My Hot Take: Humanities Are The Only Thing Worth Diving Into

I’m a little obsessed with education. Or what passes for it at the college level. So when I see something like this:

Can theology survive the crisis in Catholic higher education? @ America Magazine

I can’t help but opine.

This is fundamentally a reflection of how we’ve shrunk down what it means to be educated. We’ve turned far too much of our higher education into mere job training instead of the mind/soul/life building, the human formation that high-quality education is meant to help create. Any learning that doesn’t produce immediate economic benefit - theology, yes, but also philosophy, literature, art, anthropology, foreign languages, even many basic sciences - is considered wasteful by far too many who hold our culture’s purse strings. The crisis isn’t that theology has lost its value or relevance; it’s that we’ve accepted such a narrow, impoverished definition of what counts as valuable in the first place.

Elsewhere

• Books and Blessings: The Matthew Strother Center for the Examined Life

  Perhaps it all sounds a little idyllic. A bunch of adults sitting around talking about Dostoevsky and Bulgakov all morning, eating freshly prepared meals that often involved produce from the property, and earnest conversations about obligations, legacy, and consciousness? All without phones and with disposable cameras? Well, it was not perfect. The chickens were disobedient and there are ticks on the property. But it was idyllic. It also closely approximates the idea of leisure we get from the ancients, which was space for philosophical reflection and time spent freely, away from labor and without expectation of production.

---

---