Every person is made in the image of a Creator. That truth carries more implications than most Christian education stops to work out.

If God is a maker, and human beings are made in his image, then the impulse to create — to write, to tell stories, to shape language into something that wasn't there before — is not a hobby for the unusually gifted. It is a reflection of what it means to be human. At Veritas, English Electives are built on that conviction.

Francis Schaeffer's Challenge

In his 1973 essay Art and the Bible, Francis Schaeffer issued a challenge to young Christian artists that has lost none of its edge. He argued that a Christian artist should work in the forms of their own time, showing the marks of the culture out of which they have come and embodying something of the nature of the world as seen from a Christian standpoint. The goal was not art that wore its faith as a label, but art that was genuinely formed by a Christian understanding of reality — honest about darkness, grounded in hope, and excellent in craft.

That vision describes exactly what Veritas hopes to develop in its student writers. The great works have always been made by people who had something true to say and the skill to say it beautifully. The English Electives program exists to develop both.

The Right Moment in the Classical Sequence

By the time students reach the rhetoric stage, they have spent years building a foundation. They have read widely in Literature. They have worked through the formal composition sequence in Grammar and Writing. They have engaged with the Great Books in Omnibus, sitting with writers who grappled with the deepest questions human beings have ever faced. They have studied Rhetoric as a discipline, learning what it means to communicate truth in a way that actually reaches another person.

English Electives are where that foundation gets applied to specific forms: poetry, fiction, journalism, and other writing specialties. The question is no longer "can this student write?" but "what kind of writer is this student, and what do they have to say?"

From Imitation to Voice

The same arc that runs through every subject at Veritas applies here. Students begin by studying the masters — learning the building blocks of each form, seeing how skilled writers deploy them, developing the critical vocabulary to analyze what makes a piece of writing work. Poetry has structure. Fiction has architecture. Journalism has standards and constraints. Each form rewards close study before it rewards original creation.

As students internalize those elements, something shifts. They begin to develop taste — a genuine sense of what they find beautiful, honest, or powerful, and why. They become capable of critiquing their own work rather than simply producing it. As Schaeffer observed, the greater the artistic expression, the more important it is to consciously bring it and its worldview under the judgment of Christ and the Bible. Students who have learned to evaluate art critically are better equipped to create art that holds up to that same standard.

The Cultural Stakes

Throughout history, the writers and storytellers of each generation have done something of enormous consequence: they have preserved and shaped their culture. The great books Veritas students spend years studying were written by people who were doing exactly that — putting language to the deepest truths of their moment in ways that lasted.

The students writing now will do the same, in whatever forms their culture affords. Some will write fiction. Some will write journalism, or poetry, or essays, or forms that don't yet have names. What they carry into that work — a Christian worldview, a genuine craft, and a concern for truth — will shape what they produce and what it does in the world.

Developing those writers is part of what Veritas means by restoring culture for Christ.