When you have a website and a blog, you get asked a lot what it is you write about.
In a lecture delivered in 1939, and later published as The Idea of a Christian Society, T. S. Eliot made the following observation:
And just as those who should be the intellectuals regard theology as a special study, like numismatics or heraldry, with which they need not concern themselves, and theologians observe the same indifference to literature and art, as special studies which do not concern them, so our political classes regard both fields as territories of which they have no reason to be ashamed of remaining in complete ignorance.
Three quarters of a century later, nothing has changed.
Look at Eliot’s three-part division: theology, literature and art, politics. It is highly likely that one of those three things is most interesting to you. You can also think about the way we have divided up the modern Academy: Humanities, Sciences, and Social Sciences. Once again, one of those three things is most interesting to you.
You specialized. We all did.
Because it is so natural for all of us to put ourselves into these intellectual boxes, it is quite normal to ask in which box this website belongs.
I am a Christian. I
believe the Nicene Creed, think a lot about the Bible, and preach and teach
regularly on theological topics.
I am an Economist. I have a Ph.D. in Economics, and I teach in an Economics department
at a secular elite liberal arts college.
I am a proponent of the Liberal Arts. I
read and think about and teach classes using and have conversations about and attend
conferences discussing the Great Books.
So, is this a Christian blog? An Economics blog? A Great
Books blog?
Does it talk about Theology? Literature
and Arts? Politics?
Does it concern itself with the Humanities?
Sciences? Social Sciences?
Yes.
If you are a Christian, you care deeply about God and His works and what He has done and you want to think deeply about Christ and His works. That also means you should care deeply about the secular world. You should be reading and thinking about literature, great literature. You should be thinking about politics and modern society and how we should organize ourselves into society. You should be fascinated by science and discovering more about this world which God has created.
If you are not a Christian, you should care about theological questions. Whether you accept Christianity as True or not, you should understand the theological questions because those questions are questions you also have. Do you have a Purpose? Is there Good or Evil in this world? What is a Life Well-lived? Should you Love your Neighbor and your Enemies? These are questions with which religious people have been wrestling for thousands of years. Just because someone is a Christian does not mean that what they have to say on these questions in unimportant or uninteresting. You don’t have to deny Christ to have interesting thoughts.
If you have an academic major or a career, if you have a specialization, then you should certainly learn more about that particular subject. But, if you only learn about that subject, you are limiting yourself. You are denying the full measure of your humanity. Those questions which interest you are linked to the multitude of other questions which lie outside the artificial divisions of our academic specializations.
The Liberal Arts are distinguished from the Practical Arts. If you want to know how to build a table, learn the practical art of doing so.
But, if you want to learn to be a human, then you need to think deeply about questions from across the realms of knowledge.
So, yes, this is a Christian blog. And, yes, this is a blog about the Great Books. And, yes, it is a blog about modern society. But, mostly it is a website about the spaces in between those things, the spaces that connect the world back together.
Welcome to the Conversation