The challenge of the Truth Matters conference call to “reclaim truthfulness for the academic enterprise” underscores that a commitment to truth is not an abstract principle but a concrete action. As Plato recognizes, philosopher-rulers need not only “the ability to grasp eternal and immutable truth” but also certain “qualities of character”; in describing these, he begins with “love of the knowledge that reveals eternal reality” and follows immediately with “truthfulness” – for how could “a love of wisdom and a love of falsehood” possibly coexist in one person?1 Character thus connotes integrity, because virtuous traits are complementary and coherent.
The Apostle Paul shares this concern with truthfulness and its integrality with concomitant virtues, not of course as qualities of an elite, but as characteristics of all the saints. Paul, more clearly than Plato, is motivated by concern for others than by a theoretical vision of abstract ideals: “Do not lie to each other, since you have taken off your old self with its practices.”2 Truthfulness is a quality not of isolated moral heroes but of members of a community, for whom Paul’s purpose is that they may be “united in love . . . in order that they may know the mystery of God, namely, Christ, in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.”3 And while Paul agrees that truthfulness cannot flourish apart from the virtues that complement it, what confers integrity is love – not of knowledge, as for Plato, but of God and neighbour.4 Relinquishing “the old self” is not a matter of obeying the rational charioteer, of dialectical engagement until one attains an intellectual vision of the Good, but of willfully and willingly subjecting reason and all other human capacities to love – not a simple undertaking, as Paul explains in many places.5
While it is evident from the above that Paul does not despise knowledge, he is persuaded that only when we are face to face with love will we know fully as we are fully known.6 The virtues, finding their integrity in the central divine call to love, are “dispersions” of it, in the same way that a prism disperses white light to reveal the spectrum.7 Augustine explains, with respect to the “cardinal virtues” (having learned the lesson of Romans 7): “Temperance is love giving itself entirely to that which is loved; fortitude is love readily bearing all things for the sake of the loved object; justice is love serving only the loved object, and therefore ruling rightly; prudence is love distinguishing with sagacity between what hinders it and what helps it.”8
The “new self” is Christ-like character, the integrity of which is assured by love. From this holistic perspective it is no surprise that, for example, Anselm’s exploration of truth leads him to propose that truth, justice, and rightness are mutually definable, so that truthfulness inheres not primarily in statements uttered but in a whole-bodied response to the multidimensional call of truth.9 Actions speak truth louder than words, and so Anselm values knowledge less than understanding, the capability that informs how one acts in the world at large. Truthfulness – being true – implies being rightly directed on the way of and for life; Jesus of course claims it as a comprehensive value.10 This integrality of the virtues – the singular definition of which Plato unsuccessfully sought in the Meno – is also because they are but embodied expressions of a person’s heart commitment.
The institutional incarnations of individuals in community also answer to the call of love, and thus properly respect all modes of normativity, but each does so with a particular value in focus.11 Given that intellectual formation is the defining feature of academic institutions,12 the cultural-cognitive tools therein acquired will be employed in service of truth only if they are infused with love; as Parker Palmer contends, “we must allow the power of love to transform the very knowledge we teach, the very methods we use to teach and learn it.”13
Love connects everyone compassionately with all that God has made, and the knowledge we therefore seek is intimate and respectful. This kind of knowledge is not the comprehension of eternal otherworldly truths or the distanced theoretical control of objective material, but emerges through engagement in historically contingent experience, if we are open to hearing God’s voice.14 Biblically, such knowledge is comprised by, rather than opposed to, wisdom; taking a cue from Palmer, we may consider spiritual wisdom to be knowledge transformed by love. It involves sensitivity, vulnerability, empathy, and tact in responsive interaction with other creatures and is accessible to all who have a listening, loving relationship with creation; as Anselm also would say, things themselves, in all their diversity, reveal truth. This conception is at odds with Plato and his heirs, for in this tradition, knowledge “in and of itself,” acquired by a pure, impersonal rationality, yields “worldly wisdom,” a distortion of the wisdom revealed in Christ by the Spirit of God.15
Educating for truthfulness is not, I suggest, a matter of focusing for a time on this particular virtue and then moving on to another, until the list has been covered. I do agree with Plato that wisdom cannot be taught, not at least as a didactic transfer from expert to novice. It can, however, be learned, as a matter of holistic character formation in which students practice using knowledge wisely in loving service of others. To what extent this goal is reflected in Christian higher education, and how it might better be so, I now turn to consider.16
The Council for Christian Colleges and Universities describes its member institutions as “intentionally Christ-centered”; its 111 North American members are also institutions that employ “curricula rooted in the arts and sciences.”17 The council’s mission includes helping its members “transform lives by faithfully relating scholarship and service to biblical truth.”18 A reasonable generalization is that these colleges accept the liberal arts curriculum as the proper model for general education, provided it has a biblically transformational orientation.
We may fairly assume that the goal of a Christian liberal arts education is to support the development of well-rounded persons, broadly knowledgeable about society and culture and able to take their place in the world as thoughtful contributors to democratic life and vital members of church congregations. But we may well question whether a broad initiation into the disciplines of the arts and sciences is the appropriate platform for promoting trothful action. If an educational institution is to be faithful to Christ, it must strive to ensure that all facets of its curriculum and pedagogy reflect what scripture would have us value. This requires more than addition to and subtraction from the received tradition: it demands critical reflection on the taken-for-granted structural conditions of schooling and an ongoing commitment to their reformation. Lives are not transformed, I suggest, merely by relating scholarship, service, and scripture.19
The contributors to a significant recent publication, The Schooled Heart, are deeply concerned about the importance of college students’ moral formation (as for many, and unfortunately, I think, a term viewed as synonymous with “character education”).20 Although the editors observe that the “emergence of academic disciplines . . . is an integral part of the story of moral education’s marginalization,”21 they nonetheless argue that the integration of the intellectual (disciplinary) and moral dimensions constitutes a genuine liberal arts education, current practices that for the most part exclude the latter being a distortion of the ideal. The conviction informing the collection is that virtues are best acquired in the very conduct of learning in the disciplines – that is, within the framework of rationality – provided the acknowledged fragmentation of the contemporary curriculum is countered by, for example, the inclusion of an integrated core or interdisciplinary courses.
Yet, according to Stanley Hauerwas’s chapter within that volume, if academic excellence is prioritized, “you can kiss Christianity goodbye.”22 Hauerwas believes that American Christians “live in dark times,” one of the symptoms of which is that Christian universities produce graduates eager (if unwittingly) to serve “powers foreign to the gospel.”23 He lifts the discussion of character education out of the arena of personal behaviour and into the comprehensive spiritual, political, and economic environment that is its rightful locus. Citing Alasdair MacIntyre’s claim that the structure of education is itself of moral import, Hauerwas contends that “disciplinary divisions . . . reflect as well as contribute to the fragmentary and compartmentalized character of modern life.”24 Universities are committed to being “ahistorical institutions that can serve anyone anywhere” and thus to graduating “people educated to be willing agents of the modern state.”25 They favour knowledge over wisdom.
Wisdom is one of the virtues that the authors seek to nurture: “an educated discipline of mind coupled with a skillful practical discernment . . . in daily affairs [involving] both theoria and praktika . . . never purely one or the other.”26 This description reflects not only The Schooled Heart’s project of integrating the intellectual and the moral, but also a more pervasive mindset that, in accepting the inviolability of the theory/practice pairing as descriptor of the terrain of human life, is likely to frame most efforts to assert the primacy of character education within (or with only minor adjustments to) prevailing curricular structures.
As Hauerwas intimates, theoretical abstraction promotes the lamented curricular fragmentation. Academic disciplines require the logical-analytical interrogation of experience. Such disciplines are subject to cognitive canons, and that requires the putative expulsion of any form of normativity except the logical.27 Crucial to the deception that colleges and universities can be “ahistorical institutions” is a latently Platonic view of theory as able to penetrate to universal structures, outside a particular time and location. Hauerwas, however, proposes a remedy, the general tenor of which I endorse: hearts are schooled throughout the curriculum, but above all “by the wonderful world opened by learning to see that all that is is God’s burning bright creation.”28
By “all that is,” I understand that everything we experience, in its historically situated particularity and complexity, is God’s creation, even if it is mediated by human hands. Not only – or even mainly – the world of so-called nature, but also every person, relationship, institution, act, event, and the interrelations among them are creational entities. Creation, as God speaks through it, is the primary site of learning. As Anselm says, the things themselves speak the truth. Theoretical reflection, as one mode of experience, ought not to be the lens through which all else is viewed: “discipline of mind” (recalling Jeffrey’s phrase) will be attained in part by schooling in the academic disciplines, but this is only one category among the many disciplines that are necessary. The essential disciplines are fundamentally those of practice, not as complements to or implications of rationality or theory, but as the matrix within which full-bodied life is experienced and out of which theoretical practice arises.
The coherence that all things have in Christ cannot be seen in a curriculum that fragments the world into seemingly self-explanatory disciplinary compartments. Neither Hauerwas nor I would counsel that the resources of the academic disciplines be abandoned, but rather the focus should change, so that academic excellence – amounting to the pursuit of “truth” conceived in rationalistic terms – is not a priority. The excellences that should have priority are not those of the head but those of the heart, for where the heart goes, there the head (and hands) will follow. Ultimately, the coherence of all things, their interdependent relationality, is that of love.
The report of the Calvin College Curriculum Study Committee, entitled Christian Liberal Arts Education, and finalized in 1965, ambitiously purports to investigate “the very basis of all Christian higher education.”29 The committee eschewed what it termed the “pragmatist view . . . that the acquisition of knowledge is to be justified primarily in terms of utility for the solution of concrete practical problems in contemporary life,”30 and instead promoted the “disciplinary view”31 that the academic disciplines are not oriented primarily to practical outcomes, but involve systematic and “disinterested . . . study of some aspect or segment of reality.” Theoretical investigation will often have practical import, but the primary goal is “to discover how things are and why they are as they are.”32 This is clearly a forceful statement of the view of higher education I dispute in this chapter.
More than thirty years later, a revision to the Calvin core curriculum maintained the liberal arts model, but with a significant change in focus. Where the previous core aimed “to introduce Calvin students to the methods, results and approaches of the various academic disciplines,” the curriculum revision committee judged that the core had not “spelled out in convincing detail” how this was connected to the college’s central goal of “preparing students for lives of Christian service in society.”33
The revised core curriculum sees the disciplines as the means rather than the objects of education. While continuing to identify Calvin as “a liberal arts institution,” the disciplines are now explicitly intended to prepare students for their varied callings in life, as “citizens, parishioners, players in a market economy, participants in the culture and members of a society deeply shaped by science and technology,” by providing them “with the insights and skills they will need to be informed and effective agents within these domains of practical life.”34
The reference to lack of “convincing detail” is a courteous under-statement: the later committee was not at all convinced that the academic disciplines in their “objectivity” could serve Calvin College’s purposes. The phrase “practical life” underscores how radical the shift in emphasis was meant to be. Also significant in the revised curriculum is the addition of the virtues to the existing components of knowledge (disciplines) and skills (competences), as “certain traits of character we want to foster in the classroom and in the community at large.”35 There is, however, little conviction that these virtues – primarily attributes of individuals – can be actively taught. As I intimated above, I believe this skepticism is justified when character education is fundamentally an appendage to the liberal arts curriculum. Be that as it may, the Calvin experience demonstrates dissatisfaction with key assumptions of the liberal arts model as previously conceived, and recognition of the need to move in the direction I have espoused.
Nicholas Wolterstorff, a prolific contributor to reflection on Christian higher education among many other topics, was chair of the first-mentioned committee. He later concluded that “doing justice and struggling against injustice” – not “personal virtues” associated more with righteousness than with public justice, nor initiation into the academic disciplines – are central to college students’ ethical formation.36 He maintains the importance of a cognitive framework (some components of which will be sourced from the disciplines) for evaluating social justice issues, but he also stresses the significance of empathic engagement with suffering people, either directly or vicariously, the impact of modeling on character development, and the role of narrative. Wolterstorff considers these and other elements necessary if people are to develop not only knowledge and skills but also the disposition to do justice. And a disposition is of course a virtue, if it is directed aright.
Character entails both understanding how one should act and also true and just acting; value is thereby realized, in both senses of the latter term.37 Forming the kind of character that will more often realize value in things and actions requires the development of “grounded normative dispositions.”38 The curricular focus is then on the kinds of engagements with the world that best promote dispositions – which, as matters of the heart, are deeper than affections – to act rightly. Such engagements will be rooted in and responsive to historical context and concerned more with concrete particularity than with abstracted universality, with “practical life” and “God’s burning bright creation” in which the Spirit reveals “eternal and immutable truth.”39 Students should attend carefully to the diverse norms that obtain, for God speaks truth through every strand of the world’s fabric, and they should willingly love to act in accord with this truth.
John Macmurray succinctly formulated the problem with a “liberal arts plus” pedagogy: theory in itself is powerless to change reality, because “I do” precedes “I think.”40 With respect specifically to moral education, Maxine Greene faults the line of reflection that runs from Kant through Rawls and Kohlberg for its intellectualist emphasis, to the exclusion of concern with “embodied relationships, mutuality, care, and concern,” and thus for driving a wedge between “principled action and sympathetic identification, rational judgment and emotion”; she stresses the necessity of “relationality” as complement to rationality in the struggle for social justice.41 Jean Anyon also points to the significance of active engagement with others in movements for social justice in shaping the beliefs that people come to hold.42 Brian Walsh and Sylvia Keesmaat suggest that becoming a Christian occurs in the act of identifying with the Christian community;43 this act is also yada (knowing intimately), in accord with their understanding that truth is a matter of covenantal fidelity (of character and relationality) rather than of propositional accuracy.44 More recently, James K.A. Smith argues for the greater formative power of liturgical practices (whether secular or religious) relative to education in “worldview” and “perspective.”45
Jesus calls his disciples to “follow me, for I am the truth.”46 Just as he points to the good samaritan as the embodiment of love – “go and do likewise” – rather than demanding obedience to a principle, he asks for emulation of his incarnated life – and death. Without taking this action and discipling themselves to him – accepting his discipline, fearing the Lord – they would not have had the benefits of his teachings. Conversion or repentance is not primarily a change of mind, but a change of direction – ironically, the metaphor Plato embeds in the cave allegory, in the physical turning from “image” to “reality” that is the first step on the ascent toward the sun.
This change of direction in biblical terms is, at root, a change of heart. Jesus often employs narrative to invite this change, for narrationality weaves together the strands of life – its interdependent relationality – that rationality so regularly sunders. Narrationality is hospitable to the multidimensional realization of value that is wisdom.47 Jesus was a wisdom teacher – indeed, he is wisdom incarnate48 – who often taught in parables that, rather than being the simple stories they seem, required wisdom on the part of their hearers to be understood. The parable of the sheep and the goats is a prime example of teaching in the wisdom tradition, for it says that one hears the voice of God in the voices of God’s creatures, particularly the underprivileged and oppressed, and that one serves God in serving them – the widows, orphans, poor, and foreigners who are the ubiquitous focus of Israel’s calling to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with their God.
In my experience, the parable to which Christian educators most frequently appeal is that of the talents,49 in order to justify the laudable aim of helping individual students develop their varied gifts. However, there are a couple of significant ways in which this parable is misunderstood.
The first is bound up with the very title that has been foisted on the tale. The confusion goes back to the early fifteenth century (and results, ironically, from John Wycliffe’s attempt to render the Bible in plain English), for although the talents in the parable are coins given to the servants in gracious accordance with their different abilities, the word “talent” soon acquired the meaning of a special ability and “talent” and “ability” were conflated. Truer to the parable’s message is a recent educational coining (the pun seems unavoidable), that of a talented environment; in this conception, talents are the opportunities parents, teachers, and the community provide that enable people to develop their abilities.50 Without access to a piano, and most likely a piano teacher, the most musically able person will never be a pianist; even more fundamentally, without being nurtured in a linguistic environment, a child will not learn a language. The unwise servant earns a rebuke not because he has little ability, but because he is unfaithful in not using this ability to take advantage of the opportunity afforded to him by his master.
Scripture is one integral revelation, but its division into chapters, verses, and titled sub-sections – or the belief that it is a collection of propositions – can fragment our understanding. The parable is informed by and informs its companions in Matthew 24 and 25: the faithful and wicked servants, the ten virgins, the need to be always busy about the Lord’s work, and the sheep and the goats, which is explicit about what the Lord’s work is. But on the reading of the parable of the talents I have proposed, and as shocking as the juxtaposition of terms will sound, the parable of the sheep and goats says that the suffering and oppressed are the “talents” presented to us; that caring for the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the homeless, and the prisoner is the Lord’s work.51 Again, in serving them, we serve Jesus, and it is significant that Matthew records Jesus choosing this story to culminate his teaching ministry mere days before his crucifixion. This is the second point of educational relevance, for instead of placing the nurture of individual “talents” at the centre, this story questions what our curriculum and pedagogy would look like if the task of bringing healing to a broken world were at the centre and if the restoration of justice, the breaking in of dynamic shalom, were its impetus. Individual abilities would still be nurtured, but not for the individualistic end of competitive success in academic achievement.
The faithless servant was foolish; the other two were wiser, for they heard the words of their master and acted on them, increasing the value of the resources with which they were entrusted. Being of good character, they enabled flourishing. Should not the goal of character formation be people who live in service of the flourishing of others, enabling them to realize their value, while themselves living in service of their Master? Is not the pursuit of justice a primary goal of wise living?52
How do we create talented environments that afford students opportunities to use their abilities to address a suffering world and construct spaces in which, as Palmer aptly says, “the community of truth may be practiced”?53 In what practices do we invite students to engage, in what narratives do we ask them to live – those that promote disciplinary knowledge or those that invite the wisdom of disciples?
The authors of The Schooled Heart note the particular danger that confronts the liberal arts curriculum – briefly, that of being “merely academic.”54 Others in American academia share similar concerns. Elizabeth Coleman, president of Bennington College, says: “The trajectories of specialization, an emphasis on technical mastery, neutrality as a condition of intellectual integrity, leave us unable and disinclined to take on the real world obligations of citizenship. Such obligations are much too open-ended, contentious, messy, value-laden, and dependent on capacities radically different from those of a narrowly conceived and technical expertise . . . The aversion within the academy to tackling such problems, no matter how pressing, can scarcely be exaggerated.”55 In her conclusion, Coleman quotes Ellen Lagemann, former dean of the Harvard School of Education: “Given how difficult it is merely to change a college curriculum . . . it is hard even to imagine how one might go about the kind of truly radical change that would be necessary if liberal education were to be reconceived as a means to promote problem-centered ways of thinking and to better combine those with discipline-based styles of thought.”56 Bennington College has taken steps to radically reorient its curriculum; a physical representation of this is the new Center for the Advancement of Public Action at the heart of its campus.57 What do we in Christian institutions consider our goal and purpose? What stands literally or metaphorically at the centres of our campuses? While framed starkly, the choice is as I have already suggested: it is between the disciplines and discipleship. This requires a more radical move than the insertion of virtue ethics into liberal arts education, and it requires a conception of discipleship more comprehensive than a focus on individual piety or intellectual perspective.
God created the world as a home that we are richly to enjoy as we serve the God who is love.59 Christians are first and foremost to value all that God has made, directly as well as mediately, through human hands: marriages, states, and schools are examples of the latter, for we cannot create ex nihilo, but only give shape to what God offers. We are to engage deeply with “God’s burning bright creation” as it reveals itself to us, not to honour in its stead the insights of physicists, economists, and theologians (though we will honour these in their proper place). We are not to be distrustful of ordinary, concrete human experience, deriding it as mere “practice,” but to revel in creation’s fecundity. Put simply, we are to love the Bible in all its narrative complexity, often challenging and not infrequently puzzling, before we are enamoured of the discipline of theology that seeks to logically systematize scriptural revelation. We are also to love history – the textured unfolding of cultures generation after generation, respecting the achievements and repenting the failings of our and our neighbours’ forebears – before we are to love the academic discipline of history, which would delude us that we are hegemons over that heritage. We are to love literature before we substitute for it literary criticism.60 This “before” is not only or always chronological but ontic, a very condition of being human. In other words, we are to play in God’s world, as wisdom did at the very beginning.61
We live in God’s good creation, which yet is fallen. God has entrusted creation to us to administer as stewards so that we may open up the potential that God has gifted. Unfolding creation toward what it can and ought to be is our calling and is the “glory of God” at the very heart of our image bearing.62 Discerning and actualizing these possibilities is the primal sense in which creation poses problems to us and we pose problems to creation. But being fallen adds a second dimension to creation’s “problematic” character. In a suffering world, our task is to bring healing where there is brokenness – not merely to observe, describe, and analyze, but to show mercy in our actions. There has to be continual correction toward greater shalom and cosmic justice. Problem-posing thus passes over into peacemaking: purposeful responses that glorify God by demonstrating God’s gracious rule. We realize value, as wise stewards who reverence the one who empowers and liberates.
Coleman suggests that academics are fearful of facing real-world obligations – the messy problems that Christians know to be the result not only of creation’s radical state of being fallen but also of the dynamic creation that always calls for our response as those entrusted with shaping it to God’s glory. The Christian academy has no license for such avoidance. We need to create the kind of talented environments that invite students to use their abilities to address a suffering world, and to construct spaces in which students are afforded opportunities to grow and, in another familiar phrase of Parker Palmer’s, in which “obedience to truth [may be] practiced.”63 Like the unwise servant, we are responsible for our own self-formation. But society’s teachers, whether parents, schools, churches, media, or government, have a complementary responsibility for the opportunities they afford to those in their care, the kind of practices in which we invite students to engage.64
Learning that forms character must engage the whole person. Virtues are not predominantly intellectual, and so cannot be taught didactically, but this does not mean they cannot be learned. There are a number of pedagogical practices in higher education that subvert the “liberal arts plus service and/or virtues” model by grounding the curriculum in the complexities of concrete experience rather than in the abstract certainties of the disciplines. Each of these approaches can be adapted to focus on service to those who are in need, locally or globally, on “doing justice and struggling against injustice.”65 Certainly, colleges will nurture their students in the disciplines within a Christian perspective, but a way of seeing does not in itself lead to a way of being. The latter is character, not just as personal moral integrity, but as the stamp that persons bear; more actively, character is the whole manner in which people bear themselves, for or against Christ’s Commonwealth a-coming. Character is engendered more by actions than by thoughts, by ways of walking than by ways of talking, by organizational and communal structures that, as talented environments, shape the habits of the heart. Significantly, Paul says that character is shaped by suffering and, I venture, by identifying intimately with those who suffer.66 In suffering vicariously – as Christ did for us – we help to complete “what is still lacking in regard to Christ’s afflictions.”67 If true, just, and right action in God’s world for all God’s creatures is at the heart of our curricula and pedagogy, we may hope by the grace of God to graduate people of character who will use their knowledge wisely in loving service of others.
1 Plato, The Republic, ed. Betty Radice and Robert Baldick, trans. H.D.P. Lee (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1955), 244–6. Williams similarly underscores the complementary nature of these qualities, though he distinguishes them from their corresponding virtues of accuracy and sincerity. See Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).
2 Colossians 3:9 (Bible quotations are from the New International Version).
3 Colossians 2:2–3.
4 Colossians 3:14.
5 Not least in Romans 7.
6 1 Corinthians 13.
7 See Herman Dooyeweerd, The Christian Idea of the State (Nutley, NJ: Craig Press, 1968).
8 Aurelius Augustine, “Excerpts from The City of God and The Morals of the Catholic Church,” in From Christ to the World: Introductory Readings in Christian Ethics, ed. Wayne G. Boulton, Thomas D. Kennedy, and Allen Verhey (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 235.
9 Anselm, “On Truth,” in Anselm of Canterbury: The Major Works, ed. Brian Davies and G.R. Evans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 151–74.
10 John 14:6. “Being true” to God in Christ is a much different matter than being true above all to oneself, of course.
11 Goudzwaard thus speaks of the need for “simultaneous realization of norms.” Bob Goudzwaard, Capitalism and Progress: A Diagnosis of Western Society, trans. Josina Van Nuis Zylstra (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1979), 69.
12 That is, in the educational dimension of their mission; institutions of higher education also have a complementary research function, a logical-analytical focus on which the emphasis becomes greater from community colleges to liberal arts colleges to universities to research institutes.
13 Parker J. Palmer, To Know As We Are Known: A Spirituality of Education (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1983), 10. Love is not primarily affective, but undergirds all human responsiveness in the core of humanness that is the heart. The heart is restless, Augustine says, until it finds its rest in God; and it is also to Augustine that we owe the introduction into the philosophical tradition of the biblical insight that we must will the compass of our lives to point toward God – the God who is love.
14 According to Isaiah, farmers, for example, who really have to get their hands dirty, are instructed in their tasks by God, who speaks through soil and seed (Isaiah 28:23–9).
15 1 Corinthians 2.
16 I will not, however, consider (except tangentially) the essential question of how “biblical truth” (cited in the ensuing paragraph) should be related to scholarship – though I suggest that there is often a suspect notion of truth in play in this respect as well.
17 “About cccu,” Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, https://www.cccu.org/about.
18 Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, “Australia Studies Centre Alumni Gather in Nations Capital for Reunion,” 13 July 2009, http://www.cccu.org/news/cccu_news/australia_studies_
centre_alumni_gather_in_nations_capital_for_reunion.
19 It will certainly need to be something other than a “new synthesis of reason and faith, Athens and Jerusalem,” and the models Aquinas and Diderot provide, as espoused by the editor in a journal theme issue entitled “Re-inventing Liberal Arts Education,” for this merely represents the status quo. Oskar Gruenwald, “Renewing the Liberal Arts: C.S. Lewis’ Essential Christianity,” Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies 14 (1/2, 2002): 20.
20 This section draws on Doug Blomberg, “Review: Douglas V. Henry and Michael D. Beaty (eds.), The Schooled Heart: Moral Formation in American Higher Education,” Journal of Education and Christian Belief 13 (1, 2009): 85–7.
21 Douglas V. Henry and Michael D. Beaty, eds., The Schooled Heart: Moral Formation in American Higher Education (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2007), 6.
22 Stanley Hauerwas, “Pro Ecclesia, Pro Texana: Schooling the Heart in the Heart of Texas,” in The Schooled Heart, ed. Henry and Beaty, 112.
23 Ibid., 103–4.
24 Ibid., 110.
25 Ibid., 109.
26 David Lyle Jeffrey, “Wisdom, Community, Freedom, Truth: Moral Education and the ‘Schooled Heart,” in The Schooled Heart, ed. Henry and Beaty, 119.
27 Cognitive is conceived in conventional psychological terms, in distinction from the affective and conative, rather than acknowledging that the concrete thinking person acts in all three modes at once. Also, the normative or evaluative construction of the logical domain is generally overlooked in favour of a putatively value-neutral calculative or computational conception, as is the case, for example, with cognitive psychologist Howard Gardner, Intelligence Reframed: Multiple Intelligences for the 21st Century (New York: Basic Books, 1999).
28 Hauerwas, “Pro Ecclesia,” 114.
29 Calvin College Curriculum Committee, Christian Liberal Arts Education: Report of the Calvin College Curriculum Committee (Grand Rapids: Calvin College and Eerdmans, 1970), i.
30 Ibid., 40.
31 Ibid., 47.
32 Ibid., 48–9. Consider the extent to which this conception owes more to the German ideal of disinterested scholarship, which was influential in shaping the American higher education ethos, than it does to the impulses of the gospel.
33 Lee Hardy, “The New Core Curriculum: ‘Engaging God’s World,” Calvin College, accessed 3 April 2010 http://www.calvin.edu/publications/spark/spring01/core.htm.
34 Ibid.
35 Ibid.
36 There are echoes here of Anselm’s notion of the convertibility of truth, justice, and right. Nicholas Wolterstorff, “Teaching for Justice: On Shaping How Students Are Disposed to Act,” in Educating for Shalom: Essays on Christian Higher Education, ed. Clarence W. Joldersma and Gloria Goris Stronks (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 135. See also Wolterstorff, “Teaching Justly for Justice,” Journal of Education and Christian Belief 10 (2, 2006): 23–37.
37 “Understanding” here also echoes Anselm. “Realization of value” is Nicholas Maxwell’s definition of wisdom, which I have adopted. For comparison, see N. Maxwell, From Knowledge to Wisdom: A Revolution in the Aims and Methods of Science (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984).
38 See Doug Blomberg, “Ways of Wisdom: Multiple Modes of Meaning in Pedagogy and Andragogy,” in Ways of Knowing: In Concert, ed. John Kok (Sioux Center, IA: Dordt College Press, 2005), 123–46.
39 Echoing the second Calvin Committee, Hauerwas, and Plato, respectively.
40 J. Macmurray, The Self as Agent (London: Faber and Faber, 1969). Herman Dooyeweerd embeds a similar claim in his distinction between naive experience and theoretical thought. Herman Dooyeweerd, A New Critique of Theoretical Thought, trans. David H. Freeman and William S. Young, 4 vols. (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing, 1953–58).
41 Maxine Greene, “Introduction: Teaching for Social Justice,” in Teaching for Social Justice: A Democracy and Education Reader, ed. William Ayers, Jean Ann Hunt, and Therese Quinn (New York: The New Press/Teachers College Press, 1998), xxvi–xxvii.
42 Jean Anyon, Radical Possibilities: Public Policy, Urban Education, and a New Social Movement (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2005).
43 Brian Walsh and Sylvia Keesmaat, Colossians Remixed: Subverting the Empire (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004), 57.
44 Ibid., 117.
45 James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation, vol. 1 of Cultural Liturgies (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2009).
46 See, for example, Mark 1:16–20, John 14:1–7.
47 See Doug Blomberg, “Whose Spirituality? Which Rationality? A Narrational Locus for Learning,” Journal of Education and Christian Belief 13 (2, 2008): 113–24.
48 See 1 Corinthians 1:24, 30, for example, as well as the discussion (in the context of an extended and highly relevant justification of a Christian virtue ethics) in N.T. Wright, After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters (New York: HarperCollins, 2010).
49 Matthew 25:14–30.
50 Sasha A. Barab and Jonathan A. Plucker, “Smart People or Smart Contexts? Cognition, Ability, and Talent Development in an Age of Situated Approaches to Knowing and Learning,” Educational Psychologist 37 (3, 2002): 165–82.
51 Matthew 25:31–46.
52 Proverbs 1:1–3.
53 Parker J. Palmer, The Courage to Teach (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998), 90.
54 Nicholas Meriwether suggests that in most college ethics courses, the professor assumes a putatively neutral stance in propounding various theories and focuses on students’ intellectual skills. But, because living ethically requires a view of “the good life,” a “neutral” stance is self-performatively incoherent. Meriwether thus proposes that professors take an explicit stand on a particular normative theory. The question remains, however, whether retaining a focus on ethical theories will overcome the perceived threat of being “merely academic.” Nicholas K. Meriwether, “Returning Moral Philosophy to American Higher Education,” in The Schooled Heart, ed. Henry and Beaty, 73–101.
55 Elizabeth Coleman, “The Bennington Curriculum: A New Liberal Arts” (Bennington, VT: Bennington College, 2007), 3.
56 Ibid., 8.
57 The ground was broken for this project in June 2009. Interestingly, there is no reference to this centre in the Campus Plan of June 2004, which talks instead of converting the commons into a “multi-discipline campus center.” The new centre is a more radical innovation, though naturally itself promotes an inter- or trans-disciplinary approach.
58 For an extended discussion, see Gloria Goris Stronks and Doug Blomberg, eds., A Vision with A Task: Christian Schooling for Responsive Discipleship (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1993).
59 1 Timothy 6:17.
60 I owe the impetus for this particular way of framing the distinction between love of concrete experience and love of academic inquiry into experience to R.K. Elliott, “Education, Love of One’s Subject, and the Love of Truth,” Proceedings of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain 8 (1, 1974): 135–53. See also Richard Pring, “Liberal Education and Vocational Preparation,” in Beyond Liberal Education: Essays in Honour of Paul H. Hirst, ed. Robin Barrow and P. White (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 49–78. Clinton Stockwell (28 November 2010), director of the Chicago Semester (whom I thank for his insightful response to a late draft of this chapter) commented on this sentence as it originally stood that it was not at all as simple as I had suggested. He also proposed with respect to a related point that “what we need is an experiential interrogation of the academic disciplines.” His own “favorite story” in this regard is to take students “to visit a public housing project, talk to public housing people, then read a book on public housing and critique it from the standpoint of the people and the community visited (which sort of reverses the North American educational project, especially in seminaries where ‘worldviews’ are dictated).”
61 Proverbs 8. See also Doug Blomberg, “Wisdom at Play: In the World but Not of It,” in The Crumbling Walls of Certainty: Towards a Christian Critique of Postmodernity and Education, ed. Ian Lambert and Suzanne Mitchell (Sydney: Centre for the Study of Australian Christianity, 1997), 120–35.
62 See Wright, After You Believe, 89–95.
63 Palmer, To Know As We Are Known, 69.
64 Important to remember is that theorizing is itself a form of practice, though the theory/practice polarity is so entrenched in common discourse that we often overlook this.
65 Wolterstorff, “Teaching for Justice,” 135. I have explored some of these practices in Doug Blomberg, “New Wineskins: Subverting the ‘Sacred Story’ of Schooling,” in Christian Higher Education in the Global Context: Implications for Curriculum, Pedagogy, and Administration, ed. Nick Lantinga (Sioux Center, ia: Dordt College Press, 2007), 199–213.
66 Romans 5:1–5.
67 Colossians 1:24.