Thursday, November 05, 2020

Promoting the Liberal Arts with Exaggerated Claims



FPR

Let me offer a modest definition of what an education is for. An education assists in ordering and expanding our loves. This follows in the tradition of St. Augustine and Hugh St. of Victor up to present day with James K.A. Smith and David Brooks. The flourishing life is a life of ordered love, and education prepares and shapes such a life. It’s for a life fueled by affection creating a people “who the life they’ve made and they place they’ve made in it,” in the words of Wendell Berry.


Christian paideia does this. The liberal arts may train the intellect, but they do not by themselves, train the will, even if the state of learning before the liberal arts may influence the moral imagination.

No comments: