What can I get at college that I can't find on Wikipedia? How does it all fit together? What is the purpose of education? Students today enjoy unprecedented freedom of choice when it comes to their academic formations. But their universities are often ill-equipped to help them answer the questions that inevitably shape this freedom, in part due to a general uncertainty about what sort of unity, if any, exists across the various forms of knowledge. Jonathan Rowland considers how today's academic institutions might address this doubt and its consequences by drawing on the more lasting of John Henry Newman's insights into the nature of the university.

The Resurrection of the Body

The Christian religion has at its center the Resurrection of the Christ, without which, St. Paul says, the faith is in vain, and through which we, too, are to rise. To what sort of life? It is not that of an abstracted, disembodied spirit, but that of an entire person, body and soul, whole again, and transfigured. In this sermon from his days as Vicar of St. Mary's, Oxford, preaching to a society drawn to materialism on the one hand and 'angelism' on the other, John Henry Newman meditates on Christ's invocation of the burning bush as a sign that we – our bodies included – "die but to appearance", a sign of the incarnate eternity that awaits us on the far side of the grave.

Russell Kirk: Christian Humanism and Conservatism