Habits of the Mind: Intellectual Life as a Christian Calling

One of the formative experiences of my spiritual pilgrimage involved reading The Universe Next Door by James Sire. It helped me understand what a world view was, and why it mattered. Over the years Dr. Sire has published a series of thoughtful books (Discipleship of the Mind, Why Should We Believe Anything at All?), in which he has celebrated the truth of Christianity and called the church to both love and live that truth. His goal in his latest, Habits of the Mind, he says, “is to encourage you to think more and better than you did before reading it, to strive toward ‘the perfection of the intellect,’ to enjoy the proper habits of mind.” One of the highlights of Habits, besides the obvious opportunity to learn from a master teacher, is the fact that Sire has literally littered the book with quotations.

This book is about “not what a Christian should think, but how a Christian can think better.”