With the constant barrage of messages inundating our inbox, demanding our attention in the checkout aisle, and distracting us from our everyday activities through sophisticated marketing strategies, maybe you’ve felt the increasing difficulty that many of us are experiencing in thinking deeply about anything.
Perhaps it’s that this is just the way our brains are being rewired as a result of living in an age marked more by constantly evolving technologies and gadgets than in the constants of knowledge and history. Or perhaps it’s that we are acquiescing to a form of living that is most comfortable skimming on the surface of our everyday existence, rather than doing the hard—but rewarding—work of plumbing the depths of human existence and our Christian faith as previous generations have done.
In my assessment one of the greatest challenges of our day is to learn the craft of critically engaging our world where dynamism and change is the norm. Where we no longer have the luxury of claiming scientific and technological ignorance if that was ever even acceptable. Where we must begin to ask questions about what it means to be human, about human flourishing, about values and our common humanity, as we stand on the cusp of capabilities to shape the future of our human species, to remake humanity. That’s why I think it is essential that we cultivate the Christian life of the mind, to meet the challenge that Mark Noll heralded nearly twenty years ago in his charge that “The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.” If we have any hope of engaging some of the most pressing issues of our day, we must recapture a sense of moral imagination. And, the first step in doing so is to start with reclaiming the Christian life of the mind.