The Case for Intellectual Gratitude

Benjamin P. Myers. An Invitation to the Liberal Arts: The What and Why of Classical Christian Higher Education. Cascade Books, 2025. $19.00. 122 pp.

On an exceptionally sweaty August afternoon in 1999, the day before my first semester of college began, I walked into the office of one of the foremost Euripides scholars in the world (except I didn’t know it at the time) and declared my major in the Classics. In the nine years that it took to obtain first my B.A. and then the Ph.D. in Classics, I got a thorough liberal arts education, I realize in retrospect. This education has prepared me well to thrive and flourish in various situations and transitions in life. But at the time, my rationale wasn’t so sophisticated. Really, I was just thinking: I like languages and books, so I’d love to spend my years as a student with them. My typical immigrant parents, who had been harboring dreams of me going into engineering or law, were appalled.

In many ways, I was not a typical student, I was reminded yet again while reading Benjamin Myers’s new book, An Invitation to the Liberal Arts: The What and Why of Classical Christian Higher Education. Myers is the director of Oklahoma Baptist University’s Honors Program. He is also a former Oklahoma Poet Laureate. I wager he was not a typical student either. And yet, in this book he shows convincingly that the riches of a Christian liberal arts education are accessible and valuable for all. The defense that he offers of such an education in the age of ubiquitous screens and AI in schools is nothing short of civilizational, and it begins with asking deeper questions about education: “What do I value? What do I believe to be the nature and purpose of human beings? What do I seek as the highest good?” These questions and other related ones are not merely philosophical; they are vital for the flourishing of individuals and our society as a whole. 

Indeed, Myers muses in opening the book, in conversations with parents of prospective students and the students themselves, many are asking good questions but are not getting at the foundational questions about the purpose of education—perhaps because the foremost purpose of college for many today is instrumental. The thoroughly practical mindset of modernity has conditioned everyone, Christians included, to think in exclusively instrumental terms when planning for the future: what do I need to do to achieve the particular result? 

Thus the typical prospective college student is usually thinking about his or her desired future career and is back-tracking from there to decide on the major that will offer a pathway to that goal. To give an example of this approach, a few years ago, the chancellor of the state university system where I was teaching at the time publicized a list of careers and the number of vacancies anticipated in these careers over the next couple of decades. The message to college students (and the universities themselves) was plain: this is matchmaking (fiddler on the roof not included). Colleges just need to match current students to these fields (and the required degrees to get into them), and everyone should be set. 

Except, reality doesn’t quite work that way, Myers reminds us, and this is why thinking about biblical anthropology—who we are as persons—is so important. Perhaps the above approach would work for robots, but it definitely does not work with humans, and that is why we are living at a time of record-level turn-over in so many careers. People who thought they would love a profession learn after spending years obtaining degree credentials that the dream career isn’t what they expected. Over the years I’ve met quite a few people who have quit successful careers in medicine, law, pharmacology, education, business, and more—desirable and high-paying fields, in some cases, but they turned out to be a poor fit whether from the beginning or after some time. I myself walked away from a position as a tenured full professor in traditional academia after fifteen years, although I’m back in an academic-adjacent role now. 

There is also the issue that the list-making chancellor had not considered: career fields that existed a decade ago have thoroughly changed or disappeared, in some cases. And new fields that did not exist before are cropping up. Technology, and especially the rise of AI is changing so much. And so, the lucrative field of data analysis, into which the university system was trying to direct more students, has been remade by AI, with some jobs completely superseded by technology. Someone with an instrumental view of education as just a way to get into a career field that will disappear is going to find life challenging. But, to get back to Myers’s emphasis on anthropology, who we are as persons is not about just one particular college major that will get us into one specific career. 

The liberal arts offer a larger framework for difficult life decisions about our calling and much more besides, because they equip us to answer life’s biggest and hardest questions. Ancient history and the great epic poems of the past, for instance, show others who struggled with questions that, at their root, aren’t so different from our own. The Christian liberal arts, furthermore, equip us to remember our place in God’s creation—that we are “created in the image of God, marred by sin, and redeemed by grace.” We are very, very small—a reality that secular modernity tries to negate. But a good education calls us to love God first, rather than ourselves and our idols: “A liberal arts education aims no lower than cooperating with the Holy Spirit to enable you to ‘be transformed by the renewing of your mind’ (Romans 12:2). Such a goal is what distinguishes a truly Christian education from what is merely a secular education that happens to be provided by Christians.” To understand this idea and the significance of liberal arts education for all, Myers (ever a poet!) offers three vivid images. 

First, the cake. Imagine if you have been served a slice of the most wonderful cake you’ve ever beheld or tasted. What if you were to simply enjoy it in silence, put the plate in the sink, and walk away? It is an act of profound ingratitude for the baker. The second image involves Myers’s family home—a beautiful home that is over a century old. What would it be like if, after receiving it as an inheritance, the family did not take care of it, and preserve it for the beauty that it is? The third image is a tall mountain with a view—from there you can see farther and better than from anywhere else. These images readily speak for themselves—and they are helpful.

A good education in the liberal arts allows us, first, to be grateful for the riches we have received from writers and artists from whom we are separated by millennia. These “bakers” have “recipes” still to hand down to us—from the stunning epic poems that have been around from the days before there was a Greek alphabet, to the works of philosophy that ask questions about human life and purpose with which we continue to wrestle, to the rich promises of the Bible and beyond. Isn’t it an act of profound arrogance for us now (as some have recommended that we do) to dismiss Western civilization and its cultural artifacts as irrelevant? Surely, great works that have been relevant for millions of readers and listeners for over two millennia cannot suddenly have become outdated for us now. Besides, “We think better when we think in company, and there is no reason to limit that company to the people who happen to share our time and place. We have the great luxury of helping to ‘repair the ruins’ of the fall by thinking along with the greatest minds of the past.” Last but not least, we ignore our debts to Western civilization to our own peril: “if there were no imago Dei in ancient Israel” Myers reflects, “there would very likely be no ‘life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness’ in America.” 

Through grounding students in the classics—Greek and Roman, but also Christian, and even more modern—the Christian liberal arts education equips us for thinking of ourselves as part of a tradition rather than the sole authors of our own stories. And this change of perspective is helpful, regardless of the career the student ends up pursuing, because those immersed in the liberal arts know that their careers do not define them. 

Is Myers saying something utterly new in this book that I have never heard before? Perhaps not—although to find this coherent defense of the Christian liberal arts in one portable book is helpful. But most important, he is saying it oh-so-beautifully, reminding what a privilege it is to live in a world where there are poets—and what a gift it is that these poets teach others. And in a world too focused on practical outcomes, the beauty of both poetry and of good education is still a delight.