For Truth's Sake

This blog is jumping off from my new book, details of which are here. (Or if you live in the US, here.) You can post comments of your own, or if you want a more extended discussion you can go here.

What is the book about and why bother to discuss it? Education has become splintered and fragmented in our postmodern culture. The arts are divorced from the sciences; faith is at loggerheads with reason. Drawing on ancient traditions of learning, Beauty for Truth's Sake points the way to unity in education through a renewed understanding of cosmic order.

An extract from the book:
Faith is not opposed to reason, but it does function as a constant goad, a challenge, a provocation to reason. Faith claims to stand beyond reason, to speak from the place that reason seeks. But it does not claim to understand what it knows, and it should not usurp the role of reason in that sense, any more than it should contradict it. The resolution lies not in faith, nor yet in reason, but in love.

We are perennially tempted to reduce Christianity to something less than itself: either to power (will, faith, law) or to philosophy (knowledge, reason, wisdom). Nominalists tend to do the former. Realists tend to do the latter. But the solution to this supreme problem in binary logic is through a third and higher thing: love, in which both will and knowledge are reconciled and held in balance – or rather, in which both are transcended. God is love, in which both will and knowledge are comprised.

Whatever your intellectual quarry, if you pursue it to its ultimate lair, you will find the mark of love in the very nature of things. What is magnetism, asks the Victorian poet Coventry Patmore in The Rod, the Root, and the Flower, “but the echo of the senseless rock to the very voice of far-off Love, and the effect of the kiss of God transmitted through the hierarchies of heaven and earth to the lips of the least of beings?”

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