Intellectual Devotional Book
Charise Zelnick
Traveling back to Boston in February, I stumbled across what seemed like an interesting book in the discounted section at a Barnes and Nobles. It was called The Intellectual Devotional: Revive Your Mind, Complete Your Education, and Roam Confidently with the Cultured Class, and it was selling for $4.99. I picked it up (and its sister companion, The Intellectual Devotional: Modern Culture Edition).
It's a great concept, based on the devotional idea from various religions - a daily study of a very simple concept somehow related to a larger whole, broken out over 365 days. For the Abrahamic religions, it's a useful verse or story from the Torah, Bible or Quran. Playing this idea forward, the authors of the book decided to come up with 365 things that every reasonably educated (American) person should know. Each day is a separate idea / concept / name / piece of art / mathematical formula / etc.
As they make clear in the introduction, most people already vaguely know most of the information in this book, so much of the material stands as a refresher. But I found it incredibly helpful to do exactly what it promises to do - round out your education. And it spans an impressive range of topics covering the seven fields of knowledge: philosophy, mathematics and science, history, literature, music, fine arts, and religion.
It covers these topics well. I've never seen a book that so easily slides - in the name of culture no less - from Muawiyah I and the Rashidun Caliphs over to Fermat's Last Theorem over to the Tenets of Confucianism to Twelve-Tone Serialism to the Contents of Blood Platelets to Shakespeare's Sonnet 18 to Analytic Philosophy to the Epic Mahabharata to the impact of the Magna Carta to the Venus de Milo to Brown vs. The Board of Education to Martin Luther's 95 Theses to the Parthenon to the Prophet Muhammad's Wives to X-Rays to The Prisoner's Dilemma to the date of D-Day to Marie Curie to Descartes to Igor Stravinsky to Sikhism to the Appomattox Court House to the Baroque Period to the States of Matter the Rosetta Stone over to Modernism (for a very small taste). Again, we're generally aware of many of these things, but this book sharpens our knowledge of it.
Selfishly, I wanted to liberate the information contained in this book. Generally, since starting Anki usage in 2012, I've increasingly come to see books as simply chunks of information waiting to be broken into pieces and then memorized. In any event, I spent the last two weeks transforming each page into one or multiple Anki cards as appropriate. For example, the one page on the Lascaux Cave paintings was turned into several questions:
Beyond helping you study languages, I can't think of a better use of Anki than for this - to memorize basic facts that are highly useful to your everyday life and serve as an excellent (if simplistic) foundation for future knowledge. Knowing things like who designed the Guggenheim Museum and why it was so innovative for the world at that time will help your confidence as well - and help you fit it in Manhattan. Being able to effortlessly identify the paintings and sculptures below (among others) and their creators helps us to get a grasp of the pillars of culture while serving as a common reference point for discussion (this point was raised recently on Alex and I's podcast with Dr. Andrew Abbott of the University of Chicago - a shrinking pool of common points familiar to everyone, which he argued are required if we're to talk to one another in any meaningful way).
And without further ado, here's the deck. Apologies for any mistakes - I've corrected a few typos since creating it, so no claims that it's perfect. Also, it's not 365 cards - I left out concepts too difficult to explain on a flashcard or that I deemed unnecessary ("What is Sound?"). All cards in the deck are tagged with "intellectualdevotional" to be easily added or separated from any more comprehensive study deck you may have.
So, which will you choose? Will you have an intellectual relationship with God or a devotional one? Hopefully you already see the folly of this dichotomy and recognize that this is one of those common both/and tensions and not merely an either/or dilemma.
In one of my first semesters at DTS, a professor addressed this very issue directly. Before a class of men and women who were wondering not if but when their love for God would grow cold, he rhetorically asked in a tone akin to a rebuke,
With the Bible institutes, colleges, and seminaries gearing up for their fall semesters, and many churches rolling out their fall small group and discipleship curriculum, we must remember what it looks like to love God with our heart, soul, mind, and strength.
Since coming to New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary (NOBTS) and Leavell College in June as the school's ninth president, Dew has called the seminary community to take up the "towel and basin" and serve like Jesus.
Faculty, staff and students worked in teams throughout the city and saw at eight people come to faith in Christ. One of the people who responded to the Gospel that day lived just next to the seminary campus. A team going door to door in the neighborhood that abuts NOBTS struck up a conversation with a man working in his yard. After hearing the Gospel, he prayed to receive Christ in the shadow of a seminary building.
Before dispersing into the city, Dew reminded the more than 300 participants gathered in Leavell Chapel just how Christ served others. He warned them not to stop at intellectual devotion to the Gospel.
"I'm afraid we often do miss in the midst of all that God is doing in our lives, in the place and location we're in, with the tasks before us -- I'm afraid we miss how simple this really is," Dew said. "Christ ... the Master, the Teacher, the Messiah, the King -- our King -- came into the world as a servant and took a towel and basin and took the posture of the lowest of them all and washed his disciples' feet."
"So today, and every day from this point forward, you start this journey with me," Dew said. "I submit myself to you and the churches of the Southern Baptist Convention to be your and their servant. With Christ, I call you into that with me."
Some teams prayer walked and shared the Gospel in neighborhoods (Gentilly, Lakeview and the French Quarter) and on a university campus. Others served at Global Maritime Ministries, a seafarer ministry at the Port of New Orleans, or at the Baptist Friendship House, a ministry near the French Quarter that cares for women and children in transition and human trafficking victims.
Key Bennett, Baptist Friendship House executive director and a North American Mission Board Send Relief missionary, pointed to Jesus' example in Matthew 25 and the admonition in 1 John 3:17-18 to show the importance of service.
"[Serving others] is what Jesus did," Bennett said. "Hurting people have experienced trauma in their lives, so my homeless and human trafficking survivors and folks living in poverty have a lot of need. It's simply meeting a need, building a relationship and changing a life through Jesus Christ."
At Global Maritime, teams helped with cleaning and lawn care and prepared supplies for ministry. Some baked brownies and cupcakes to share with cruise ship crew members who visit the center on Mondays, Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays -- times when Global Maritime staff members have many opportunities to share the Gospel.
Scarlat Duerreiro, a NOBTS Master of Music student from Brazil, said the cards' images were particularly helpful in talking with a young man who had some difficulty in communicating his thoughts. When the young man expressed that he felt like he was living in darkness but wanted to live in the light, Duerreiro shared the Gospel and led him to faith in Christ.
"I think we were 'out of the box' and really had the opportunity to experience New Orleans," Duerreiro said. "It really took it out of theory and let us work as a team with professors and other students. We were able to say 'Taste and see that the Lord is good.'"
The Call to Read is the first full-length study to situate the surviving oeuvre of Reginald Pecock in the context of current scholarship on English vernacular theology of the late medieval period. Kirsty Campbell examines the important and innovative contribution Pecock made to late medieval debates about the roles of the Bible, the Church, the faculty of reason, and practices of devotion in fostering a vital, productive, and stable Christian community.
Campbell argues that Pecock's fascinating attempt to educate the laity is more than an effort to supply religious reading material: it is an attempt to establish and unite a community of readers around his books, to influence and thus change the ways they understand their faith, the world, and their place in it. The aim of Pecock's educational project is to harness the power of texts to effect religious change. Combining traditional approaches with innovative thinking on moral philosophy, devotional exercises, and theological doctrine, Pecock's works of religious instruction are his attempt to reform a Christian community threatened by heresy through reshaping meaningful Christian practices and forms of belief. Campbell's book will be of interest to scholars and students of medieval literature and culture, especially those interested in fifteenth-century religious history and culture.
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Budd spoke about how she had always struggled to play the piano without getting frustrated. As a young girl, her piano teacher would tap her hands with a pencil every time she made a mistake. Later, as the Relief Society pianist, her hands would rapidly retreat from the keys whenever she hit a wrong note. But from this experience, Budd learned a valuable lesson.
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