College Is for Lovers
Learning to Love welcomes Christian undergraduates into the liberal arts tradition.
Review by Sarah Clark
Alex Sosler’s new book, subtitled Christian Higher Education as Pilgrimage, is a guidebook for students, whether in late high school or in early college, who are choosing or have chosen to attend a Christian liberal arts college for their undergraduate degrees. The premise of the book is simple: it takes the question “What is the purpose of college?” and gives it a serious, studied answer grounded in history, literature, and philosophy. Later in the book, Sosler summarizes his answer like this:
These years are about asking and seeking answers to important questions: what is the good life? How do I dive into it and nurture it? How do I care for the flourishing life that I find compelling? It’s one thing to have a vision of the good life; it’s a whole different undertaking to live into that good life.
This slim volume is not didactic—Sosler doesn’t tell you that you have to choose the path he’s setting out or agree with him about what the good life consists of—but it is persuasive.
This is also a deeply hospitable book. Sosler often uses classic literature to illustrate his points, and I quickly realized that by briefly explaining Pilgrim’s Progress (and The Divine Comedy, and The Little Prince), and by a number of other means, like self-deprecation and references to popular memes, Sosler has succeeded at writing a book that is accessible without being condescending. At every point, Learning to Love strives to meet its readers where they are and offer them a hearty welcome to the world of learning, without making them feel the lack of what they don’t already know.
Here, he makes the case for what should be primary for the Christian student: the love of God and fellow people, which, in the liberal arts setting, is executed by learning and by being formed into the kind of person who can “see that there is more to love in the world.”
The first half of the book sets out a simplified philosophical history of the university system. It isn’t definitive, but it doesn’t need to be. Beginning with the Renaissance and the rise of secularization, Sosler takes his readers on a metaphorical pilgrimage through three eras of thought (styled in the book as “cities” on our pilgrimage route) about the raison d’être for secondary education. The first is the plain pursuit of “objective” knowledge (college for thinkers), the second the pursuit of economic and career success (college for workers), and the third the pursuit of authenticity or personal truth (college for critics). This third “city” is where Sosler thinks the secular university system is headed now, though there are still plenty of takers for the first two cities, as well. Finally, we arrive at our destination: the Christian liberal arts college, or “college for lovers.”
Along the way, Sosler has been making an argument for why each of the other three rationales for educating students takes something good, like pursuing knowledge or making a living or understanding yourself, and makes it primary. Here, he makes the case for what should be primary for the Christian student: the love of God and fellow people, which, in the liberal arts setting, is executed by learning and by being formed into the kind of person who can “see that there is more to love in the world.” Overall, this section is an excellent apologia both for the liberal arts and for the Christian life of the mind.
But what’s even better is that this first half of the book is absolutely packed with Easter eggs for the interested reader. Sosler mentions and quotes a who’s-who list of philosophers, writers, and thinkers, from the classical to the contemporary: Plato—Augustine—Descartes—Kant—Nietzsche—Charles Dickens—Charles Taylor—David Foster Wallace—Marilynne Robinson—Wendell Berry—Alan Jacobs—Christian Wiman—and you get the idea. For a high school or college student hungry for riches of knowledge, this section is a treasure trove. There are so many thinkers and writers mentioned who I only learned about later in college, or after graduating, and whose work has had a huge impact on my life. By introducing their ideas here, Sosler is giving his readers an enormous gift. It is, hands down, my favorite thing about this book.
Though I’m not the target audience for Learning to Love, I enjoyed and was edified by reading it.
The second half of Learning to Love is dedicated to explaining how to make the most of four years of college as a “lover.” First, Sosler addresses the “worldview” conception of how our intellects are formed, arguing that while useful, it is not the best way to understand our posture toward the world. Instead, he offers the notion of a sacramental imagination, emphasizing “how one sees, a sort of intuition about the world” instead of the worldview focus on “what one believes.” The next few chapters build on this foundation by explaining the traditional Christian understanding of what it means to love (i.e., charity) and how to apply that in a college setting, setting out a distinction between acquiring knowledge and gaining wisdom, and engaging what it means to truly live in a community (such as the one on a college campus). It is, like the first half, a lightning-quick survey, skimming the surface of the richness of the Christian intellectual tradition and offering glimpses here and there of its depths.
A Christian liberal arts college, Sosler contends, is uniquely suited for guiding students through four years as “lovers,” because the faculty and staff understand the proper order of things and the unity of their students’ hearts, souls, and minds. Secular schools “might not talk about your spiritual or moral life,” while at a Christian college, “We have the resources of faith to discuss character, virtue, and the good life.” Though I certainly don’t fault Sosler for advocating for institutions like the one he teaches at, this emphasis on the advantages of a Christian university is my only substantial quibble with the book. I would otherwise like to recommend it to a number of college students of my acquaintance who attend secular schools (and I still might). For them, I’ll just say here that as a graduate of a secular school, I can say with certainty that students at secular colleges can also pursue this path and find mentors and peers who will encourage and help them to do so. The resources Sosler so skillfully sprinkles throughout this book would be a great help in that journey, as well.
Though I’m not the target audience for Learning to Love, I enjoyed and was edified by reading it, because it aims to set its readers’ feet on the same path that Christian magazine editors and Christian professors alike are striving to follow: one where knowledge of the world, and all the truth and beauty it has to offer, are sought after with care, attentiveness, and above all, love.
Sarah Clark lives in New Hampshire with her family. She is a founding editor of Fare Forward and the current editor-in-chief, and she owns Scale House Print Shop, a letterpress printing studio. She graduated from Dartmouth College in 2011 and received an MAR from Yale Divinity School in 2022.
Learning to Love: Christian Higher Education as Pilgrimage was published by Falls City Press on March 1, 2023. Fare Forward thanks them for providing us with a review copy. You can purchase your own copy here.
