On Reading, Thinking, Learning

The best part about education is the worst part about education: the more you learn, the more you realize how much there is to learn. And then comes the worst realization of all: there's no way or time to learn it all. And that stinks.

I experience this sensation everytime I walk into a library or bookstore and remind myself again that, if I manage to average reading 60 books a year and even live to be 100, I'll only have read 6,000 books in my lifetime (and that's counting younger years of my life when I didn't read 60 books a year, so it would be less). This thought makes me very sad.

All that said, of late I've been reading a few books on some challenging topics, namely Islam and evolution; the title of the former is Religion of Peace? Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn't by Robert Spencer, and the latter is The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. I'm still working through them, intrigued by the arguments, perspectives, and applications of each.

In addition, I read The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness by Simon Wiesenthal, a memoir of a Jewish concentration camp prisoner asked by a dying Nazi soldier for forgiveness. The last half of the book is a compendium of short essay responses from 53 "distinguished" men and women (theologians, political leaders, writers, jurists, psychiatrists, human rights activists, Holocaust surivovrs, and victims of attempted genocide) and their opinions on what Wisenthal should have done (he did nothing). Interesting to think through.

This weekend, I need to begin immersing myself in the world of Ancient and Medieval Church History, as I'm taking my first Access class through Covenant. I'm supposed to work through thirty-six recorded lectures by Dr. David Calhoun and volume 1 of Justo L. Gonzalez's book, The Story of Christianity, no later than May 15th. There are also quizzes, tests, and a project. Even then, I'll just be scratching the surface of all that went on from the time of the early church until the Reformation. Nuts.

I'm taking two other classes at Covenant this spring (Children's Ministry and Youth Ministry Across Culture), but those are each a weekend class, so they shouldn't be too bad. This is good, as I still need to help my own students make sense of all the letters of the New Testament and the last four of the Ten Commandments (like there's any way to cover any of those to the depth I want to in the course of a semester).

Which brings me back to my original thought: the more I learn, the more I want to learn, and the more frustrating I become that I can't learn it all, even in a hundred lifetimes. My hope for Heaven is that we don't get to just download everything we don't know in one fell swoop; I'd rather have to learn it, as at least then I'll have plenty of time to do so.