Adapted from a talk given at Sterling College, March 28, 2025.

You are in college. You are learning. Knowledge increases daily. Perhaps you are studying business. Or accounting. Or nursing. Perhaps you are one of the chosen few studying English literature (as I did). Whatever the case, you are surrounded by a community of people learning the same thing, oriented to the same body of knowledge, working toward the goal of achieving your degree and getting a job in your chosen field.

But perhaps things will not go according to plan. Perhaps there will be no jobs available in your field. Perhaps (if you are an English major) you will find out upon graduating that they don’t really make jobs for your degree. Perhaps you will become disillusioned with your profession and go back to school or find a job in another field. Perhaps you will get married and have kids and take out a mortgage and the bills will pile up and you will have to get whatever job is on hand. Much is unknown.

But for now you are studying. You are learning. You are surrounded by friends and mentors who are (or should be) helping you discern what is true and right in the world, what is good, what is evil, what is true, what is false, what is beautiful, what is grotesque or hideous or uncomely. It is likely that right now you are in one of the richest forms of intellectual and spiritual community you will have in your life. But the world is not like college. These rich forms of life and community are harder and harder to come by as you grow older and make your way in the world. You have to search them out. And when you find them, you realize they are very precious indeed. In my experience and in the experience of many of my friends, as you move on from college and out into the world and settle in to whatever it is we consider a normal life, you have to work harder to cultivate a community of like-minded people who love the things you love, who encourage you to be a better person, who take you deeper and challenge you and stimulate you.

So how do you provide some sort of continuity between what you have available to you now and what will be available to you in the future? How do you maintain a rich inner life, one that is contemplative, reflective, engaged, intentional, intelligent, and wise? How do you find the kind of people who are that way and want you to be that way?

Before I answer those questions, let me identify two poles on a spectrum that represent the bounds, so to speak, the two extremes of the options available to you intellectually.

Substitutes for the Intellectual Life

On one end of the spectrum, you could become a lifer. Spend the rest of your days in the academy. Some people do this! Your professors, for instance. You could continue going to school, get more degrees, continue to learn, gain more knowledge, read more books, polish your curriculum vitae, go to conferences, attend seminars and webinars and study groups, write a dissertation, publish articles in journals and maybe even a monograph or two that will be read mostly by your peers in your discipline. It’s not a bad life! But it’s rare. Most people either aren’t qualified or don’t choose it.

People who get PhDs, though, learn an important thing about the intellectual life: there is so much knowledge in the world—in your field, in your discipline, in your dissertation topic—that you slowly become aware that the more you learn, the more you know you don’t know. In other words, even though you know more, you know less compared to the knowledge you now realize exists. The circle that represents your knowledge of the world may grow, but the circle that represents the things you know you don’t know will have grown flagrantly, extravagantly larger. To get a PhD you have to account for all the things that you know and all the things you know you don’t know. So you specialize your body of knowledge; you don’t expand it really. You have to stop thinking in terms of the big picture. A woman recently went viral on Twitter (or X or whatever) for posting a picture of herself with her finished dissertation in hand. The title: “Olfactory Ethics: The Politics of Smell in Modern and Contemporary Prose.” Likewise, a friend of mine recently finished his doctoral dissertation on the personal-essay genre as published in London newspapers from 1880 to 1920. One little subgenre. One city. Forty years. I’m a humanities guy, so these examples are from the humanities. Science research is a hundred times more specialized. All this to say: to contribute something new to your discipline, your topic must be extremely specific. Your research might cause you to become less engaged with and wise about the world, not more. And the intellectual life as I’m thinking of it is about engaging with the world. My point here is: the academic life is not the same thing as the intellectual life. Plus, let’s be real: a few of you will choose this path, but not most of you.

Even many people who are qualified and do choose it—several of my friends who are academics included—become disillusioned with academic life and get jobs in health-care administration or insurance or as commercial airline pilots. Plus it’s an expensive way to maintain the intellectual life. And the pay is not great.

The other end of the spectrum is much more common: you drop out of the life of the mind altogether. You graduate from college and stop reading books, you stop talking about the deep things of this world with your friends and mentors, you just put your head down, work five, six, or seven days a week, and in your off hours you scroll social media or watch sports or play video games or go out with friends. You don’t really choose this lifestyle; it chooses you. It’s a passive, reactive way of living. What drives you is mostly what’s enjoyable in the moment. And if you’re always looking for what’s most enjoyable in the moment, you’ll find that the pleasures to be had are of the addictive variety. What’s weird about this mindset is that even though it’s disengaged, it has strong opinions about what’s wrong with the world and how to fix it. Why is this? Because you have the opposite problem from the PhD paralyzed by the overwhelming deluge of the world’s knowledge. The less intentional you are about reading and engaging and thinking, the smaller your world becomes, the more provincial and comprehensible and fitted to what you think it is and not what it actually is. (More on that later.)

At best you become informed about what’s going on. You read the news, or at least the headlines, you know what’s going on in the world, and you have a sort of vague knowledge of current events. At worst you get submerged in the grinding, reactive, hot-take, culture-war world of vitriol and venom. This is the world of cable news and social media, where you don’t so much think as emote.

I would like to propose a third way. It’s not the only way, maybe not even the most important way, but it’s my way, and it’s a way that, even if you don’t choose it, I think represents some important insights into the life of the mind, the intellectual life, the life of faith and learning. Because while the academic life is one way to live the life of the mind, it doesn’t guarantee a rich, contemplative inner life or wisdom or discernment—and those are the things I’m after. And while the reactive, pleasure-filled life is easy, it’s not rewarding—and it gives pleasure in diminishing returns. My third way is the way of the small magazine and the intellectual and spiritual virtues that, at its best, it fosters.

The Intellectual Virtues of the Small Magazine

In order to tell you about the intellectual and spiritual virtues of the small magazine, I need to tell you a little bit about my own vocation. For I am an editor for a small magazine. But I got there by a somewhat circuitous route.

As I mentioned, I was an English major in college. I started out, however, with a different major, one that had a much more direct career path. But the more I imagined myself doing this job, the more uncomfortable I felt, like it would be a bad fit for my personality and my gifts. About that time, when I was feeling more and more lost, a few friends, a key family member, and a couple of my professors all told me I was a good writer and that maybe I should consider being an English major. At the same time I was realizing I liked ideas—I liked to read and to think about things. I had also kind of had it with ideas of ambition and worldly success. Studying English literature and writing seemed like a good fit, and it was the least practical thing I could do, which appealed to my bohemian sense of anarchy. Maybe not the best way to make a decision! But what it came down to was, instead of deciding what I wanted to do, I decided what I wanted to be. And what I wanted to be (though I didn’t put it this way to myself at the time) was an intellectual. It’s a pompous label to apply to oneself, but I wanted to live in the world of ideas, to think about them, to wrestle with them, to debate them. What that meant for a career was secondary, as long as I got to do those things. I guess that’s what an intellectual is.

So I graduated with my English degree and went on to get an MA in theology. It took me three years, and it was bliss. I loved every minute of it. I got to read and think and write and discuss all the time. I had it all. A great community of like-minded friends, brilliant mentors—the works. But pretty quickly into my time there I realized I was not a lifer. I loved ideas, I loved writing, I loved a good discussion. But I was not a scholar. The academic life was not for me. So I did what an English major who has an advanced degree in theology who likes ideas but doesn’t want academia does: I went into publishing.

I worked on the academic line of a Christian book publisher. I got to read for a living and think about ideas all day long. When I moved home to Kansas, where theological publishing houses are not, shall we say, densely clustered, I did freelance book editing from home. Which meant the publisher assigned me a book by some theology prof somewhere, I read it, fixed the shoddy grammar and vague sentences, and sent it back. And then I did it again. And again. And again. For twelve years.

I learned a ton. But it got old. By this time I had the aforementioned wife and kids and mortgage, and while my job paid the bills, it wasn’t really the intellectual life. I read books and absorbed them, but what was I supposed to do with all this knowledge? What was I contributing to? Who else was talking about these things who wasn’t at a college somewhere?

I did a few things during this time that I think were valuable and provided an opportunity to think and discuss and read. One was a group that met once a month to discuss mostly theological questions. We gathered of an evening, shared some food and drink, and then pitched questions and voted on the ones we wanted to talk about. Let me emphasize: this generated more questions than answers! But that was its value. Pursuing truth in community. It was wonderful. Another thing I did was to get involved in adult Sunday school, usually teaching it but also facilitating it so others could teach. This is something that is often missing in our churches—a place to learn and discover with other Christians, not just stay complacent and glean a few ideas from the sermon in church services (as important as that is). You can do this yourself! And when you do it, people will come. They’re hungry for it. Maybe not the masses, but those who come will be enthusiastic. And you’ll make good friends. And watch out! Lives might be changed. It happened to me. A friend of mine changed careers and moved away to a life of ministry partly because of what he learned in our Sunday school class. This was not my objective, but it happened.

These kinds of non-professional, non-expert groups of people thinking together are some of the closest to the form of a rich, full intellectual life as I conceive of it. And it’s precisely because of their non-professionalness and non-expertness. They occur in the world of the amateur. A word that has its root in the Latin amo, “I love.” You do something not because it’s a career or you get a paycheck or you say something novel, but purely for the love of it.

During this time I started doing a little work for Comment magazine, where I now work full-time. This was very part-time, just a couple hours a week. But immediately the pace of magazine publishing appealed to me. I had been editing biblical commentaries and theological encyclopedias and monographs. Some of these took over two hundred hours to edit. I’d plow my way through one book forty hours per week for two, three, four weeks straight. But now I was editing articles, which took two hours to edit, not two hundred. Not only that, but they weren’t specialized: I was part of a rolling intellectual conversation that came and went with every issue and every piece we published. What were people out there thinking and saying and writing? What were the issues of the day? How could we respond?

Mind you, it wasn’t a newspaper. This wasn’t down-and-dirty muckraking journalism, with a hot take for every controversy that hit the news cycle. It was a quarterly print magazine that also published one article online per week. We were asking not how we could add to the world of scholarly precision, nor how to land the next blow in the culture war, but how to respond to our culture and our society and our world with reasonableness and clarity and criticism.

Now remember the two poles. On the one end is academic research, which for all the good work that happens (and it does happen! I’m not here to take down the academy!) tends toward professionalization and specialization and fussiness and footnotes and bibliographies. On the other end is the reactive world of hot takes and culture-warring and mindless pleasure-seeking and ease.

I was burnt out on the one and had no patience for the other. But here was this small, modest magazine navigating a middle way. I loved it.

Moreover, it was a Christian magazine of public theology. Christian magazines of public theology are not the only kind that succeed at embodying the intellectual life, but I do think Comment’s Christianity and its publicness are intrinsic to its being faithful. The Christian part means that we are trying to inhabit a Christlike way of being in the world, showing charity and goodwill but also standing up for the truth. The public part means that the Christian faith has something to say about what happens in our society and in our institutions, not just in our individual hearts. Battles must be fought, to be sure, but when you have a reputation for responsibility and integrity and restraint, people will listen when you do put on the gloves (judiciously). 

I am an editor, but you’re not. So am I recommending you all become editors of small magazines? No. But there are ways to participate in this life no matter what you’re doing. What I do in my job at my magazine vocationally is to provide a venue that others can participate in avocationally—that is, for enjoyment and enrichment and beauty, not for a paycheck or to get ahead. (Our magazine is quite beautiful, and we’re intentional about that, providing a lot of colour and artwork to make the experience of reading sensuous.) We publish essays and podcasts that are thoughtful but not specialized, attentive to current events but not determined by them. That are occasionally oriented to the political world but are not obsessed by what’s happening in Washington or Ottawa. We’re not so theoretical that there’s no connection to real life, but we’re not so practical that we forget to actually think. Part of our motto is that we are rooted in two thousand years of Christian social thought. We talk about what’s in Scripture but also what Augustine had to say about it, what Thomas Aquinas had to say, what T.S. Eliot or Hannah Arendt or Martin Luther King had to say. That gives us a wider and deeper perspective than the narrow focus of the now. What’s more, because our culture and our media and our communities do not always encourage this kind of perspective, we foster connection for our readers and listeners who value these things. Comment Suppers is one way to connect: have a meal with other readers and discuss a set of questions we provide. Another is to come to our festival: we’re planning the Understory Festival next spring, to provide a venue where people can convene and learn.

And we’re not the only ones doing this. Obviously I want you to read Comment magazine, but there are a lot of these, both Christian and not, that are doing a lot of this same work.

The Intellectual Life: A Broad Definition

So that’s what small magazines can do for the intellectual life. But what do I mean when I talk about the intellectual life? So far I’ve (1) tried to describe what it’s not, to identify common substitutes that are often mistaken for the intellectual life but are more like parts that masquerade as the whole, and (2) talked about how I’ve tried try to create that middle space in my own life and how we attempt to do the same at Comment magazine. But I’ve mostly taken the actual definition for granted. So let me try to fill in the middle a bit, to sketch out what the intellectual life is, what it consists of beyond academic study on the one hand and reactive information-gathering and emoting on the other.

I’ve waited, though, for a reason. Because it’s difficult to abstract the intellectual life from an actual life lived in the world. The intellectual life is the shape of a human life, embodied, in a place, with friends, with family, with institutions. Its primary expression is in a particular time and a particular place. It’s not so much a set of principles or ideas as it is a way of living, of being in the world. So what follows is the effervescence, the ideas that are squeezed out of what I hope is a life well lived. It’s my good-faith attempt at it, at least.

The life of intellectual pursuit consists of three things: curiosity, truth-seeking, and leisure.

First of all, curiosity. Curiosity about things, about the world, about truth. What makes things go? What makes them click? How do they work? What made them that way? Kids are great at curiosity of course. They haven’t lost the fundamental curiosity about the world. They’re great at asking why. Why is the world like that? Kids have yet to take for granted that the world must be the way it is. It might have been anything, but it’s this. Why? Curiosity is about maintaining an openness to that question and following it where it takes you. It’s easier, we learn as adults, not to ask, because we learn we’ll always be dazzled, always be overwhelmed by more than we can take in. And that’s a lot of work. It’s intense to keep gulping down the plenitude of the world. Like drinking from a firehose, or looking at the sun. And that makes it a discipline, something you have to do intentionally. Because the more you drink in the world, the more capacity you’ll have for it. You can become complacent: just resist that question of why, and your world will stay small and boring and provincial. The dangerous thing about this habit of resistance to curiosity is that you will not know about anything beyond the immediately gratifying. And you won’t know you don’t know. You will have the habit of refusing to be dazzled, and so the world will cease to be dazzling to you. And in fact you will become impatient with depth and complexity and nuance, because it will threaten your ease and your ignorance. But remember: it’s a habit, a muscle you can build. When you learn to be continually dazzled, you learn, like a child knows, that the world is not necessary. It’s a gift there to be received with something akin to awe and amazement.

What I’ve really been describing is wonder. I haven’t mentioned “wonder” yet because it sounds like an exalted, lofty word, and I wanted to stay on the ground for a bit before we took flight. But now that we’re up here, let’s look around. Plato says, “Philosophy is born in wonder.” You might balk at the term “philosophy,” but that’s all philosophy is: a long persistence in wonder. A refusal to ignore the world, a willingness to be dazzled and overwhelmed. To take delight in it, and to make a habit of being delighted by dazzlement. It’s a way of life.

The second part of the intellectual life is truth-seeking. First I’d like to emphasize the seeking part. It is not a life of already-knowing, of clamping down on the truth and protecting it, fencing it in, defending it. The intellectual life always wants to find, discover, unearth, stumble upon. It’s an orientation toward looking and looking again, seeing more, taking in more. This is as true of people as it is of things. Think about it next time you’re in a conversation with someone. Follow up. Be interested in your conversation partner, in their life, their history, their hopes, their fears. Orient yourself to finding out about them. You’ll find the conversation, the person, the day, the whole whopping world, suddenly becomes more interesting. You become more interesting. The conversation, the person, is no longer a means to an end but has a value in itself, in himself or herself.

But the point of seeking is not just to seek. We are seeking the truth. The phrase “It’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey” has a measure of truth to it, but it’s not true in an absolute sense. The point of a journey is not just to journey but to arrive at your destination. The point of having an open mind is not to have an open mind. It is to orient yourself to the truth. As G.K. Chesterton said, “Merely having an open mind is nothing. The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.” There’s a balance to this: we must remain pilgrims in this world, always striving toward the truth and treasuring it when we find it, but always remembering that we will never arrive at a complete possession of it.

Overall what I’ve been describing is the life of leisure. This may sound odd, but the word “leisure” in the classical sense is not about lounging and recreation but about contemplating the world for its own sake. It’s about slowing down and being still long enough to receive it and love it and partake in it. It’s about being okay with silence, and learning to hear what silence has to say to those who are listening. This posture is essentially receptive. You’re not going out and mastering the world or controlling it or manipulating it; you’re taking it in. The philosopher Zena Hitz writes, “When we are at leisure, we stop counting the minutes toward the goal, because the goal is precisely what we are doing.” How many things do you do in a day that would fit that description, where the goal is what you are doing? If our noisy, busy, hurried, efficient, results-oriented culture had its way, the number would be close to zero.

Leisure is, I think, central to the life of faith and learning. Whether you’re an academic or a construction worker, an accountant or a nurse, it’s a life that’s available to you and open to you. It is to receive the gift of the world that God is giving to us, every moment. It is to love the world because God has loved it by becoming part of it, by blessing it with his human presence in Christ. It is to lose yourself in the world and find that you have been swept up into the presence of God.

Sterling College is a Christ-centered, four-year college located in Sterling, Kansas, with a mission to develop creative and thoughtful leaders who understand a maturing Christian faith. For more information, visit www.sterling.edu.