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Finding Mentors Who Share Your Faith

Mentoring Conversation

Last week, I gave some general thoughts on finding good mentors as an undergraduate. This week, I’ll talk a bit about finding mentors who share your beliefs. This is not in any way to minimize the value of mentors who have different views about life. I’ve learned valuable skills, knowledge, and virtues from mentors who had completely different assumptions about the way the world works. It’s often quite helpful to have a mentor who will challenge your deepest  beliefs about the world. But, as in most things, it’s also helpful to find some mentors who see things from a similar angle and can deepen your understanding of how your faith and your field interact. And it can be a difficult task.

Many professors are hesitant to talk about their own epistemology in class, in the commendable desire to give students room to express their individual viewpoints. And as a student, it can be intimidating to ask a professor what he or she believes, even in an individual conversation during office hours. Leaving those issues aside, it’s simply hard to build community in the rush of managing course schedules and extracurriculars. Here are a few ways to look if you’re trying to find mentors who share belief in Christ. Some of these thoughts are easier to apply in graduate school (the suggestion about going to conferences, for instance), but I hope that they’re helpful to think about in undergrad as well. If you are interested in graduate school, applying some of these suggestions will help to prepare for that as well. [Read more…] about Finding Mentors Who Share Your Faith

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Does Education Need to Have a Highest Good?

While mowing the grass on Sunday, here’s the question that was put to me through my headphones:

Is it possible to really have education — and hence to nourish imaginations — if schools refuse to define some highest good that is ordering educational life, some higher good that is transcendent or spiritual in some way?

Maybe this isn’t the typical issue that comes up during your yardwork, but it’s not uncommon for me. I was listening to the current issue of Mars Hill Audio, specifically Ken Myers’ interview with Anthony Esolen, Providence College professor, translator of Dante, and most recently author of Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child. Myers put this question to Esolen as they were discussing the undergraduates whom Esolen teaches during Providence College’s 2-year, 20-credit required course for freshmen and sophomores, The Development of Western Civilization. It sounds much like the kind of thing that Anthony Kronman would desire for college students — except, of course, that Providence College, as a Catholic college founded by Dominican friars, is one of those “fundamentalist” schools that Kronman dislikes so much.

[By the way, you too can listen to Mars Hill Audio during your weekend chores. Mars Hill Audio generously offers ESN members a discounted subscription rate. I would say that it’s the best place for long form audio interviews with theologians, philosophers, historians, scholars, poets, and musicians about contemporary culture and eternal truths…but I’m having a hard time thinking of another place that offers them.] — Note: At present a discounted subscription rate is not available, ESN’s seeking to renew this relationship (2/21/2014, 8:41 AM).

How would you answer Myers’ question? For some additional background, Myers prefaces his question by distinguishing, per Josef Pieper, between “education” and “training.” Is it possible to really have education if schools refuse to define some highest good?

For record, Esolen answers, “Probably not.” What do you think? And what should be the highest good of education?

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