...mens eadem...

"Don't be conformed to this present evil age, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind..." - Romans 12.2

"The word of God was the sweat of [Paul's] brow, but it was also the life of his mind. Our juncture of history is rather like Paul's in one respect: it requires a Christian preacher to come to the defence of the life of the mind. As Universities daily conform themselves more closely to the school of wizardry in children's fiction, a repository of magic techniques to get startling effects, who else is left to care for how people, as individuals, think for themselves about the coherence of understanding, principle, and purpose that makes the difference between living in freedom and living in servitude? As the young flock in ever greater numbers to our Universities and colleges, who is there to talk to them seriously, and with all the resources of refined scholarly culture, about the meaning of their human existence, about how vast quantity if scatted or organised information can be distilled into something worth a humans being's while to be occupied with in his or her one and only venture in life? Of course, we shall be told that virtue cannot be taught, that the existential dimension of wisdom is something each person must discover for him or herself, not a topic for inclusion in a syllabus, to be "covered" in a tutorial. All of which is perfectly true. Yet wisdom can be present or absent as a goal and a horizon, before which everything covered in a syllabus can begin to assume its real importance. But this requires teachers who believe that learning is not simply perfecting a performance, but has to do with the terror and hope that is due to existence itself. It requires teachers who believe in the human reality of salvation and loss, who live out their academic roles as those who continually ask how they may be saved?" - Oliver O'Donovan, No End to the Word, The Word in Small Boats, 2010.