My career

(Continued)

First, teaching Socratic Tradition, Logic, and Philosophy at CSD makes it possible for me to help students see God’s unifying hand in all their studies – to imbue all their studies with the advantages of purpose, context, and direction.  The gracious order of God’s creation is apprehended and expounded by many of the great minds of the Western tradition in the fields of science, history, literature, language, and the arts.  Philosophy, in its turn, encompasses each of these disciplines, their relation to each other, and discerns the mode in which they are oriented toward the True. 

Second, in teaching Apologetics, I can help students to see that their minds (which are a part of God’s orderly handiwork) are to be integrated with their Faith.  The Christian worldview is rational and defensible.  Since a rational faith conforms to the order of God’s providence, it conforms to the Good.  

Third, participating in the unique relational aspect of our school allows me to engage in what God intends for us in the realm of our relationships.  Learning to be well-ordered personally and imparting that to the students reflects the claim of Blaise Pascal that “the strength of a man’s virtue should not be measured by his special exertions, but by his habitual acts.”  It is the well-ordered life, a life that is open to that of Christian discipleship, that is most open to the Beautiful.

William Ralph Inge writes that “nobody is bored when he is trying to make something that is beautiful or to discover something that is true.”  Along with the students and my colleagues at CSD, I am given the opportunity to behold the good and beautiful and to discover the true.  In other words, the Cambridge classrooms are places in which wisdom of the Western intellectual tradition is contemplated and pursued every day.  This kind of classroom experience is an incredible thing, and one would be hard pressed to find it elsewhere.