Discipleship of the Mind

"You are all sheep." With that opening sentence, one can't help but be drawn in to this perplexing and often profound book on Learning To Love God In The Way We Think. Sire recommends beating your head against the wall, taking prozac, and watching wrestling, Jerry Springer and all the bad sitcoms on TV. Once your IQ has been sufficiently diminished, you are now ready to Love God In The Way You Think. Remember, "you are all sheep." BAA!

Sire has succeeded again. His other popular work, The Universe Next Door, is an intelligent catalogue of worldviews. This work, a look at what it takes to have an intelligent belief in the modern world, is marvelous. Sire's ideas of Christianity are excellent, taking it as a religion of the intelligent rather than the anti-intellectual. Christians too often misrepresent Christianity as a shallow and mindless religion of vague feelings, with no real relevance to modernity. Sire seeks to combat this at the college level. College is the time of making or breaking a faith, whatever it may be, because it will be sorely tested. Now, many Christians are destroyed, or rather, destroy themselves coming into an intellectual community with real and intelligent objections, and no answers. No justification for a belief is almost the same as a non-belief: there isn't much there that is understand or communicable, and so what belief is there? Sire, admirable, combats this problem with an exploration of the necessity of education in Christianity. However, that aside, the real reason I value this book so highly is its view on education in general. Going against what C.S. Lewis called "a nationally suicidal form of education", so prevalent in america, Sire lays out the necessities of a true education.This education is not so compartmentalized and career-based as we often would think. It is liberal, broad, and challenging. Sire's education raises students rather than chopping off their heads to make them "like everyone else." A must!!!