Educating for Love

The information age has done something remarkable: it has accelerated the generation of ideas
and concepts beyond anything our ancestors could have imagined. Whatever your taste, whatever
your question, there is a concept ready to meet it. We can find the thinkers who speak our
language, the frameworks that confirm our instincts, the communities that share our angle of
vision. On its face this is an abundance — fertile, enlivening, endlessly generative.

And yet abundance has a shadow. An information explosion that promises to expand us can
quietly contract us instead. Because we can choose the ideas that suit us best, we tend to do
exactly that, gravitating toward what is comfortable and familiar, settling into the warm corners
of our own assumptions. The very technology that invites us to think beyond our borders ends up
reinforcing them. Tribalism is not dissolved by the flood of information; it is preserved by it.
I notice this in myself. I find myself immersed in conversation after conversation — analyses and
theories, worldviews and concepts, diagnoses layered upon diagnoses. At times it feels as though
we are diagnosing ourselves to death. We have never been more articulate about our condition,
and rarely more weary of it.

Here is what gives me pause. We know vastly more than René Descartes knew in the seventeenth
century. We have built inventions he could not have dreamed of; we have hot and cold running
water and a universe of facts at our fingertips. And still, are we any better off? Our fears and
anxieties have proven stubbornly timeless. If anything, they have deepened. More information
has not made us less afraid.

What is missing, I have come to believe, is not knowledge. It is vision.

Something holds us together on this planet — some unnamed coherence beneath the noise. What
is it? And beyond that: where are we going together? What do we live for? These are not
questions our analytical age is equipped to answer, because they are not finally questions of
analysis at all.

This is where the World Institute for Science, Religion and Culture, with its formative vision of
Christogenesis, can play a vital role. It is true that at the Center for Christogenesis we find
ourselves discussing more theology and philosophy these days. But the point of those discussions
is never the theology itself. The point is the question underneath: How do we live? How do we
shape our lives? Theology earns its place by offering symbols and narratives that can give a life
meaning and form.

Yet the real glue — the thing that actually holds a life together — exceeds book knowledge. Or
rather, it redirects book knowledge to where it belongs: the place of the heart. The unitive energy
that binds life together and animates us, even when things grow dark and frightening, is love.
Not sentiment, not mere feeling, but the deep coherence that draws the scattered pieces of
existence toward one another.

This is why we are redefining our mission. We are not setting out to be one more institute for
education. We are setting out to educate for love. The question that orients everything we do is
this: How can we come to know science, religion, and technology in a way that deepens love?
This is the Christogenic question of our age. And at its root it is a theogenic one as well — for
how we come to know and love is also how God comes to be born anew among us.

And the answer will not be found in more theories or sharper concepts. It may be found, instead,
in claiming the question as a personal one. Not “what does humanity live for” in the abstract, but:
What do I ultimately live for? What gives fire to my life? These are the questions that can
motivate a new way of doing theology in the twenty-first century — theology that begins not in
the library but in the burning center of a human life.

Teilhard de Chardin had a vision of a world moving toward greater union, greater consciousness,
greater love. It is time now to realize that vision — for a struggling planet in search of new life.
For without vision, the people perish.

Thank you for your support!