The Blackboard

"We seem to be born homesick, and that homesickness is meant to lead us into a life of pilgrimage.” Walker Percy Black Mountain,...

We should aim to conserve what is deepest and true, not just what happens to have immediately preceded the present. It should be the conservative’s task to reconnect the manner of our lives and the institutions of our civilization—schools, colleges, churches, governments—to the solid truths beneath the surface, peeling away the layers of mere convention to find the “permanent things.”

Temperamentally and vocationally, I was in the wrong place. Yet I don’t regret a single day I spent there—not only because I met my wife, but because I learned to relish a simple, quiet way of living that many around us seem anxious to exceed.

Being a teacher is a demanding job, whether in a college, school, or home setting. It requires tremendous energy, responsiveness, and mental flexibility. It requires that you, the teacher, also be willing to let yourself be taught.

Though the metaphor sounds alarmist, an unimaginable tsunami is barreling down on a complacent world. We may have time to adjust, who knows?

All education programs enculturate students. There is no neutrality here. The question is not whether education will form our students, but how they will be formed. Proverbs (22:6) says, “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” Any curriculum and set of standards will base itself on certain ideas about the nature of the human person, how persons are shaped, and what kind of person society needs.

As we approach the new academic year, we, like Sisyphus, are condemned to roll the rock up the hill only for it to roll back down. However, this does not have to be a meaningless task – we can escape the absurdity of our condition. We give ourselves meaning by following either the dogmatist, the activist, or the healer.

Donnelly’s scope of transformation may seem like an impossible undertaking, yet even if it is not possible for everyone to achieve the level of faith integration suggested here, anyone can still benefit by choosing particular areas for improvement.

The 1619 Project states that its purpose is to remember the history of slavery and racism that American schools have sometimes tried to forget. But mostly it teaches students the wrong way to go about remembering. It abuses remembering to promote forgetting America’s history of reconciliation and unity on race, so as to frame the nation’s identity as irredeemably stained and systemically, irreparably flawed.

We academics unfortunately often fall into the trap of pride (particularly of the self-involved, self-satisfying, institutional kind), and hence a humbling such as this conference delivered was probably much needed. I have a Christian duty, as an educator and as a member of a Christian community, to think systematically about how I can live up, as a teacher and scholar, to the values of inclusion and equality