Reading What I Want To
One of the more pleasant things about completing my Ph.D. is the fact that I now have a good deal more time to read what I want to read. My dissertation was about a topic I wanted to study, but if we are being entirely honest, there were times when I just wanted to pick up a fiction book and unwind a little bit. However, I always felt a little bit guilty when I read something that didn’t quite align with my studies. After all, I wanted to finish my dissertation someday, and if I had a finite amount of reading time, I felt like I should use it towards that end. Consequently, I put aside a pile of books that I wanted to read and figured I would read them someday. Now is someday.
I noticed something funny about this pile of books the other day though. Their content is not all that far off from what I was studying. I still read about the humanities broadly. I still read about apologetics. I still read about Christian culture. My studies are done, but they have not left me. I don’t think they ever will.
One of the few blessings that has emerged from our time of forced separation in so many ways is that some friends and I started a book club. We began by reading The Benedict Option by Rod Dreher, and now we are reading Beauty for Truth’s Sake by Stratford Caldecott. This group of wonderful people has truly made Monday’s something to look forward to.
I came across a quote this week that I think explains this correspondence between what I studied and what I am now choosing to read in my free time. Caldecott writes, “The road to reason leads through the ordering of the soul, which implies the necessity of an education in love, in discernment, and in virtue.” In context, he is talking about why it is important to help children order their souls by teaching them music. However, I think this applies to just about any discipline.
I consider it a privilege to have been given an education that helped order my soul. Both of my graduate programs emphasized the Great Books, and I was able to engage with some of the greatest works ever written. These are not books that you just pick up and set down; they are books that challenge you to consider the way in which you view the world. They help you grow in love, discernment, and virtue. As you develop what is hopefully a more mature and well-founded foundation as a human being, your soul will naturally gravitate towards order, and hopefully that will help direct you down the road of reason.
Because of the formative influence of my education on my mind and my heart, I think that the choices I make now reflect this journey. Abraham Lincoln once said, “Freedom is not the right to do what we want, but what we ought.” My Christian liberal arts education has truly freed me to pursue the good, true, and beautiful. In that freedom, I have found my wants beginning to conform to my oughts. I am now free to read whatever I want. I could spend my entire life reading supermarket paperbacks if I wanted to. However, what I want to read (and you can check out my Goodreads profile for verification) seems to bring me back to things that are assisting me on this lifelong journey I started in the classroom. I didn’t finish my dissertation and all of a sudden rush away from these great books, never to return. Instead, being introduced to them for a little while whetted my appetite for more.
As educators in the liberal arts, I think this is one of our most important responsibilities. We need to introduce our students to these great conversations, and we need to help them fall in love with these ideas. These ideas have intrigued humanity for millennia, and they are not going to stop anytime soon. Therefore, we need to help our students learn right order, keeping them on the road to reason, and helping them set their sights on the good, true, and beautiful.