When I first arrived, I viewed the ‘great books’ as the 100 or so texts that served as the bricks in the grand edifice that is western civilization.

That’s the way, I think, lots of National Review-reading Anglophile evangelical and Catholic conservative-types view ‘the great books’ and the ‘liberal arts’.

After four years, though, I learned nothing could be further from the truth.

The great books are akin to a conversation where everybody’s tackling the same questions but nobody agrees about anything.

In fact, I found a thoroughly ‘liberal’ education to be liberating because it made most students radically skeptical, and almost desperate of truth. We spent four years learning about amazing possible answers (alternative accounts), but settling on nothing.

That kind of education can be very valuable, but it can destroy some people (spiritually, intellectually, even morally), too.

I think it’s asinine when conservative Christians hold up ‘the great books’ as a quasi-religious canon simply because it avoids the multicultural garbage so many schools focus on.

I would also say that I have to agree with the spirit of the quote in that the story told–at least in our humanities program–is woefully inadequate because it fails precisely to tell those stories which Yoder would describe as moving “with the grain of the universe”; after all, the whole conception of “great books” rules out or at least curtails a sensitivity to those narratives told from the underside.

. . . Hey, lets not romanticize this or confuse it with discipleship. After all, the sort of education offered in the liberal arts is one of privilege and we don’t want to uncritically equate the self-improvement of the privileged with what discipleship means.”

If that’s what he’s saying, then I have no problem; I just didn’t get that whole context from the quote. Often I have thought the same way about this (in principle, not in articulation ;-) . . . knowing the history of “University” and such, I have come to some of these same conclusions; and the thing that really concretizes this for me is when I look at my “SallieMae” debt which is still in deferment :-(.

I think what he’s challenging here is the too-easy acceptance of the notion that the liberal arts are simply coterminous with what a “Christian college education” is supposed to be, not saying that they are of no value at all. What he’s really pushing against here is the notion that studying the liberal arts is somehow a process of “building character” that is part of, or easily circumscribed within Christian discipleship. That’s why I see him point to the liberal arts and basically saying, “Hey, lets not romanticize this or confuse it with discipleship. After all, the sort of education offered in the liberal arts is one of privilege and we don’t want to uncritically equate the self-improvement of the privileged with what discipleship means.”

I’m thinking of how Christian Humanism (a direct result of the “Liberal Arts”) was used to reinvigorate the Apocalyptic message of the Gospel — the one that Yoder is a proponent of himself.

Of course the liberal arts do not set us free. They too are often powers that enslave. But the Gospel can also deliver them up for God’s use and, indeed, our delight.

The study of classical literature, of reading books worth reading, of listening to music, of walking without prosthetic media attached to one’s person, is an anarchic subversion of our mindless hyperkineticism and the frenzied leisure of consumers (eminently practical creatures, every one of ‘em). What constitutes “elitism” is not supplied from a storehouse of timeless cultural products. What may be a “bourgeouis cultural reflex” for some is, in my hands, a call for militant inefficiency and unproductiveness: Dolce Far Niente.

What is Yoder’s alternative except some sort of quietism? Mustn’t we know what the good is and how we may morally attain it? Being “useful” is not a good in and of itself. So in respect of which ends are we to be “useful?” To answer the latter question requires developing the faculty of moral discernment. Pray how to do that while we’re at the busyness of not becoming social elites?

I’ll risk the label of elitist in order to give my students a glimpse of what poem, tale, tragedy, and music are capable of. “But, but, that’s just some ridiculous repristination of constantinian state-church power structures!” Transcendentalized bosh. The reason for a christian educator to do so because such human products, like the Gospel, have the power to speak to what is deepest in us.