Classical Christian Education and the Modern World: Recovering Truth, Goodness, and Beauty in Our Time Stephen R. Turley, Ph.D. (Originally presented at the Evangelical Scholars Conference at Grove City College, April 22, 2015) The title of my talk this evening is “Classical Christian Education and the Modern World: Recovering Truth, Goodness, and Beauty in Our Time.” I believe that the renewal of classical education over the last few decades in America represents much more than what Russell Green ascribes to it, when he said: "The advantage of a classical education is that it enables you to despise the wealth that it prevents you from achieving." Whatever truth may lie behind that observation, particularly for educators, I want to argue that classical Christian education is in fact playing a profound role in our time, in this modern civilizational experiment of which we are a part. And I am very excited to learn that you have a classical Christian education minor here at Grove City, which means that you are part of this very important role. There is no doubt that the 1940s constituted a most historically formidable decade: the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (1941), WWII, the advent of the Atomic bomb, the transformation of the US into a global super power, the establishment of NATO, the founding of the People’s Republic of China (1949). Yet among these notable events one rarely if ever comes across the inclusion of a small book published in 1944 critiquing the state of British education. The book was entitled The Abolition of Man, and its author was CS Lewis. In what is perhaps the single most significant analysis of the modern age published in the 20th century, Lewis in less than 100 pages outlines what Peter Kreeft calls a terrifying prophecy of mortality, not just the mortality of modern western civilization .. … but the mortality of human nature itself. Lewis was concerned that the modern age represented nothing less than a totalizing civilizational project which cut the human person off from what he called the Tao, the doctrine of transcendent values, and thereby redefined the human person. According to Lewis, classical man was preoccupied with the fundamental question: ‘How do I conform my soul to the world around me and thus be drawn up into divine life, and the answer was through prayer, virtue, and wisdom. However, for modern man, the question is inverted: modern man is not interested in how to conform the soul to reality, rather modern man asks how do I conform the world to my own desires and ambitions, and the answer involves tapping into those institutions that operate by the mechanisms of power and manipulation, namely, science, technology, and the state. And while the classical and Christian worlds viewed culture as the embodiment of objective values divinely embedded in the cosmos, modern science views the world as reducible to mere physical, biological, and chemical causal laws devoid of any meaning or purpose apart from that which cultures construct and fabricate. Thus, what was once considered knowledge, indeed the highest form of knowledge, the contemplation of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful, is now appropriated as no more than mere private belief and personal preference. Lewis concluded that as modern education is an extension of this secularizing project, it was in fact conditioning students into a radically new conception of what it means to be human. By sequestering the student from the Tao, the transcendent values of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, modern education perpetuates a mechanistic vision of the world comprised of scientifically inspired control over nature and, as a necessary consequence, over humans. Lewis believed that only the recovery of the doctrine of objective values could overcome this de-humanizing social trajectory. What Lewis did not reflect on is the extent to which these modernist tendencies have made their way into the church. I have seen this first hand with my own students at both the high school and university levels of Christian institutions [particularly in you two], how modernist assumptions have worked themselves out particularly in our aesthetic conceptions and practices. I have found that students when called to give a basic account for, say, Beauty in literature, art, music, and poetry, the answers to my inquiries consistently exemplify a complete and total devotion to aesthetic relativism. And if we understand the world in terms of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, we will find that this is not merely an issue of bad taste or the lack of cultural sophistication; it is in fact indicative of a relativism that permeates our conceptions of the True and the Good as well. Truth, Goodness, and Beauty are not sequestered from one another – they need each other and they are implied in one another. And if Beauty is robbed of its transcendent nature and relocated solely within private psychological processes, you can be sure that the same dislocations are happening to Truth and Goodness as well. And so, this is why I wrote my book on Truth, Goodness, and Beauty; it is an invitation for all of us – student and faculty alike – to encounter a world filled with awe and wonder; to cultivate a particular human life which embodies Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, that begins at the fountain of worship and flows out into unlimited cultural pursuits that awaken the divinely imparted meaning of the cosmos and thereby voice creation’s praise. This evening, I want to extend this invitation by exploring with you the frames of reference that constitute historically Truth, Goodness, and Beauty; I then want to look briefly at what is behind the eclipse of these cosmic values in our secular age and the adverse effects such an eclipse has wrought on the church’s witness to transcendent values; and then show how the renaissance of classical Christian education represents nothing less than an effectual recovery of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty in our own time. Cosmic Piety The Christian vision of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful finds its origins in what classical scholars have termed ‘cosmic piety,’ which was virtually universal in the GR world. In the world of antiquity, the cosmos is very much brimming with divine life. Plato goes so far as to argue that the cosmos is actually alive, with a cosmic psyche or soul. For the Greek, this meant that every person born into this world was born into a world of divine obligation, such that we were obliged to conform our lives into a harmonious relationship with the gods and our fellow men and thereby perpetuate the life of the world. At the heart of this cosmology is a micro-macro relationship between the human body and the cosmos, where the individual human person is a microcosmic replication, literally a mikros kosmos, of the substance and order of the macrocosmic world. This micro-macro relationship can be found to originate with Presocratic philosophers and was instrumental in the development of Greek medical theory, which in turn contributed to its popularization among the masses. With the advent of the writings of Plato (428-348) in the 4th century BC, this relationship between the individual human person and the larger macrocosmic world was reinterpreted according to the cosmic values of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. For Plato, the human person was made up of a tripartite soul, logos, thymos and eros, which Aristotle develops as logos, ethos, and pathos. The logos involves our rational capacities (Republic 435 e8-9), the thymos involves our emotional, ethical or moral capacities (Republic 439 e3-4), and the eros involves our desires and aesthetic capacities (Republic 439 d5-7). Now, because we are a microcosm of the larger macrocosmic world, that entails the fact that the universe also has three soul-like qualities as well, and this Plato termed the True, the Good, and the Beautiful (alethia, agathos, and kalos). These are terms that were already pretty well established in the Greek world by the time of Plato. In the fifth century BC, the upstanding citizens of the polis were designated as the kalos kai agathos, the beautiful and the good, which was later contracted into a single term, kalokagathia. But it is not until Plato that you get this systematic interplay between Truth, Goodness, and Beauty and the human soul. The Greek term alethia (truth) literally means to reveal or disclose, the negation of lethein (to conceal); truth reveals the nature of reality to our intellectual capacities, our logos. H. Hübner, “ἀλήθεια,” in Horst Balz, et al (eds.), Exegetical Dictionary of the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1993), 1:57-60, 58. The term agathos (good) connoted “the excellence of a thing or person,” and was eventually developed by philosophers to designate the goal, purpose, or meaning of existence. And so I have a good marriage if I am living out the purpose of marriage; I have a good watch if my watch fulfills the purpose of watches. And while Truth reveals reality to my intellectual capacities, goodness reveals reality to my volitional and moral capacities (thymos or ethos). Walter Grundmann, “ἀγαθός,” in Gerhard Kittel, et al (eds.), Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1977), 1:10-17, 10-11. Plato actually sees the Good as the divine source of all life. But what is perhaps most stunning in this micro-macrocosmic relationship is the role Plato ascribes to Beauty, particularly in Diotima’s speech in his work entitled The Symposium: Beauty is the loveliness, the radiance, the delightfulness of the True and the Good that draws the human person toward Truth and Goodness by directing our eros, or a loving desire within the human person. So Beauty is a physics, a law of attraction which serves the indispensable role of momentum or motivation in intellectual, moral, and spiritual pursuits. This is why we associate Beauty with ‘attraction’; through Beauty we are drawn to the True and the Good, the divine source of life. And because Beauty communicates Truth and Goodness to the whole soul, bringing harmony to our rational, volitional, and aesthetic capacities, Beauty always involves the awakening of arête, the classical virtues (wisdom, moderation, justice, and courage) which obtains when the logos, thymos, and eros reflect the balance or harmony of the cosmos (cf. Republic 442A). Thus Plato sees an inextricable link between virtue and a true knowledge of the world, what we might call here a virtue epistemology. As to the question of how one encounters this cosmic Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, the answer was the polis, the Greek city-state. The polis came to be seen as the integrative bridge between the micro-human person and the macrocosmic world. The important point here is that the city-state facilitated the social space wherein people could learn to live in harmony with the gods and with one another and hence perpetuate the life of the world. Thus, these cosmic, anthropological, and civic frames of reference converged together into the conception of a cosmic koinonia or communion. And this is where we get the whole idea of a cosmopolis as particularly evident in Plato’s Republic; the cosmopolis was envisioned as conjoining and creating a harmony between the cosmos, the human soul, and society. Now, this value that the Greeks placed on cosmic communion gave rise to a distinct educational project known as paideia. Flourishing in the fourth-century BC, the goal of paideia was the formation of a particular kind of human that embodied a balanced soul concomitant with the order of the cosmos, which in turn entailed a balanced civic life in the polis that perpetuates this cosmic koinonia, this cosmic communion, and thereby realizes human and social flourishing. And so you have four interrelated frames of reference for our understanding of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty: first, we have cosmic piety, second a micro-macro schema; third, the polis as the social space that facilitates this cosmic piety; and fourth, an educational project that initiates students into the social life of this piety. With the emergence of Christian civilization, Christians tap into this cosmic piety, but they also radically alter it. Christians certainly affirm that all people are born into a world of divine obligation; however they introduce something wholly new by transcribing this cosmic piety away from the gods, the planets and celestials spheres and imputing it onto Christ, who is the Logos, the new creation, in whom all things hold together, and through whom God is revealed as the infinite fountain of Trinitarian love and delight. Along with this there is also a radical recalibration of the human person. For Plato, the soul was eternal and did not belong in the created material order. But with the advent of Christianity, the human soul was firmly fixed within the goodness of creation and inextricably linked to the physical body. Instead, the human person is recast as created “in the image of God,” which is translated in the Septuagint as kat’ eikona tou Theou, “according to the image of God.” The preposition kata has the significance of “in accordance with,” and thus most early Greek Patristics interpreted this phrase to mean that humans were created in accordance with the Logos, who is “the image of the invisible God” (Col 1:15). Andrew Louth, “Later Theologians of the Greek East,” in Philip F. Esler (ed.), The Early Christian World, Vol. 1 (London: Routledge, 2000), 580-601. And this is why for the Patristics, as evident in the highly influential work of Athanasius of Alexandria, the Incarnation is so important to the realization of our true humanity. When we were first created in Paradise, we were created to discern and delight in creation as a reflection of the Logos, and hence we were able to understand ourselves as creatures created in the image of this Logocentric Paradise. But in the fall, this vision is frustrated; we have lost Paradise and live in a world that is marred by the tyranny of sin, death, and the devil. And so, having been deprived of this paradisical habitat, our humanity is adversely affected. However, this Paradise has now been restored in the Incarnation of the Logos, the second person of the Trinity. Indeed, this is the classical significance of the Eucharistic meal, where the grain and fruit of the third day of creation are transformed into the bread and wine identified with the body and blood of Christ, such that creation and Incarnation come together to restore our communion with God and one another. And so Paradise returns to the world in Christ; the cross is the Tree of Life restored. And analogous to the polis, the sacred space that facilitates this distinctively Christian cosmic communion is the ekklesia, the church. Ekklesia interestingly was not a term associated with what we might call ‘religious’ gatherings, but was in fact a political term that designated the assembly of adult citizen males who had the ultimate decision making power in a city-state. And so we see in Galatians chapter 4 how the early Christian conception of the ekklesia translated into the eschatological polis, the ‘the Jerusalem above,’ or in John’s term, ‘the New Jerusalem.’ So, in a manner comparable to the city-state, the church serves as a bridge between the individual person and the macrocosmic Logos, reconstituting time and space around Christ in Word, Sacrament, and prayer, and thus enabling us to fulfill our divine purpose and thereby become truly human. And beginning with Paul, we see the emergence of a distinctively Christian paideia. For example, in Eph 6:4, Paul exhorts fathers to raise their children in the paideia tou kyriou, the paideia of the Lord. Paul brings in this paideia idea, but it is unique in that this is not a paideia of the Greeks or the Romans, this is a paideia of the Lord; it is a paideia quite literally not of this world but rather revealed through Christ. The Patristic scholar Frances Young has traced out how this paideia was developed in the formative period of the church. Young traces the process whereby Christians deliberately subordinated the sacred writings of the Greeks (e.g. Homer, Hesiod) that formed the foundation of their paideia to the philosophical, chronological, and theological primacy of the (developing) Christian Scriptures (p. 68). When we look at the writings of the Apologists in the second century, and the schools that develop over the course of the third in Alexandria, Antioch, Caesarea in Palestine, Edessa in Syria, they are all characterized by a classical curriculum that has nevertheless been reoriented around the emergence of a new classical canon, namely, the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. And so, with Paradise restored in Christ, facilitated by the shared lifeworld of the church and its developing paideias that initiate people into that shared lifeworld, you have the frames of reference that foster distinctively Christian visions of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. And key here is that the cosmic values of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty revealed the fact that the entire cosmos has been incorporated into the transformative life, death, and resurrection of Christ, and thus served to draw us into an encounter with the inner life of God revealed in Christ and facilitated by the sacramental lifeworld of the church. Classical Christian education was therefore a project by which the student was initiated into a social order that materialized or substantiated a Christian cosmic piety, which in turn enabled the student to fulfill his or her divine purpose and thereby become truly human. The Rise of Modernity However, with the advent of the modern age, and more specifically the advancement of modern science, knowledge became increasingly redefined in such a way so as to exclude any divine moral order. With the break-up of Christendom and the emergence of nation-states, the burden on universities which were originally founded within monasteries was to produce more civil servants than clergy, a process that Perry Glanzer has labeled the ‘nationalization of the universities’. And what is interesting here is that this transformation of the university into a servant of the nation-state led to the re-conception of knowledge that foregrounded science to the exclusion of the church. Specifically, it became increasingly plausible to view knowledge as limited solely to that which could be verified by a method. It was argued that only those things that could be verified by the empirical method were those things that could be known in a way that was completely detached from the preconceptions of the observer. Anything that was not subjected to or failed this method was reduced to the state of person-relativity and excluded from the arena of what can be known. But there was a toll that had to be paid for this new knowledge: we collectively had to surrender the concept of cosmic piety, since meaning was impervious to method; divine telos simply could not be placed in a test tube. Thus, this new conception of knowledge in effect exposed all value systems as mere cultural fabrications. Science had uncovered the fact that the world is not governed by the gods or any kind of divine meaning, but rather by physical, chemical, and biological causal laws. We are not born into a world of divine obligation; no, ‘objective’ values are merely culturally specific meaning systems contrived by humans and imposed upon otherwise meaningless cause and effect processes. Modern science has therefore rent asunder what the classical imagination brought together: the physical world and the semiotic world, the world of nature and the world of culture, fact and faith, knowledge and belief. And the universities were not the only institutions to go through a process of nationalization. Indeed, with the advent of the industrial revolution in the nineteenth-century and social democracies throughout Europe after World War I, there is in effect a massive recalibration of the totality of social and economic life around the state. According to economic historian Lars Magnusson, this was a social process wherein a ‘particularist’ state transformed into a ‘territorial’ state; the state that was once but one of a plurality of mediating institutions that organized and governed social order transformed into a territorial monopolist of regulation, taxation, and arbitration over the public square. Lars Magnusson, Nation, State and the Industrial Revolution: The visible hand (London: Routledge, 2009). And as political theologian Bill Cavanaugh has observed, it is here that secularism plays a key role, for it is through secularization that the state is able to perpetuate and protect its monopolization over the public square. Secularization is in effect a network of social strategies whereby the church is pushed out of public life and marginalized to the private sphere of life. And the primary mechanism by which such monopolization is maintained is the redefinition of religion: beginning in the eighteenth century, religion was re-conceptualized as something that one believes but cannot know. The state effectively marginalizes the church by re-inventing our conception of faith and religion in accordance with secular norms: faith and religion are no longer civilizational expressions of cosmic piety, they are now little more than instrumental means by which individuals find personal meaning and purpose for their lives. And what we have to understand is that this social relocation has dramatic effects on the nature of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty within the shared lifeworld of the church. And this is because the public and private fields of life operate according to very different social dynamics; what belongs to one does not necessarily belong to the other. Public life consists of the objective, while private life consists of the subjective. Public life involves the obligatory, while private life involves the optional. Public life involves rules that apply to all, while private life involves rules that apply only to some. And so, if there is such a marked difference between public and private life, we have to ask: What happens to Truth, Goodness, and Beauty once the church has been privatized, displaced by secular values? The answer is that the church has been robbed of her capacity to witness to truth, and this is because truth is public, not private; it is objective, not subjective; truth is obligatory, not optional; truth applies to all, not merely some. And we can see the dramatic effects of this privatization in our churches. Gordon-Conwell professor David Wells has made the sustained argument since the 1990s that every study on the internal life of the church shows that Christians are becoming increasingly less biblically literate. For example, if Barna is correct, nearly 60% (54%) of those who claim to be born-again in America do not believe that we are born with a sin-nature, and 40% of self-described evangelicals believe that other religions are legitimate paths to God. Similarly, when we speak out in defense of classical Christian morality, whether in regard to the sanctity of life, or marriage or sexuality, we find out very quickly that our moral claims can no longer be socially sustained. This is because morality, like truth, requires the highly unambiguous, definite, invariant, and formal frames of reference that constitute public life. In order for something to be either right or wrong, true or false, it cannot be placed in the social equivalent of a food court that operates according to recreational, optional, and preferential dynamics. Indeed, having been relocated approximate to strip malls, our churches can no more declare definitive moral pronouncements than can pizzerias or dry cleaners. Here again, Wells notes that 53% of evangelicals think that there are no moral absolutes. And so, what we are finding is that the aesthetic relativism exemplified by my students to which I made reference earlier, the idea that Beauty is simply a matter of taste and personal preference is in fact indicative of broader and indeed devastating relativizing tendencies. The Educational Renaissance And it is here that I believe that the renaissance of classical Christian education which we have witnessed over the last three decades is most relevant. For as CS Lewis so profoundly recognized, the role of education in the modern world redefined by secular norms is to maintain the state’s monopolization over the public square by perpetuating this dichotomy between the public and the private, science and religion, fact and faith, knowledge and belief. But it is precisely these secularized frames of reference that classical Christian education both throws into relief and directly and explicitly challenges with a distinctively Christian vision of life. And this is because the renaissance of classical Christian education entails nothing less than the recovery of cosmic piety, particularly as it is found in two Christian traditions that stand over and against these modernist dynamics: what I call “the redemption of the senses” on the one hand and the formation of “the moral imagination” on the other, the reorientation of the body and soul towards God in Christ. Briefly, the redemption of the senses involves a re-directing or re-training of the senses away from the carnal and the sensual and toward the eternally True, Good, and Beautiful. Christians believed that it was not just our souls that fell with the first sin in the garden, but our bodily senses were disordered as well. Thus, in the context of Christ’s redemption of the world, the purpose of literature, art, architecture, music, and poetry was to sanctify our senses in such a way that our bodies become prepared for their future resurrection. Now classical Christian education facilitates the recovery of just such an aesthetic vision for the Christian life. For example, our students are rediscovering the formative significance of the music of the spheres, the idea that the universe is held together by a cosmic sonic harmony. We have to understand that the ancients thought of music very differently than we do today; music was not understood as something performed, composed, practiced, or played; rather music was interpreted as a mathematical discipline, which sought to discover and formalize the symmetrical relations between sounds. Carol Harrison, “Augustine and the Art of Music,” in Jeremy S. Begbi, Steve R. Guthrie (eds.), Resonant Witness: Conversations between Music and Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011), 27-45, 27. In this sense, music functioned as a metaphor for this whole cosmic chain of interrelationships and harmonies. And so you have Augustine, in his De Musica, concluding that God is music. In other words, God is perfect symmetry, proportionality, unity, diversity, harmony, and number. Harrison, “Augustine,” 31. For Augustine, when God formed the world from nothing, the form was itself music. Thus the entire chain of created being is held together and sustained by music. And this is linked with what Patristic scholar Carol Harrison has called ‘transformative listening,’ Carol Harrison, The Art of Listening in the Early Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). where the soundscape of the church awakened the imagination and inspired the listener to reinterpret the cosmos in terms of a distinctively Christian sonic harmony. So, classical Christian students are being taught not merely to resist modern aesthetic relativism, but redeem it, transfigure it into a means by which our senses are sanctified and God glorified. In terms of the ‘moral imagination,’ I borrow this term from the eighteenth-century British statesman Edmund Burke to denote specifically the integrative role of the imagination. The imagination has been gifted to humans by God to perceive the divinely-infused meaning of the cosmos which provides a moral map of the world by which we might piously live out our lives. For an enriching exposition on the moral imagination, see Vigen Guroian, Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child’s Moral Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). The tradition that Burke is drawing from here goes back to the classical world where there were two basic kinds of knowledge, scientia and theoria, or in the Latin, ratio and intellectus. Scientia dealt with the act of problem-solving, acquiring the skills for a life of business and commerce, farming and manufacturing, the practical and the political; theoria, however, involved quite literally ‘beholding’ reality, ‘seeing’ the divine meaning and purpose inherent in the created order, and was thus considered indispensable to rightly orienting our dispositions and inclinations towards the reality of God revealed in Christ, and thereby becoming truly human. Theoria sought to bring a unity to knowledge as it forms a theological point of integration for the diversity of data achieved through scientia. And the Christian university was founded for precisely this reason, to facilitate a sacred space for contemplation, which originally meant to think thoughts in accordance with a temple, contemplare, so as to encounter the divine harmony of the cosmos and thereby bring unity to the diverse taxonomies discovered through scientia: hence the term, university, unity in diversity. And so our students are learning a fundamentally different way of knowing our world than the absurd reductionisms of the modern age. Hence, we teach them to not merely see their curriculum but to see through their curriculum. They are learning that the world of mathematics is revelatory of eternally divine ratios and proportionalities, which they can hear through music. They are learning to ‘see’ through stories as they point beyond themselves to a larger story, such that they see themselves as microcosms within a larger narrative macrocosm. On discerning meaning in literature and art, see Gregory Wolfe, Beauty Will Save The World: Recovering The Human In An Ideological Age (Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2011). Thus, Shakespeare’s tragedies are seen to represent the fall of humanity and his comedies represent our redemption; Sleeping Beauty can be seen as a story about a Christ-redeemer who slays the dragon and rescues his betrothed, by raising her to life. In Pinocchio, the hardened wood represents laziness, lying, and self-centeredness, and his transformation into a human represents the divine processes of regeneration and transfiguration. The Little Mermaid represents the quest for eternal life; Charlotte’s Web reveals life as communion and friendship. For an exposition of the broader themes inherent in fairy tales, see Guroian, Tending the Heart. They learn to see sports as the classical means by which we cultivate the virtue of engkratia or self-mastery, self-control. The apostle Paul draws from this in 1 Cor 9 when he says, “Everyone who competes in the games exercises self-control (engkrateuomai).” In fact, engkratia, is one of the fruits of the Spirit in Gal 5:23. Further, theoria’s emphasis on the integration of subject matter is absolutely crucial here. Because theology functions as the integrative center through which all course subjects cohere, the totality of life appears to the student as a manifestation of the splendor of God. And here we come full circle with the classical conception of Beauty. By communing with the manifestation of the splendor of God in all our subject matter, students get a glimpse of the ultimate goal of our Christian cultural pursuits, what theology calls the beatific vision, the vision of the New Jerusalem in Revelation 22, where heaven and earth come together as one, when God floods the cosmos with his incorruptible glory and life-giving radiance. It is just such a glimpse that can transform students into embodiments of that beatific vision for our world today. And so, the resurgence of classical Christian education extends to all of us an invitation, a divine calling to rediscover the human affirming values of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. Indeed, it has long been recognized that the Greek word for Beauty, kallos, is related etymologically to the word, kalein, to call. We are called to reconfigure our desires and dispositions, our habits and inclinations toward a cosmic vision of the True, Good, and Beauty revealed in Christ and the shared lifeworld of the church. And in answering such a call, we realize John Ruskin’s vision of the purpose of education: The entire object of true education is to make people not merely do the right things, but enjoy the right things — not merely industrious, but to love industry — not merely learned, but to love knowledge — not merely pure, but to love purity — not merely just, but to hunger and thirst after justice. John Ruskin, The Crown of Wild Olive: Three lectures on work, traffic, and war (New York: John Wiley & Son, 1866), 50. Our task as students and faculty alike is nothing less than to encounter the self-replenishing fountain of indescribable delights of a new creation in Christ, to embrace the gift of the freedom to be human again, and in so doing, to experience educational communities of faith that blossom with rational, poetic, worshippers of God, and thus get a taste of what life will be like when Christ returns, when God will be all in all. This is our calling, and it is beautiful.