Lovey-Dovey

You can’t judge a book by its cover. Judging by its cover, Love: Christian Romance, Marriage, and Friendship, by Princeton Christian philosopher Diogenes Allen, looks like it falls in the same general area as The 5 Love Languages or some other self-help book. Looks, as they say, are deceiving.

Allen actually traverses some of the terrain as other important works, most notably The Four Loves, by C. S. Lewis. In Allen’s case, he taps into the Western tradition to help explain in a deeper way what usually gets flattened or trivialized for mass consumption in most books on this topic. Allen takes the humanities seriously, and in the first few chapters of the  book, he refers to the following writers:

Denis de Rougemont on courtly love

Plato (Phaedrus)

St. John of the Cross

Coleridge (“Rime of the Ancient Mariner”)

Genesis

Kierkegaard

Arthur Miller (Death of a Salesman)

Dante

Bonaventure

Martin Luther

Allen does not write as the Princetonian scholar, though. He wants to make accessible to a more general audience some of the fundamental Christian insights into the nature of love in its multiple dimensions. A work like this shows that “The Western Tradition” is much more than a dull section of humanities credits required to knock out an undergraduate degree. Allen shows that ancient Greeks, Medieval Catholics, modern Protestants, and literary works of all kinds have the power to illuminate the most fundamental reality of all human beings (“Love the Lord your God and your neighbor as yourself”).

The Western Tradition was generated for a reason. It is not a unified, monolithic voice, and it still communicates profoundly about our own day to day concerns for loving and being loveable. Why study good literature, philosophy, and theology? So you can love your wife better. So you can love your kids better. So you can love God better.

Across the Pond

American Christianity has always had to wrestle with a triumphalist streak, whether in conservative or liberal forms. To gain some perspective on this problem, it helps to look outside our American inflections of Christianity to other cultural positionings of faith. One way to do this appears on the U.K. web site bethinking. Since Christians in the U.K. are now a distinct minority in an increasingly hostile and aggressive secular culture, their wrestlings with faith and culture can inform our own in helpful ways. Take a look. 

Here is a sample essay called "A Media Studies Approach to Not Noticing God." In it, Pete Lowman reflects on how modern media trains everyone--even Christians--to see the world in purely material cause-effect ways, effectively shutting down our intuition of supernatural realities.

A Quote from Paul Shorey

"...the good teacher will almost in the same breath translate a great poetic sentence, bring out its relations to the whole of which it is a part, make its musical rhythm felt by appropriate declamation, explain a historical or an antiquarian allusion, call attention to a dialectic form, put a question about a peculiar use of the optative, compare the imagery with similar figures of speech in ancient and modern poetry, and use the whole as a text for a little discourse on the difference between the classical and the modern or romantic spirit; so that you shall not know whether he is teaching science or art, language or literature, grammar, rhetoric, psychology, or sociology, because he is really teaching the elements and indispensable prerequisites of all."

~Paul Shorey, "The Case for Classics," in Frank Kelsey's Latin and Greek in American Education, 1927.

Work in Education

This article, which references a recent major study on higher education, indicates that a lot of the current trends in higher education--such as group work--is probably quite worthless. Sitting down alone a few hours with a difficult book, a notebook, and a pen will probably do more for you than finishing a team project that probably did little more than require you to apply some currently fashionable ideas.

Want better students? Make them work by giving them difficult reading and writing assignments.

Modern Education

As we work over The Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis, you might find this article on education to act as a useful summary/introduction to the book. The article itself refers to Lewis, but the example given derives from our contemporary educational disaster.

The site on which this article is placed is also worth looking at.