The Fabric of Faithfulness

Extended passage from Steve Garber - personal reflection later. "During the critical years in which moral meaning is being finally formed, students need to be people who

• develop a worldview that can make sense of life, facing the challenge of truth and coherence in an increasingly pluralist world.
• pursue a relationshp with a teacher whose life incarnates the worldview the student is learning to embrace;
• commit themselves to others who have chosen to live their lives embedded in that same worldview, journeying together in truth after the vision of a coherent and meaningful life.

Is this a guarantee of the good life? We can never engineer human happiness, of course. And yet we can listen and learn, doing our best to understand the world that God has made and our place in it. But when the day is done, every truly good life is always, first and last, a story of grace. And yet grace, as it is known in time and space, is embodied in flesh-and-blood history. It is always set amid the struggle between telos and praxis, between one's dreams, aspirations and hopes and one's concrete experience in the ordinary demands of daily life. In the face of the tensions which are there for students in every time and every place, we have explored what is involved in helping them learn to see and act responsibly. [...] These two strands (what one sees and how one acts) are critically dependent on each other. The more inductive conslusions about the framing of a worldview, the finding of a mentor and forming of lifelong relationships echo off of the more deducitve conclusions about the necessity of listening in on the disciplines of the history of ideas, the ethic of character and the sociology of knowledge." (P.171-2)