The colonial period of U.S. history contains a variety of interesting lessons. One of these pertains to the concept of a "virtuoso." The virtuoso was primarily characterized by curiosity. Rather than being overly specialized, the virtuoso explored a wide range of interests. The study of nature, art, literature, and theology all would have been pursuits common to this stereotype. This blog aspires to take this early category and use it as a point of departure for exploration and reflection.
Thursday, June 16, 2011
Intellectual Giants of Christendom
"What J.S. Bach gained from his Lutheranism to inform his music, what Johnathan Edwards took from the Reformed tradition to orient his philosophy, what A.H. Francke learned from German Pietism to inspire the University of Halle's research into Sanskrit and Asian literatures, what Jacob van Ruisdael gained from his seventeenth-century Dutch Calvinism to shape his painting, what Thomas Chalmers took from Scottish Presbyterianism to inspire his books on astronomy and political economy, what Abraham Kuyper gained from pietistic Dutch Calvinism to back his educational, political, and communications labors of the late nineteenth century, what T.S. Eliot took from high-church Anglicaanism as a basis for his cultural criticism, what Evelyn Waugh found for his novels in twentieth-century Catholicism, what Luci Shaw, Shirley Nelson, Harold Fickett, and Evangeline Paterson found to encourage creative writing from other forms of Christianity after they left dispensationalism behind - precious few fundamentalists or their evangelical successors have ever found in the theological insights of twentieth-century dispensationalism, Holiness, or Pentecostalism." ~The Scandal of The Evangelical Mind, 138.
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