Klassen and Zimmermann have given me much to think about in their book The Passionate Intellect: Incarnational Humanism and the Future of University Education. One chapter subheading alone rings the bell of reflection during my day: “Thinking is not optional: It is part of your Christian identity.” It is not just that our university is starting a Quality Enhancement project related to our accreditation, and that project focuses on identity as a key component of Christian servant-leadership development. It has everything to do with the deeper purposes of my teaching, so it is indeed a passionate proposition. I hope my students come to share in it.
In his discussion of those philosophers (in the lineage of Descartes) whom he referred to as instead ideosophers, Jacques Maritain wrote,
. . . a number of them would prefer, it seems, merely to be a channel for the stream of research, a vanishing instant in its ever changing self-awareness. Their misfortune is not to have seen that thought is not the harlot of time . . .
(The Peasant of the Garonne, 1968, page 102)
From “Goodbye to All That,” by Steve Wasserman www.cjr.org/cover_story/goodbye_to_all_that_1.php
– on troubling changes in the culture of literacy:
The “most troubling crisis is the sea change in the culture of literacy itself, the degree to which our overwhelmingly fast and visually furious culture renders serious reading increasingly irrelevant, hollowing out the habits of attention indispensable for absorbing long-form narrative and the following of sustained argument.” Read more…
December 31st, 2007
Jerry
Dorcas Rose McBride, in The Convention, by Will D. Campbell:
“This is politics, much as I hate that word. We had an old governor in Mississippi who always said, ‘people don’t come to political rallies to think. They come to holler.’ And he kept getting elected.”