Rush Witt

“Mackenzie had completed his voyage almost nine years earlier. He suspected that his seven-month overland journey to the Pacific was probably of historic moment, and so he had left a memorial. He had created what he hoped would be a lasting inscription on a tiny sea-washed rock near the present-day British Columbia fishing village of Bella Coola: “Alex. MacKenzie, from Canada by land. 22nd July, 1793.” He had inscribed the message with his finger, using an old trappers’ trick for long-duration messages, dipping it into a poultice made of bear grease mixed with vermilion powder and smearing out words that he hoped would survive the cold and lashing rains for which the Pacific coast is notorious.”
― Simon Winchester, The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible

“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

“happiness, and we all know that we desire it; but we do not all at bottom pursue joy in the truth, so we do not all pursue God. We seek joy in honor or in power, in pleasure or in superstition, instead of in the things that will enable us to flourish.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“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