The Open Door podcast explores Blessed John Henry Newman's polemical piece on education and the Tamworth Reading Room. Our special guest is Christopher Zehnder, educator and author. He's also an active member of the American Solidarity Party!
Our questions will include the following.
1. Who was Lord Brougham? Sir Robert Peel?
2. What was the Tamworth Reading Room?
3. Sir Robert Peel tells us that a man "in becoming wiser will become better:" he will "rise at once in the scale of intellectual and moral existence, and by being accustomed to such contemplations, he will feel the moral dignity of his nature exalted." Is he correct?
4. Is knowledge virtue? Or is Newman right to say that “To know is one thing, to do is another; the two things are altogether distinct.”
5. Can virtue be taught? Jeremy Bentham thinks that an uneducated man is ever mistaking his own interest and standing in the way of his own true enjoyments. Is this the case for the educated man as well?
6. Is the chief merit of philosophy that while we are thinking of it we will be free of grief, anxiety, passion, ambition, and hatred? Is philosophy as successful in distracting us as, say, whiskey or cannabis? As successful as major league athletics?
7. Sir Robert Peel speaks of "this preliminary and fundamental rule, that no works of controversial divinity shall enter into the library,"—of "the institution being open to all persons of all descriptions, without reference to political opinions, or religious creed,"—and of "an edifice in which men of all political opinions and all religious feelings may unite in the furtherance of knowledge, without the asperities of party feeling." Is his aim to promote civility and reduce divisiveness?
8. Does Scripture include passages of “controversial divinity”?
9. In his An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), David Hume writes “When we run over libraries…what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: For it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.
10. Newman writes that “if virtue be a mastery over the mind, if its end be action, if its perfection be inward order, harmony, and peace, we must seek it in graver and holier places than in Libraries and Reading-rooms.” Just what does he have in mind?
(August 23, 2019)
