Dec102021
Book excerpt

“The love of learning opens up dimensions of humanity that might be hidden in ordinary life and to which common experiences are hostile: the capacity to understand the structures of space and time or mathematical theorems; the appreciation of beautiful phrases, images, or scenes; the ability to be transported to different times and places; even the simple capacity to reflect, to think, to see through illusions. All these are a part of the splendor of humanity: the growth in excellence of the mind, its capacity to be aware, to retain, to study, or to reimagine the objects of its awareness. . . .

“Humanistic learning also hopes to cultivate excellence in perception — for instance, of human reactions or human events. So, for example, the study of literature might enable us to see that we ourselves, like Elizabeth Bennet, have been blinded by self-regard and have failed to perceive another person as he really is. Studying the folly of Athens’s invasion of Syracuse twenty-five centuries ago, we might learn to see the folly of a contemporary act of national aggression. But useful as heightened perception may be, its splendor is not in its use, any more than the use of Olympic diving explains the awe it provokes in us.

“The capacities of the mind lie strangely in tension with our motivations as shaped by those around us: the social expectations for a social worker or for a young overachiever; the demands made on a young woman preparing for marriage; the human diminishment deliberately induced by segregation, racial prejudice, or prison life. The way that others treat us gives us an image of who we are: an animal to be controlled, a piece of property to be traded, a vehicle of physical pleasure, a rung on a social ladder to be ranked or climbed up on. We escape from these images to recover fuller and truer ways of thinking about ourselves, and thus to find fuller and truer ways of being.”

— From Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life (Princeton University Press, 2020)

Related reading and listening

  1. The need for robust Christian intellectual life — In this lecture, Robert Benne surveys the contemporary landscape in which Christian scholars attempt to integrate their faith and their intellectual life. (43 minutes)
  2. Treating Truth with sovereign respect — Henri de Lubac on the urgency of intellectual activity
  3. The life was the light of men — Robert Jenson reflects on the relationship that should be sustained between the Church and those of her members with an “intellectual” vocation.
  4. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 153 — FEATURED GUESTS: Charles C. Camosy, O. Carter Snead, Matt Feeney, Margarita A. Mooney, Louis Markos, and Alan Jacobs
  5. Visionary education — Josef Pieper on the mistake of confusing education with mere training
  6. Trails, furrows, and bookish virtues — Zena Hitz offers some rich reflections on the remarkable feature of human life that is the love of learning. (16 minutes)
  7. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 152 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Jeffrey Bilbro, Zena Hitz, James L. Nolan, Jr., Bishop Robert Barron, and Jason Blakely
  8. Healthy habits of mind — Scott Newstok describes how many efforts at educational reform have become obstacles to thinking well, and he offers a rich and evocative witness to a better way of understanding what thinking is. (20 minutes)
  9. Religious pluralism & the calling of Christian intellectuals — From our archives, Robert Wilken talks about religious pluralism in Christian history, and Robert Jenson discusses his essay on the calling of Christian intellectuals. (25 minutes)
  10. On Christian teaching and forming Christian minds — David I. Smith argues that teaching methods are as important as educational content in forming Christian minds. (9 minutes)
  11. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 141 — FEATURED GUESTS: Grant Wythoff, Susanna Lee, Gerald R. Mcdermott, Carlos Eire, Kelly Kapic, and James Matthew Wilson
  12. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 113 — FEATURED GUESTS: Steven Shapin, Arthur Boers, Christine Pohl, Norman Wirzba, Craig Bartholomew, and David I. Smith
  13. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 110 — FEATURED GUESTS: Kevin Belmonte, David Lyle Jeffrey and Gregory Maillet, Mark Noll, Alan Jacobs, and Jonathan Chaplin
  14. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  15. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 86 — FEATURED GUESTS: Roger Lundin, Lawrence Buell, Harold K. Bush, Jr., Katherine Shaw Spaht, Steven L. Nock, Norman Klassen, and Jens Zimmermann
  16. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 78 — FEATURED GUESTS: Mark Bauerlein, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Sam Van Eman, Thomas de Zengotita, Eugene McCarraher, and John Witte, Jr.
  17. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey

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