i've moved to davidleong.info

with only 8.5 days of work at cornish remaining, my mind is quickly shifting gears back into school mode. last week, i ordered my first textbook for my first course at fuller coming up in a couple of months which is basically a two-week intensive research methodology tutorial. the price was a new record: only $0.90 used on amazon! even after a few bucks for shipping, this is far and away the cheapest textbook i've ever bought, which at least makes me feel a little bit better about having to fly down to pasadena for the class. even though three hundred pages of instructional material on how to best craft a doctoral dissertation doesn't really sound all that enthralling, i'm sure it will be worth the read.

as i think about re-entering academia, i'm reminded of the scary realization that school doesn't necessarily make you a smarter, or perhaps more importantly, a wiser person. no amount of schooling can give you a complete education, or to put it another way, even a whole lot of school is no guarantee that you're not an idiot. i'm pretty sure that there are still plenty of morons out there with three degrees.

i first realized how stupid i was when i went to regent under the partial assumption that a masters degree in theology was essentially the same across the board at various north american 'evangelical' institutions of graduate education. years later, i see what a ridiculous and naive assumption that was. as with nearly every academic discipline, in the face of large amounts of conflicting, credible research, often times we are just stuck between well informed opinions, making educated guesses in a somewhat murky puddle of choices.

but i'm thankful that in that murkiness we are allowed to enter into the glorious, ongoing process of deconstruction and reconstruction- intellectual, theological, spiritual, emotional... and as we recognize how little we really know for certain, there is a beautiful opportunity to embrace a radical, liberating dependence on a transcendent God. and i suppose that is the root of faith- an acknowledgment of the simple truth that often times, the more we think we know, the less we realize we actually know. most of all, i'm thankful that knowledge is not limited to some sort of intellectual ascent to propositional truths- knowledge of god is personal, existential, and mysterious... and it reminds me, as uncomfortable as this acknowledgment is, that i am not the one in control.