Author Archives: Andy

On February 28 I was reflecting again about my career path, and I took a rather decisive step towards philosophy. Over the past several years I have been weighing two options for my career: philosophy (in which I would write and teach) and psychology (in which I would be a counselor). I’ve see-sawed back and forth, but that day I realized that the weight had tipped more clearly to the side of philosophy.

I realized again that I really do value my diverse interests, and it would be nice if my career could reflect them. I could see that happening with philosophy, because philosophy professors regularly list their research interests in their faculty profiles, and they are often collections like, “Philosophy of physics and decision theory,” or, “philosophical theology, philosophical psychology, the epistemologies of the early modern philosophers, and the works
of David Hume, St. Augustine, and Jonathan Edwards” or, “Business Ethics and Policy; Kant; Induction and Confirmation; Ethics; Philosophy of Religion,” or, “Media Philosophy, Ethics, Social & Political Philosophy, Informal Logic & Critical Thinking Pedagogy, Aesthetics.” In one way, philosophy is a meta-discipline. It’s a field of study in which you think about the nature of other fields.

Psychology is a diverse field, of course, but it’s still only psychology, and I have found that as with all my other interests, my level of interest in it comes and goes. My key observation during this cycle of reflection was that over the past year I have had a number of opportunities to get back into psychology, such as during Stephen Ministry training, but it hasn’t happened. That makes me think psychology is just one of the crowd rather than a career-making preoccupation.

I like helping people, but there are plenty of ways I could help people as a philosopher. I could do philosophical counseling or be an advisor to some organization, for instance. The world needs people who can think. Bad thinking can hurt people, and an awful lot of it goes on: People don’t listen to each other for understanding; they let their preconceptions, worries, and desires rule their whole thought process; they make bad arguments for good causes that turn people off who might otherwise be convinced; etc.

So now I’m about 95% sure philosophy is my field. Once I decided that, I began thinking about my next steps. I don’t really know that much about the actual discipline of philosophy because I’m more interested in it as a way of thinking than as a subject, so I need to get familiar with it. My plans are rather vague, but I think I should find out what the major schools are, what they specialize in, and who are the major publishers of philosophical books and journals. I’d like to flip through some of the journals and get an idea of what philosophers are talking about these days and who some of the major players are. And for a long time I’ve wanted to interview a few philosophy professors to get an idea of what it’s like to be one and check some of my assumptions.

And I also need to learn the history of philosophy, because it seems ridiculous to even apply for a philosophy program without having some sense of context, which brings me to my next project. The classic work on this topic is Frederick Copleston’s nine-volume History of Philosophy. So my goal is to work through the whole thing in the next year or two. I also have plans involving an outline and flashcards so that I will actually remember the things I read and learn some study skills that I never really got the hang of in school, but I’m not entirely sure about the details there. I was going to derive the outline from Copleston, but I may take it from some more straightforward source, like the Oxford Companion to Philosophy, and just read Copleston to tie everything together and provide some commentary. I think that would save me some work.

There’s a programming project in there too. I’d like to be able to generate the flashcards from the outline (or from a concept map, which is a bit more flexible, though more work to put together) in a comprehensive fashion so that I could essentially start from anywhere in the outline (or any node in the concept map) and, in a step-by-step fashion, reproduce the whole thing from memory. Memorizing that much would be a challenge, but I don’t think the flashcard creating program would be too hard. Then the flashcard data I generated would be fed into the open source program jMemorize, which uses the Leitner method for spacing out the repetitions.

The biggest challenge in this Copleston project, other than not giving up altogether, will of course be trying to juggle both it and the spirituality survey. Hopefully along the way I can learn skills in juggling as well as studying. Continue reading →

Back when I was doing my audio sermon project (which is technically still open, though I haven’t worked on it in months), my friend Rob asked me if it had worked, if I felt more spiritually vital. I told him not extremely, and that was that; but it got me thinking. I didn’t expect the sermon project to fix my spiritual life, but it was useful to ask what I still needed that these audio sermons weren’t giving me.

The first thing I needed was a way to internalize what I was hearing. I have that now with my morning devotions.

The other thing I needed was a system, a set of interrelated concepts that I could drop each sermon into. Without a system to give context and balance to the pieces, I feel lost. I tend to get tunnel vision when I try to take any particular spiritual principle seriously. I either forget about anything else (less often now than in the past) or I ward off doing that by wondering what principles I’m forgetting or how this principle relates to others I do remember. It hinders my willingness to act on those principles or to be confident in explaining them to others.

So I intend my next major project to be a systematic New Testament spirituality survey. I want to assemble a fairly detailed framework of Christian spirituality made of the NT’s comments on the subject. I won’t attempt to go very far below the surface; I just want to get a good idea of the raw material we’re working with when we discuss Christian spirituality. I have actually had this project in mind for a number of years. Now just seemed to be the right time to do it.

When I mention this project to people, they sometimes ask what I mean by spirituality. I mean anything that has to do with humans’ relationship to God. In Christianity that covers a whole lot. So studying the spirituality of the NT is more like looking at the whole NT from a spiritual angle than looking at a specific, limited topic like baptism, which would involve examining only a few passages. Looking at the whole NT from one vantage point like this will mean studying every passage to some degree and will mainly affect what details I select to concentrate on in each case and the kinds of connections I make between concepts.

With a framework, when I think about, for example, John 6:37, I’m hoping my mind will easily move to somewhere like Matthew 7:21, and I will be more able to discuss how they fit together and how a person would land themselves in the John 6 crowd and avoid being in the one from Matthew 7, especially given a scary verse like 7:13.

I will also be able to hear a verse like Mark 12:30 and have my mind move more easily down to the specifics and out to the motivations for obeying these commands.

And I will be more easily able to pinpoint the passages that are the most appropriate for my own spiritual needs or for other people I’m talking to.

So primarily I want to have a rough mental map of the Christian spiritual life for the good of my own. One other reason I want to do this project is to have a starting place for my broader historical study of Christian spirituality. I want to be able to connect the teachings of Christian spiritual writers with the Bible’s framework of spirituality so I can know the biblical context of those teachings and thus understand them better. Knowing their connections with Scripture will also help me evaluate them.

I’ve nailed down the first half of my procedure. In order to get a clear idea of all the pieces of the text and how they relate, I’m going to do a quick and dirty discourse analysis of the whole NT in English. I’ll use the WEB for my translation because it’s in the public domain, and I’ll use CmapTools to create the discourse analysis diagrams because it’s free and has a handy XML format. I have already done a few chapters.

As that’s moving along, I’ll be working on the other step in the process, which is actually assembling the system. This will be either a normal prose description or something more formal and programmable like a concept map. I’ll decide that as the project progresses. It took me several months to settle on using discourse analysis.

I plan to post the results on the site, probably as I go along. I have no idea how long this project will take. Continue reading →