The Violence of Our Knowledge: Toward a Spirituality of Higher Education
Need to chew on this and then respond to a wonderful short comment on the emergent Malaysia yahoogroup. ” What fascinates me is that we find many, many young people not interested in learning science as it is traditionally taught. But in these new models of science, which want to integrate the subjective with the objective, which want to present a more connective mode of doing science, we find a terrific interest among young people. I have a hunch about why that is. I have a hunch that young people today feel profoundly disconnected and alienated from community in its many forms – from human community, to community with nature, to community with things of the spirit. If we present science or thinking to them as one more way of getting alienated and disconnected, why would they want to learn? Who would want it if you already lived in a world of disconnection and alienation and someone cynics along and says, ‘learn to do science or sociology or literary criticism or history because it will disconnect you even further.” But when we represent human thinking for what I believe it is, which is not a disconnected mechanism but a community-building capacity, then it turns out students want to learn because students want to conic back into community with that which they have lost.” I see myself in the “young people” category 🙂
Reading the powers biblically: Stringfellow, hermeneutics, and the principalities(pdf) (HT: Paul Fromont)
Bedtime reading tonight?
Finding Faith: The Spiritual Discipline of Self Criticism/Reflection
Jason gets us thinking here “…When I went to seminary to read theology I was warned about the danger of losing my faith. People do lose faith when they reflect at seminary. But they also lose faith outside of it. When faith is built on certainty, and we have no understanding of how to grow unless we know for sure, we’re heading for trouble. Because one day life will happen and we’ll be asking some questions.”
For the love of God (26): Why I love Wittgenstein
The “Why I Love …” series has been very informative … this one caught my attention because I was talking with someone when Brother WWittgenstein’s name came up! Food for thought here: “What is most important about Wittgenstein is his method of philosophy, which prevents a fruitless pursuit of metaphysical “solutions”; more precisely, it teaches us what metaphysics actually is. Thus Wittgenstein’s method is a necessary discipline for theologians, as it prevents us from mis-characterising the nature of Christian doctrine. As he put it himself: “Christianity is not a doctrine, not, I mean, a theory about what has happened and will happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life. For ‘consciousness of sin’ is a real event and so are despair and salvation through faith. Those who speak of such things (Bunyan for instance) are simply describing what has happened to them, whatever gloss anyone may want to put on it.””