Part 2: This world is enchanted.
This is the second exploration of the various realizations that contributed to my conversion into the worlds of Anglicanism and classical education at (roughly) the same time.
This was a letter sent to our student body in May 2023 about the rise of AI in education. You can read an essay of mine that expands on these things here.
Let Them Be Born in Wonder is the title of an excellent article that highlights the work of the storied, but relatively short-lived, Integrated Humanities Program at the University of Kansas.
Part of the reason the program no longer exists is that a disproportionate number of students in the program were converting to Christianity as a result of their studies. The program was closed for this reason in 1979, despite the fact that the investigative committee found “no evidence that the professors of the program have engaged in such activities in the classroom.” It was, in many ways, the mere exposure to great minds and works of the past that drew students to God.
But the three founding professors also noticed something about the students entering the program that is worth us considering today: they had lost an interest in real things. These professors were convinced that before their students could encounter great works, they needed to reencounter, and be drawn again, to reality itself.
Aristotle and St. Thomas teach that the human person, as a union of body and soul, lives an integrated life in which the intellect and will rely on the senses, the imagination, and emotions. The professors recognized that the new generation of students was sensibly and emotionally disconnected from reality. Their technology, their whole environment, pre-internet thought it was, cut them off from God’s creation, and inclined them toward fantasy. Their basic correspondence to reality, to the true, good, and beautiful, had been blunted. They were not interested in real things, were restless, and could not focus.
What makes these observations more poignant is that they were made in 1968. Our world has grown to prefer the virtual and the digital even more in the decades that have followed.
I share all of this for three reasons.
First, I hope that you read the article, and grow to appreciate what the IHP sought to be and do.
Second, I hope this gives you some perspective on why any classical Christian school worth its salt will insist on nature studies, physical activity, art and music appreciation, and a direct encounter with great works from the past. We learn to learn from thinkers who we may not entirely agree with, but who nonetheless had a better picture of ultimate reality than most in our own age.
And finally, I hope this encourages us to remedy our own preference for the virtual and the digital; to sharpen our “blunted correspondence to reality” by seeking to “be born in wonder” by the natural order and human community around us.
If we are all determined to begin this work in our own lives, we might just stand a chance at leading our students to do the same.
On May 18, 2024, the Coram Deo Academy Dallas Campus graduated its first class of Seniors. Below is my message for that class, shared at the Class of 2024 Commencement Ceremony.
There have been many times—perhaps more than I care to admit—that I have stood in the hallway outside the doorway to your classroom thinking to myself “I don’t have time for this. I need this hour for something else.” To reflect on what just happened. To prepare for what is to come. To plan, or to pray, or to respond.
But I stepped inside regardless—mostly because I know you well enough not to trust you in a room alone together.
After spending that hour with you in the classroom, God has not once failed to use each of you as a gift of grace: to refresh, or restore, or challenge, or comfort. I leave time with you thinking, “I needed that hour more than I knew. I don’t have time to not have this time together.”
You—as individuals and as a class—have a gift that our mutual friend C.S. Lewis liked to call “the good infection.” You rub off on people. You are like the house of the patient’s girlfriend that Uncle Screwtape describes in Letter 22:
Could you not see that the very house she lives in is one that he ought never to have entered? The whole place reeks of that deadly odour (of Christian love). The very gardener, though he has only been there five years, is beginning to acquire it. Even guests, after a weekend visit, carry some of the smell away with them. The dog and the cat are tainted with it. It is a house full of the impenetrable mystery.
Whether in the classroom or around campus, at a dinner table or in a living room, in Dallas or Austin or Arkansas—I leave time with you changed for the better.
You have shaped me. You have shaped my family—all of them. You have shaped this community and many others beyond it.
Today is an occasion marked by joy—despite the misty eyes in the room—and here is why: This is a big crowd in a big room full of “the good infection.”
But beyond these walls is a bigger crowd in a bigger room.
Sitting behind you are just some of those who have cared for you in this season of your life at this school. In front of you are even more who have done the same in your homes and in your churches. The older you get the more you will realize the sacrifices they have made for you to be here.
Now it is your turn.
Because beyond those doors, there are people you haven’t even met yet who need you. There are a people yet unborn, who need you.
They need you to witness—in word and deed—to the Good News of God in Christ. To pursue ever more deeply the Truth, Goodness, and Beauty of God. Not to shout into the darkness about how dark it is, but to light a candle, no matter how small, wherever God leads you.
It is a joy to send you out with that mission. And we are at peace in doing so, because you are in excellent hands, hands that have been there all along, hands that I pray you will notice more and more as you grow up: you are safe, no matter what you face, in the wounded hands of our Lord.
Amen.
To put a bow on the past few weeks we have spent discussing Councils, Creeds, Confessions, and Catechisms, my Senior Theology class has an exciting task ahead of us this week:
Use soccer as a running analogy for the Christian Church, and articulate where each of these things fit.
For example, perhaps:
Excited to see how my students run with this question, and how this activity will reflect their renewed understanding of these things.
Not every Christian institution is rocked by scandal, and there are many Christian colleges that are healthy and vibrant, led by men and women of integrity. Yet as we witness systemic misconduct unfold at institution after institution after institution, often without any real accountability, we can understand that many members of the church have gotten Paul’s equation exactly backward. They are remarkably tolerant of even the most wayward, dishonest and cruel individuals and institutions in American Christianity. At the same time, they approach those outside with a degree of anger and ferocity that’s profoundly contributing to American polarization. It’s also perpetuating the corruption of the church.
Under this moral construct, internal critique is perceived as a threat, a way of weakening American evangelicalism. It’s seen as contributing to external hostility and possibly even the rapid secularization of American life that’s now underway. But Paul would scoff at such a notion. One of the church’s greatest apostles didn’t hold back from critiquing a church that faced far greater cultural or political headwinds — including brutal and deadly persecution at the hands of the Roman state — than the average evangelical can possibly imagine.
Why? Because he realized the health of the church wasn’t up to the state, nor was it dependent on the church’s nonbelieving neighbors. Liberty University is consequential not just because it’s an academic superpower in Christian America, but also because it’s a symbol of a key reality of evangelical life — we have met the enemy of American Christianity, and it is us.
Are you against computers, Socrates?
Socrates: Of course not. Am I against brains? I am against confusion—against personalizing instruments and instrumentalizing persons—which is what is at stake in this philosophical question about human and computer intelligence.
From Peter Kreeft’s brilliant book The Best Things in Life, which imagines dialogues that occur when Socrates visits a modern university campus. Even more poignant: this book was written in 1984.
Juniors at Coram Deo Academy research, write, defend, and present a rather impressive Capstone paper. The remarks below were shared the evening that our Dallas Campus Junior shared their capstones with our community.
I am encouraged by many things this evening, but I would like to name two of them.
First, I am encouraged to know that this is a place where students are trained to think deeply, slowly, and theologically about things that matter a great deal.
Juniors, your presence here this evening and your work this year is a testament to the many ways you are growing in wisdom and virtue. Well done.
Second, I am grateful that this is a place where adults take time out of their busy weeks to hear students share some of what they have learned this year.
Parents, teachers, and friends of our school: your presence here this evening is a testament to your desire to contribute to a more wise and virtuous Christian witness in the public square.
Our students have selected challenging topics to explore this year, and their teacher has demanded that they read, think, and write wisely about them.
All while many of their peers are being trained to think and write by social media, rash politicians, and celebrities who are famous for being famous.
Though you may—in some cases—find yourself arriving at different conclusions than our presenters, I trust that you will appreciate, honor, and be encouraged by the way our students have thought through these things.
The paragraph below, from Alan Jacobs, is an important one to comprehend. The rest of his post helps frame some of the wider issues at hand, and points to other helpful works for those seeking to read more widely on these things.
I want to make a stronger argument: that the distinctive “occupational psychosis” of Silicon Valley is sociopathy – the kind of sociopathy embedded in the Oppenheimer Principle. The people in charge at Google and Meta and (outside Silicon Valley) Microsoft, and at the less well-known companies that are being used by the mega-companies, have been deformed by their profession in ways that prevent them from perceiving, acknowledging, and acting responsibly in relation to the consequences of their research. They have a trained incapacity to think morally. They are by virtue of their narrowly technical education and the strong incentives of their profession moral idiots.
While it is not the only point of the paragraph, I cannot help but revisit the final sentence (emphasis mine):
they are by virtue of their narrowly technical education … moral idiots.
Learning to lead, love, and serve our world does not require more technical training, either in K-12 or higher ed. It requires more humane teaching and learning.
Your eight year old can learn to code from an app whenever they need it, whether that is this summer or twenty summers from now. They cannot so easily learn what it means to be a human being who is a member of a human society, while also learning to master the art of letters and numbers.
One of the best things you can do now to prepare young children for the moral idiocracy of our age is to ground them in a rich education in the liberal arts.
That’s why he and two co-authors—Dweck and Greg Walton of Stanford—recently performed a study that suggests it might be time to change the way we think about our interests. Passions aren’t “found,” they argue. They’re developed.
From a much appreciated article by Olga Khazan—especially for those of us in the world of K-12 Classical Education.