Habits of the Mind

Intellectual Life as a Christian Calling

James W. Sire

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780830848782
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

A Christianity TodayBook Award WinnerWhat does it mean to love God with your mind?Can the intellectual life be a legitimateChristiancalling?In this deeply personal book, James Sire brings wit and wisdom to bear on these questions. He draws from his own experience and the life of John Henry Newman to explore how to think well for the glory of God and the sake of his kingdom. Habits of the Mindchallenges you to avoid one of the greatest pitfalls of intellectual life: the temptation to separate being from knowing. Sire shows how to cultivate intellectual virtues and disciplines—habits of the mind—that will strengthen you in pursuit of your calling.Thinking well is integral to acting righteously. Sire offers assurance that intellectual life can be a true calling for Christians: because Jesus was the smartest man who ever lived, you can and should accept the challenge to think with more accuracy, wisdom, humility, and passion.This classic work is now available as part of the IVP Signature Collection, which features special editions of iconic books in celebration of the seventy-fifth anniversary of InterVarsity Press.

Notes

Preface

• 1. Os Guinness, The Call: Finding and Fulfilling the Central Purpose of Your Life (Nashville: Word, 1998), p. 73.
• 2. Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life, trans. J. E. Crawford Flitch (New York: Dover, 1954), p. 16.
• 3. Ibid., p. 1.
• 4. Attributed to an old Jew of Galicia by Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind, trans. Jane Zielomko (New York: Vintage, 1955), p. 2.
• 5. Petrarch’s letter to Giovanni Colonna di San Vito, dated September 25, 1342, as quoted by David Lyle Jeffrey, People of the Book: Christian Identity and Literary Culture (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1996), p. 170.
• 6. George Santayana, Character and Opinion in the United States (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday/Anchor, 1920), p. 52.
• 7. Okay. These Latin words are a bit much. Centuries ago they were sung by a child and overheard by Augustine, encouraging him over and over to “pick it up and read, pick it up and read” (Confessions 8.12). He did and read Romans 13:13-14. His highly emotional and spiritual conversion quickly followed. A bit too much to quote here? Who knows?

Chapter I: Confessions of an Intellectual Wannabe

• 1. Denis Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew and D’Alembert’s Dream, trans. Leonard Tanock (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1966), p. 33. Of course it takes an act of considerable imagination to picture a story by this eighteenth-century French philosophe in The Saturday Evening Post. Still, the Post carried stories that intrigued me as a child with an insatiable hunger to read.
• 2. This definition is close to that given in jest by President Eisenhower: “a man who takes more words than are necessary to tell more than he knows” (quoted by Richard Hofstadter, Anti-intellectualism in American Life [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969], p. 10; Hofstadter also lists other uncomplimentary descriptions of intellectuals [pp. 9-10]).
• 3. Paul Roazen comments, “Intellectuals make at least as many political, moral, and personal mistakes as anybody else. Ordinary folk, however, may not have the same capacity for self-deception as more high-powered minds” (“Soft-Hearted Hannah,” review of Hannah Arendt/Martin Heidegger/Elzbieta Ettinger by Elzbieta Ettinger [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995], The American Scholar, summer 1996, p. 459).
• 4. Bertrand Russell, quoted by Russell Kirk, “The American Intellectual: A Conservative View,” in The Intellectuals: A Controversial Portrait, ed. George B. de Huszar (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1960), p. 309.
• 5. J. I. Packer summarizes Johnson’s notion of an intellectual as “one who pontificates about how others should live while being unable or unwilling to live that way himself” (J. I. Packer, “The Substance of Truth in the Present Age,” Crux, March 1998, p. 5).
• 6. Paul Johnson, Intellectuals (New York: Harper & Row, 1988). Johnson’s full description is as follows: “The secular intellectual might be deist, sceptic or atheist. But he was just as ready as any pontiff or presbyter to tell mankind how to conduct its affairs. He proclaimed, from the start, a special devotion to the interests of humanity and an evangelical duty to advance them by his teaching. He brought to this self-appointed task a far more radical approach than his clerical predecessors. He felt himself bound by no corpus of revealed religion. The collective wisdom of the past, the legacy of tradition, the prescriptive codes of ancestral experience existed to be selectively followed or wholly rejected entirely as his own good sense might decide. For the first time in human history, and with growing confidence and audacity, men arose to assert that they could diagnose the ills of society and cure them with their own unaided intellects: more, that they could devise formulae whereby not merely the structure of society but the fundamental habits of human beings could be transformed for the better. Unlike their sacerdotal predecessors, they were not servants and interpreters of the gods but substitutes. Their hero was Prometheus, who stole celestial fire and brought it to earth” (pp. 1-2).
• 7. Johnson is only one of many critics to define and criticize “intellectuals” as a class. Thomas Molnar, for example, takes a more nuanced view in The Decline of the Intellectuals (New York: World, 1961). He argues that the term intellectual used in a historical context should be limited to a “class” of thinkers living between 1350 and 1950. All of them were ideologues, but not by any means of one mind: they included liberal humanists, Marxists, progressives, reactionaries; most were secularists, but some continued to maintain belief in Christianity. All were interested in bringing about their utopian visions, but in every case their plans shipwrecked on th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• I Confessions of an Intellectual Wannabe
• II John Henry Newman as an Intellectual
• III The Perfection of the Intellect
• IV How Thinking Feels: What Is an Intellectual?
• V The Moral Dimension of the Mind: What Is a Christian Intellectual?
• VI Perfecting the Intellect: The Intellectual Virtues
• VII Perfecting the Intellect: The Intellectual Disciplines
• VIII Thinking by Reading
• IX Jesus the Reasoner
• X The Responsibility of a Christian Intellectual
• Notes
• Index
• The IVP Signature Collection
• Praise for Habits of the Mind
• About the Author
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright