Op-Ed: The Love of Learning and the Desire for God
by R. David Cox
When Professor Debra Sowell invited me early last year to deliver the Phi Kappa Phi lecture in March, a title sprang to mind: “The Love of Learning and the Desire for God.” Decades ago I had read a book of that name by a French monk describing Catholic monasticism in medieval Europe. It occurred to me that the title describes what we strive to do at Southern Virginia University.
The author, Jean Leclerq, argued that monastic culture revolved around twin passions: the passion to know, and the passion to know God. Monks cherished learning on its own merits, but also as an act of faith. Learning drew one closer to God.
No one can confuse Southern Virginia with a monastery. No abbey ever had a department of family and child development. Yet we pursue learning in a school consciously created in the context of a religious tradition. As most colleges seem nowadays to go in the opposite direction, that alone sets us apart.
There’s more. Elder Ronald Rasband, a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, challenged the just-inaugurated President Wilcox in 2016 “to find ways to help students to include religious thought and study as central, and not just complementary, to their university experience.”
We embody his challenge in obvious ways, like our weekly Friday Forum, and the newly-intensified relationship with the Institute.
I’d go one step further and suggest this love of learning and the desire for God permeates our curriculum itself. Religious thought and study are already central to this university’s experience, in the courses professors offer and students take which, perhaps without our realizing it, promote that link between the love of learning and the desire for God.
Sometimes the link is obvious — in my courses on the Reformation or American religious history, or in Professor Hunt’s studies of Islam or Judaism. Sometimes it’s inherent, as in Professor Lambert’s course on Reformation devotional poetry, or when Professor Widzisz explores the biblical Greek of the Epistle of James, or Professor Dransfield examines the book of Job.
Yet there is so much more: Think of Professor Knudsen teaching astronomy, which constituted one of the four liberal arts of the medieval monastic Quadrivium. Or Professor Lee who in exploring evolutionary biology deals with fundamental issues of creation. Or Professor Whitehurst who in computer science considers artificial intelligence and thus the nature of human learning itself.
The most basic courses in English composition, or for that matter of any language, convey the vital monastic conviction that good writing leads to good thinking. Courses in art and music brim with religious works of the ages, and I suspect our philosophers and psychologists deal with matters of human existence before God with great frequency. Languages and explorations of other cultures explore the marvelous diversity of this world the Heavenly Father created.
Business professors convey more than the mechanics of the market or the principles of accounting. They aim as well to instill leadership, and with it, a sense of ethics — of right and wrong, of moral responsibility — rooted in religious understanding. Ethics, several tell me, can be a driving force not only in business decisions, but even in the decision of which business to pursue, that is, in the direction of one’s career.
To be sure, not every course may lift our hearts to the Heavenly Father. Like science or mathematics. Or maybe it can: Isaac Newton wrote Principia Mathematica as a means to comprehend the divine hand at work in the natural world.
In short, as the curriculum promotes a love of learning, it fosters the desire for God.
Which leads me to one last point. In the powerful combination of learning and faith, Southern Virginia can make a unique contribution to our society.
Many today seem to fear learning. Colleges have become suspect. To some degree they always have been, advancing new knowledge which can itself can challenge preconceptions or even challenge God. By uniting the two, we transcend such fears.
And many colleges seem to fear the love of God. Religion, for them, inhibits, imprisons, diminishes. We believe it liberates. Furthermore, at Southern Virginia, I have found this passion for learning combined with a dedication to God and to service to mark the “leader-servant” we hope to launch into our world.
We now begin another year of learning. We have the chance to pursue learning as an act of faith, trusting the promise of the one who declared [John 8.32], “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.”
