And I quote...

Found this in a book we are studying with the staff, thought the words were very poignant...

“There seem to be two different styles or emphases in the intellectual world today. Each has different values. Each will attack Christianity in a different way. At the same time, each can support Christianity in a different way.
A university, for example, has two functions. It first must preserve the accumulated knowledge and experience of the civilization and transmit that heritage to future generations. This is its traditionalist function. Without it, every generation would have to start over again from nothing. Knowledge builds on itself, so that today we stand on a pyramid of past discoveries. And yet the weight of the past, the vast body of received learning, could well stifle and prevent new knowledge. There must also be an element of resistance to the past, of questioning and rethinking, so that new ideas can add to and change the edifice of the past. In other words, there must also be a progressive function. Without it, we would be satisfied with what we already know, or think we know, and inquiry, curiosity and research would cease.
Both the traditionalist and the progressive functions are extremely important and valuable. Although they seem to be opposites they are complementary. They exist in tension but in harmony at the same time. In a university some professors will be traditionalists. Others will be progressives. Some scholars will have elements of both. One can find modernists and postmodernists in either camp. (Ironically, though postmodernists are busy deconstructing truth-claims, putting them in the progressive camp, they tend to be more open to the past than the modernists, for whom the new is always better than the old, a progressive view postmodernists dispute)
A healthy intellectual culture needs to contain both styles, both those who preserve their tradition and those who add to it. For Christians, each contains a certain risk and a certain promise. Christians with a biblical faith can be both traditional and progressive…
…In theology, art, and many other spheres of knowledge the rebels have captured the citadel. Although they persist in calling themselves revolutionaries, they have become as repressive, dogmatic, narrow-minded, and hostile to change as their old opponents. Today and academic who doubts evolution, who rejects moral relativism, who does not mouth the pieties of humanism often faces violent and outraged opposition. That person stands, though, where the true progressive has always stood, outside the circle of accepted thinking. From this vantage point, new ideas become possible, and the circle of knowledge can be made to expand.”

- Gene Edward Veith, Loving God with all Your Mind, Chapter 6

The juxtaposition here struck me. How often do we put each other in boxes so that we don't have to really deal with each other, and how often (if we were to really think about it) do we end up in the very same box looking across at the very individual we tried so hard to separate from?