Rush Witt

“My coreligionists, Catholics specifically and Christians more broadly, have also fallen into the trap of educating by opinions: riven by anxiety about the broader, hostile culture or by conflicts within their ranks, they each retreat to their own faction and turn to the rigid promotion of factional teachings. In this way they reduce serious inquiry and intellectual development to catechesis and evangelization by bullet points. The educational agenda is set more by broad political goals—to each faction its own—rather than by the fundamentals of spiritual life. We teach self-justifying arguments rather than the common human bonds that ground persuasion. We need to remind ourselves that Christianity has a few basics and holds out the prospect of free, vast, and indefinite growth in understanding and in sanctity. Christian teaching is less a containable artificial lake than it is an inexhaustible spring.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“You must take special care to act faith in your meditation; mix the Word of God's grace with it, or else it will not profit you (Heb. 4:2). And if you set the lovingkindness of God frequently before your eyes, by meditating on it believingly, you will be strengthened to walk in the truth (Ps. 26:3); and, by beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, you will be changed into the same image, from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord (2 Cor. 3: 18). This kind of meditation is sweet, and delightful to those that are guided to it by the spirit of faith, and it needs not the help of such artificial methods as the vulgar cannot easily learn. You may let your thoughts run in it at liberty, without confining them to any rules of method. You will find your souls much enlivened by it, and enriched with the grace of God; which cannot be effected by any other kind of meditation, though it be never so methodical, and curiously framed according to the rules of art.”
― Walter Marshall, The Gospel Mystery of Sanctification

“The civil exchange of opinions can create a veneer of tolerance, but it requires no serious thinking. Opinions rarely change. Nor, when they do, is their change necessarily the sign of any intellectual engagement. Opinions are fixed in place by a network of socially directed impulses of fear and ambition. We change our minds when we change our clique, our social circle. At the level of opinion, our reasoning powers operate backward to justify predetermined choices. Our social world is our intellectual comfort zone. To break its bonds, so as to actually learn something, requires a sort of intellectual violence: the pain inflicted by a torturously realistic book, by an unanswerable question, or by the presence of an intelligent human being who is oriented differently than we are.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“The diminishment of intellectual life caused by the opinionization of everything also demeans our students. If we cultivate our college campuses either as echo chambers or as chocolate-box assortments of viewpoints, we think of young people first and foremost as receptacles of opinions, as consumers of content, and as subjects whose experiences must be carefully managed. The difference is only whether the selection of opinions is curated by concerned officials or left to the open market, where gimmicky appeals or social pressures might draw in fresh consumers. Either way, we deny the rational agency and inbuilt love of learning of our students. We seek to control the reactions of beings viewed as inferior to us rather than to undertake an open-ended inquiry with fellow free adults.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life