Everyone you meet looks like someone else you know if you’ve been sufficiently around the block. Travel expands your categories – lets you dice and divide more finely – closer to the truth. Good education does the same when it demands that you do the slicing finer each day instead of just placing everything in categories for you lest you be misled by the “enemy”. Shortcuts. These sorts of intellectual shortcuts work too, but only for one generation. Your acolytes are on board but they really don’t know why. They’ve done their homework, but only the assignments you gave them. Their children, when exposed to legitimate challenges, will enter a dark night of the soul and they are unlikely to come out the other side of it with your orthodoxy intact. The much more difficult alternative is to teach yours students to think, but this is an even scarier proposition than the propaganda option. Now they are GUARANTEED to evolve your precious orthodoxy in ways you don’t except – some of which you will certainly drive you crazy. Hope is trusting it will one day be even better than yours, not worse. Who can believe such a thing? Someone who trusts in the Lord.
A scrapbook of thoughts on arts, culture and the Christian life.