In Pursuit of Wisdom: Introduction and Outline

It's 6:59 PM Saturday and I have made two key decisions in my first hour of tonight's session. Instead of Christian Astronomy, I am going to relabel this project thread Christian Earth Science (cf. Christian Astronomy, Earth Science, or Cosmology?) That's number one. Secondly, I am not going to try reading in Origins and In Pursuit of Wisdom at the same time, as I started to do last week. Mortimer Adler calls this syntopic reading and it's not the way I want to proceed with my study at this point. Instead, I am going to try settling in for a moderately deep analytical reading of In Pursuit of Wisdom.

Adler encourages active reading of non-fiction, which involves asking four key questions as we make our way through a text:

1. What is the book about?
2. What is being said and how?
3. Is it true?
4. What is its significance?

It's important, according to Adler, to treat the act of a reading a book as a conversation with the author. I was therefore delighted to find an accessible YouTube introduction to Phillip Campbell, author of In Pursuit of Wisdom, at Homeschool Connections. Campbell also maintains a nicely organized website at PhillipCampbell.net. 

Campbell's introduction to In Pursuit of Wisdom sets out the primary problem the book attempts to solve, the purpose of the book, and its organization.

The key problem that concerns Campbell is the evidence that many young people are leaving Catholicism because they mature into the perception of an untenable conflict between science and the teachings of the Church. They believe they need to choose science and leave the Church. On the other side of the coin, Campbell is also concerned about devout Catholics who eschew science because they cannot see how to reconcile it with their faith.

Campbell rejects the idea of a perennial conflict between science and the Church in favor of the "complexity thesis," according to which "the historic relationship between science and religion has been so extraordinarily rich and complex as to defy generalizations" (p. 11).   

Here is the purpose of the book in Campbell's words:

"My purpose in this book is to move beyond polemical approaches to glean a more accurate picture of the historical relationship between scientific inquiry and the Catholic religion. The goal is neither to vindicate Catholicism nor condemn it, but to understand the interactions between science and the Church over the centuries so that we may get a better understanding of how we have arrived at our current situation, and a clearer means of moving forward" (p. 11-12).

The book is organized into an introduction, twelve chapters, a conclusion, and an appendix. My plan is to work my way through a chapter a week until I've finished the book, hopefully around the end of November, since I'd like to begin a study of Michael Molnar's The Star of Bethlehem in December of 2025.

In my next Saturday evening session, I will describe how Campbell summarizes the cosmology of the Bible.