It's an honor just to be nominated

Thanks, Alex, for the invitation to guest-blog for you while you're camping resorting at Rockbridge. While I in no way expect to be able to produce the kind of brilliance that your readers are used to over here, I do plan on making sure they're still here when you get back. Mostly, though, because I expect a kind of car-wreck phenomena to be at play: they just won't be able to look away from the tragedy of a wrecked blog.

I normally (some might say "abnormally") post at The Stokes Kith & Kin Community Blog, aka, Kith&Kin, aka K&K. I'm one of the Kin, in case you're wondering. Since this is Alex's blog, I won't put up pictures of my own uber-cute son. But if you check in at K&K, you can see one there.

And, for a last little bit of introduction, some history.

When I was a student at my fair alma mater, my IV chapter invited Jim Sire to come for a few days of evangelism, "Davidson Style". (Which is to say, "Nerd Style.") I had the honor of being his driver and during one of our times in the car, he and I spoke about what it means to be an intellectual. He was talking to me about the book he was writing at the moment which, when finished years later, was Habits of the Mind.

In our drive (and in the book) he called himself an "Intellectual Wannabe," a title I promptly co-opted for myself. Here's how he defines a "Christian Intellectual":

An intellectual is one who loves ideas, is dedicated to clarifying them, developing them, criticizing them, turning them over and over, seeing their implications, stacking them atop one another, arranging them, sitting silent while new ideas pop up and old ones seem to rearrange themselves, playing with them, punning with their terminology, laughing at them, watching them clash, picking up the pieces, starting over, judging them, withholding judgment about them, changing them, bringing them into contact with their couterparts in other systems of thought, invting them to dine and have a ball but also suiting them for service in workaday life.

A Christian Intellectual is all of the above to the glory of God.

I like that definition very much.