Divinity United

I have recently finished reading Stratford Caldecott's, Beauty for Truth's Sake: On the Re-enchantment of Education . The first chapter on the Liberal Arts continues to be the most interesting for me, but the rest of the book brings together the importance of beauty's place in education. So much of the world whether music, mathematics, science, or architecture has beauty and order to it, as Caldecott has shown. It is an excellent book and a good argument for the place of religion in education. After I finished the book, I thumbed through it for the places I had highlighted. This passage on page 28 still strikes a chord with me: "The sheer amount of information available in every discipline is far too great to be mastered by one person in an entire lifetime. The purpose of an education is not merely to communicate information, let alone current scientific opinion, nor to train future workers and managers. It is to teach the ability to think, discriminate, speak, an...

I will come back to the Gospel of John and Intimations of Apocalyptic colloquium. It was an excellent colloquium. I just read this inspiring selection yesterday: “At the heart of any culture worthy of the name ['culture'] is not work but leisure, schole in Greek, a word that lies at the root of the English word ‘school.’ At its highest, leisure is contemplation. It is an activity that is its own justification, the pure expression of what it is to be human. It is what we do. The ‘purpose’ of the quadrivium was to prepare us to contemplate God in an ordered fashion, to take delight in the source of all truth, beauty, and goodness, while the purpose of the trivium was to prepare us for the quadrivium . The ‘purpose’ of the Liberal Arts is therefore to purify the soul, to discipline the attention so that it becomes capable of devotion to God; that is, prayer.” – Stratford Caldecott, Beauty for Truth’s Sake: On the Re-enchantment of Education , p. 90.