Rejoicing in the Truth: Wisdom and the Educator's Craft

Rejoicing in the Truth offers a vision for the renewal of Christian education through the intentional pursuit of wisdom. When educators make it their goal to accompany their students along the path to wisdom and to instruct them by showing them how to delight in the truth, then their practice is illuminated and enlivened at every level. Informed by the philosophical and theological visions of John Henry Newman, John Paul II, Alasdair MacIntyre, and, above all, Thomas Aquinas, this volume offers a series of different looks at the life of a Christian educator.

The first three chapters treat the dispositions that need to be brought to the pursuit of Christian wisdom, chief among them the kind of restraint that follows from always seeking to ascend to the most noble forms of knowing. Chapters four through eight treat some of the tools of education: first-hand experience of nature, Euclidean geometry, imaginative literature and poetry, history, and biology, bringing to bear on them Aquinas’s conception of the order of the different fields of inquiry. The last two chapters reflect upon the settings of the pursuit of wisdom, first the school or college and second the life of the educator taken as a whole.

As a whole, the book invites the reader to a joyous pursuit of truth and to a life dedicated to intellectual charity.