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Pillar

Education & Culture

The fourth pillar, education and culture, is built upon the recognition of two essential realities. First, the Western intellectual tradition requires a dedication to and desire for truth. Second, education takes place not only within colleges and universities but within our broader culture, whose institutions and practices form us as whole persons.

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Pastor Keller preached the Gospel as true. He would blush when I told him he was a genuine apologist. But he deserved this cherished title as one who, in a compelling, credible, and colorful way, could present and defend the basic truths of God’s revelation. No watering down, no wavering, just the truth—which, he would repeat, has a name: Jesus.
In denying students access to their history; in dumbing down art, music, literature, and even the sacred liturgy; and in celebrating obscenity over beauty, you detach people from their past, their home, and the transcendental dimension of the human experience. You make them strangers to themselves, to the soul, and the soil.
As a moral framework for assessing regimes in an imperfect world, Nigel Biggar’s Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning has much to recommend it.
It is through deep feeling that we see truth and beauty. Spiritually emotional people are fully conscious of their object, fully immersed in it. Someone who is profoundly sorrowful can see life’s purpose more clearly than any practitioner of science and technical skill who is devoid of feeling.
Prose is not poetry, yet it has its own rhythms; and the writer’s meaning—conveyed not in bare words alone but in emphases, inflections, punctuations—can be clarified by speaking and hearing it as well as by seeing it. But reading well aloud takes practice.
Too many universities treat students as atomized wills, encouraging them to follow their passions in and out of the classroom. Our colleges must change course and remind students that their familial relationships and their accompanying responsibilities can and should play a more decisive role in their lives than their careers will.
Augusto Del Noce’s The Problem of Atheism refutes the pessimistic notion that “in every philosopher, from Descartes onward,” “the history of philosophy is a process of secularization.” Although Descartes perhaps enabled rationalism’s rebellion against Christianity, his intended project was quite the opposite. He meant to preserve Christianity’s distinctive and closely related commitments to freedom, transcendence, and human dignity.
Ernst Jünger’s 1957 novel, The Glass Bees, is prescient. But it also clarifies many of our own present challenges as we struggle with the role of technology over our lives. In a society defined by sound bites, 280-character tweets, three-minute TikTok videos, and deep fake videos, the line between what is authentically real and what is mere performance or imitation is blurred.
The bad good (or great) books must be read and taught in just the same way as the good great books. The teacher must be a wrestling coach, instilling in his students a readiness to grapple equally with every kind of argument, accepting nothing on which they have not tested their own grip.
What continuing, large-scale “nonversion” away from traditional Christianity means for the nation—both presently and in the years ahead—is a huge “macro-level” question. And a pressing question, not just for sociologists and theologians, but for all of us one way or another. Stephen Bullivant’s prognosis in Nonverts: The Making of Ex-Christian America is neither grim nor naïve, not unduly pessimistic or optimistic, but realistic.
Renewals, revivals, and awakenings are unpredictable, by definition. Christians should not credulously accept them as de facto works of God just because they’re on the news, or on YouTube. But sometimes they produce godly results that last for generations: lives transformed and renewed, people called into vocational ministry, and communities brought to greater wholeness.
To some, my rejection of “privilege” discourse revealed that I was arrogant, ungrateful, and ignorant of the ways in which I was not solely responsible for my success thus far in life. But to others, it was evidence of gratitude and the desire to share my forebears’ recipe for intergenerational mobility as widely as possible, to reject the pessimism inherent in systemic thinking.
An explanation for the military’s recruitment challenges goes deeper than trends in the labor market. Ultimately, the civic honor on which voluntary service depends has quietly been eroding for some time, and is being replaced by an ethos of individual self-fulfillment.
The Greeks lost their marbles, and the British could kindly return them. Bad arguments why the British must return them do not gainsay the fact that they may. Such magnanimity, moreover, would put into practice one of most unexpected innovations in human history: St. Paul’s understanding of grace.
Art is a convening point for many different avenues of pursuing beauty. It is the bridge between chemistry and history and between theology and engineering. Beauty is something every specialist cares about, even in the fields that seem most technical.
When it comes to premeditated murder, compensation is not available. As much of human history attests and as the biblical witness affirms, it is the one crime that carries a mandatory death sentence. To suggest or argue that the ultimate human crime should not be met with the ultimate punishment is a moral travesty because it fails to comprehend the nature and meaning of the imago Dei, and thereby undermines the common good.
The attempt to control thought can do incalculable damage, however doomed it is ultimately. Just as Plato’s guardians are to be kept on the path to virtue by the elimination of all examples of vice, so the self-appointed guardians of contemporary culture have decided that “inclusion” is the virtue of our time, and all literature that might make the path to inclusion a bumpy one must be flattened, bulldozed, paved over.
All those we love, and we ourselves, will one day go through that great black door of death. We need to acknowledge that fact and not try to evade or soften it. Without God, life really is a tragedy, and our mourning is a meaningless biochemical reaction. But our story doesn’t end there. The door has another side: a side of light, with a waiting, loving God.
Present-day Americans are a people consumed by anger—an anger that rests on deep pools of sadness, isolation, loss, and fear. In spite of his reputation for dry, unemotional logic, Thomas Aquinas has a great deal to say about the way in which disordered passions can undermine our capacity for getting at the truth. His work can teach us how to resist the vices encouraged by social media, pursue truth in concert with others, and achieve rational disagreement.
Life’s biggest questions are almost never resolved to everyone’s satisfaction, and if we don’t study the differences between the Epicureans and the Stoics, between Locke and Rousseau, and between legal originalists and non-originalists, we are missing out on our own music: sometimes a battle of the bands, sometimes cacophony, always fascinating.
From beginning to end, the Inquisition’s actions were disciplinary, not dogmatic, although they were based on the erroneous notion that it was heretical to claim that the Earth moves. But opinions of theologians are not the same as Christian doctrine. The error the Church made in dealing with Galileo was an error in judgment. The Inquisition was wrong to discipline Galileo, but discipline is not dogma.
The modern story of “argument” might seem troubling to many. Debate too often seems emotion-driven, and laden with fallacies and quarrelsome noise. By exploring the significance of argument for both individuals and society, Lee Siegel’s Why Argument Matters reminds us why to be human is to argue—and why that is something to celebrate.
With All Her Mind, in compiling the hard-won wisdom of women from many different states in and ways of life, encourages its reader to cultivate compassion toward women whose balances of work, family, children, and study look different from her own. The intellectual life need not be a source of competition among women, but instead ought to find a place in each of our lives.
In The Scandal of Holiness, Jessica Hooten Wilson suggests that we shift from passive, uncritical acceptance of cultural mores and entertainment to active formation in virtue, leading toward a life of sainthood. To do this, we need stories of sanctity that do not elide the messiness of everyday reality. These stories are neither saccharine accounts of cheap piety nor dry philosophical and moral theories.

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