Faith Today - May/June 2014

from the editor

Let’s begin with an obvious statement: a lot of commencement speeches suck. They’re boring, chalked full of ponderous, snore-inducing life advice – a 1,000 clichés packed into a half hour. Yet the good ones are so much more. Take, for example, the one writer David Foster Wallace delivered to the graduating class at Kenyon College in 2005 that later became known as This is Water. The title comes from a “little didactic parable” he tells at the beginning of two young fish swimming along. “They happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way who nods at them and says, ‘Morning boys, how’s the water?’… Eventually, one fish looks at the other and goes ‘What the hell is water?’” The speech revolves around something Wallace called “our natural default setting,” or the tendency each and every one of us has to think of ourselves as the absolute centre of the universe. Our education, he says, gives us an opportunity to see things differently or, put another way, to acknowledge something as obvious as the water a fish swims in.

It may seem like an unimaginative point but the speech is brilliant. That’s because Wallace perfectly articulates the difference between knowledge and awareness. Sure we know that other people matter, but in our most irritable moments – when it truly matters – it’s very difficult to be aware of it. The true value of our education is that it helps us override that “default setting.” It gives us choices about how to think so we might be able “to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars.” In this issue of LIA we look at some of the ways we are educated. We bring you our first ever Canadian Christian University Guide to help the faithful young people moving into the next phase of their educational careers. Then, in our cover story, Joel Gordon sits down with Shad to find out what “Love Means,” and finally Mark Fisk speaks with two Christian educators who are trying to maintain God’s Love in the secular system.