precious evening minutes or any gap of time in the day, but the HarperCollins UK survey from 2025 also reveals that fewer parents see a purpose for reading together. They simply don’t do it. The lack of purpose is altogether disheartening. It is likely what my minister friend discerned—that all families do not know that spending purposeful time interacting together as readers can strengthen God-given bonds, love, and affection. My friend responded to the need by adding weekly classes and introducing these families to many activities and ideas, not to fill schedules but to show them that they could shape who they were becoming as families with God in the center.

According to cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham, when children develop a sense that being a reader is part of who they are, a virtuous cycle of growth begins. It’s not just how they feel about reading. It becomes a daily choice whenever time offers an opportunity. And reading together is about what we give and receive. It can be more than a school reading program, more than minutes we count, more than conversation, even more than the nurturing moments of holding a child on a lap. These times can hold greater potential if we can see it.
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In Wondrous Reading: Encountering the Catholic Faith in Children’s Literature, LuElla D’Amico makes a spiritual distinction that equips those struggling to see reading’s purpose. The shared literary space with our children not only cultivates reading habits but also “nurture[s] a space for meaningful conversations that can bond you and develop your spiritual acumen.” This intention sets it apart from other family guides. It is with others, in communion, that our minds and hearts are engaged, not only our emotions but also our spirits. . . .​

They have multiplied across my nightstand, and the stack is growing. Sticky notes, a pencil, junkmail postcards, and a receipt work as placeholders.

I actively read three to four books. I read a few pages from each book every night or switch from book to book. I have plenty of other reading friends who keep disciplined systems like these, sometimes with up to ten books.

Unfortunately, I started four books in December and have not returned to them since. Can I blame my attention in a distracted age? Certainly. Did I spend a lot of late night hours visiting instead of reading? You bet, but a few months have now passed. Is a book or two ready for the fatal Did-Not-Finish pile? Also a possibility. But I wonder if it’s something else that leads me to lay aside certain books.

Here are two examples. For a decade, I have wanted to read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first novel, from 1920, This Side of Paradise. I’ve taught many of Fitzgerald’s short stories and The Great Gatsby countless times. I might never find a character to truly cheer for in his work, but that is my opinion of course and also not the point of fiction. My margin notes and lines and boxes of every color reveal how I’ve learned and reflected on Fitzgerald’s works over the years as I taught them. I relish so much of his style and phrasing while I can also appreciate his critical eye of American society. Yet I stopped halfway through his instant bestseller. I don’t like Amory. I have left him at age twenty in the middle of Princeton in chapter 3, and I’m not sure I care enough to read more. I feel a certain stubbornness or maybe ambivalence. . . 

In first grade, I had the misfortune of being the first left-handed student Mrs. Posey had ever taught. I sat in the front row by her desk “because you’re different,” she huffed. My five-year-old mind thought she was an ancient grump. She grumbled when she “had to” give me a pair of left-handed scissors. She grumbled when she corrected my pencil position. I felt her glare at the slant of my letters.

I was plain scared of her, and I’m pretty sure others were too. Whether Mrs. Posey knew it or not, her classroom had a culture. Every first grade classroom does. Every type of classroom, in fact, has structure, routine, and expectations, intentional or not. And the teacher is the core of that culture.
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Mandi Gerth’s Thoroughness and Charm: Cultivating the Habits of a Classical Classroom addresses this very issue. Classroom culture may develop accidentally, but the truth is that a neutral classroom does not exist. Although her apologia is intended for classical Christian educators, Gerth speaks to all teachers: “To be great teachers, we must do so consciously and intentionally, for we cannot avoid crafting culture, and we must be careful of the message we send." . . .

No other author has so immediately affected my perspective on work as Josef Pieper. In my mind, work was separate from the rest of life. Working hours have always been a discrete part of my day since I took my first job as a teenager. Maybe this division is inherent to American culture and how I grew up, but in Pieper’s mind, work is part of our response to the gift of life.

Though published decades ago, German philosopher Josef Pieper’s commentaries on work, leisure, and festivity bring to light two deficits within our culture today—true community relationship and conscious introspection. His works, Leisure: The Basis of Culture (1948) and In Tune with the World: A Theory of Festivity (1965), posit not a solution to our culture’s dis-perspective, but a call to return to a meaningful and fruitful life. If we can’t recognize leisure, then our culture is endangered.
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But leisure is a tricky word in the twenty-first century. Is it welcoming visitors at our leisure? Is it reclining on a couch in a leisure suit? Is it being free from work demands? Is it the opposite of work? What kind of leisure is this? . . .

It was a simple tweet. I posted a picture from the second day of school, showing my own annotations of a C.S. Lewis essay with the caption, “Teaching students annotation means modeling my own.” To my surprise, author Stephen Chiger responded that he taught the same, most notably in his book Love & Literacy published in 2021 for Uncommon Schools, a public charter network in New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts.
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Intrigued, I wanted to see if a design to foster reading and literacy in urban public schools might share some practices with classical education. The premise of the book is a true ideal: “This is what love in a literacy classroom looks like: a love for the conversation, love for the text, and love for the ideas they both spark. When that includes all students, magic happens.” I kept reading.

Caldwell, ID. In 1513, after serving for years in the courts of Florence, Niccolò Machiavelli found himself on the losing side of a Medici plot and was exiled from his beloved city. He was likely tortured before he left. In his new life, he farmed on his family estate and spent his days debating peasants in the local inn. But that was not all. He described the rest of his day in a remarkable and justly famous letter to his friend Francesco Vettori:

When evening comes, I return to my home, and I go into my study; and on the threshold, I take off my everyday clothes, which are covered with mud and mire, and I put on regal and curial robes; and dressed in a more appropriate manner I enter into the ancient courts of ancient men and am welcomed by them kindly, and there I taste the food that alone is mine, and for which I was born; and there I am not ashamed to speak to them, to ask them the reasons for their actions; and they, in their humanity, answer me; and for four hours I feel no boredom, I dismiss every affliction, I no longer feel poverty nor do I tremble at the thought of death: I become completely part of them.
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Roosevelt Montás, the author of Rescuing Socrates, was likewise welcomed kindly into these ancient courts after finding a whole set of Harvard Classics in the garbage and—due to limited space for books in the Queens apartment of his teen years—saving the Plato volume from suffering the fate of the rest of the series. Like Machiavelli, he is also unashamed to speak with the ancient men and to question them. His new book is a generous and magnanimous account of his own initiation into the world of classics via the Columbia College Core Curriculum, as well as a thoughtful record of his continued engagement with them in many classrooms at Columbia and elsewhere....

In the history of education in America, many Americans no longer know how common schools became more than an idea. Nor do they know who made the first strides in these efforts.

Thomas Jefferson attempted to establish a decentralized public school system more than once, a plan based on localized districts within counties. In his 1778 “Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge,” he stressed the need for vigilant citizens who would constantly be on guard against the ambition of rulers, especially at the state or federal levels. Jefferson wanted to educate all students as future citizens in a republic and at the same time provide expanded opportunities for men to develop into the future political leaders of Virginia.

At his 1838 Lyceum Address in Springfield, Illinois, Abraham Lincoln advocated that schools should teach a reverence for our American democracy: “Let reverence for the laws be breathed by every American mother, to the lisping babe, that prattles on her lap—let it be taught in schools, in seminaries, and in colleges; let it be written in Primers, spelling books, and in Almanacs;—let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislative halls, and enforced in courts of justice. And, in short, let it become the political religion of the nation.”

Building on this idea of citizenship, William Holmes ​​McGuffey (1800–1873) strove to openly cultivate Christian character by developing readers in the growing American West independent of British influence. The McGuffey Readers introduced students to the classics, to morality, and to good character. Seven million readers were sold before 1850 with thirty-seven states adopting them by 1890. McGuffey’s influence held for decades.
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In his examination of McGuffey’s life and curriculum, John H. Westerhoff weaves a biography within a fascinating history of education in the early 1800s. The idea of common schools was growing. Westerhoff’s research clearly shows how McGuffey and his original Readers made a significant impact on nineteenth-century education through the use of moral teaching, civics, story, and phonics....

Sometimes I reread children’s literature because I enjoy being captured again by the quality of writing and the stir of imagination. I read Laura Ingalls Wilder alongside every Louis L’Amour western in my junior high library. Not one librarian said I couldn’t read them because I was a girl, and thankfully, those same librarians pointed me next to Zane Grey. At age 13 and 14, these westerns were deep to me, even if I did recognize the plot patterns. I loved them. Action, mystery, rescue, the setting sun, the lonely West, and often, a misunderstood man.
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In the same vein, Jack Schaefer’s very first novel creates a story that’s even more impactful. Shane (1949) began as a short story that was serialized in three parts in Argosy magazine in the late 40s. First titled “Rider from Nowhere,” it wasn’t intended for young children, though it’s certainly suitable. Through the eyes of a child narrator and from his opening description, Schaefer crafts a deeper cowboy character than most, perhaps because we witness Shane’s moral choices and his influence upon an entire family...