Why Gadfly Academy?
And here’s the shorter version:
For decades I have been animated by the question: in what ways does modern life affect the spiritual life of modern people, and what can we do about it? My doctoral dissertation ("The Theological Anthropology and Cosmology of C.S. Lewis: An Orthodox Christian Evaluation") was inspired by this question, for in order to properly answer it, one first needs to know what it means to be truly human, what our relationship with God's creation should look like, and what the purpose of our lives is.
These questions, of course, are particularly relevant for Orthodox Christians...but they are also relevant for all souls created in the image and likeness of God. I see the new project as a natural outgrowth of Protecting Veil and The Collective Wisdom Project...in many ways the two projects are two sides of the same coin. There is a great tradition within Orthodoxy, perhaps best exemplified in St. Basil the Great (you can read Fr. Seraphim Rose's reference to St. Basil, in the longer version) of looking for and using the best in our culture to support the work of the Church. While the new project's content will be rooted in Orthodox Christian anthropology and cosmology, I will be looking at a variety of thinkers (Orthodox and non-Orthodox) and ideas that offer insight into our modern situation.
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Why “Gadfly Academy”?
Socrates was famously put to death because of the intellectual challenges he presented to the ruling Athenian power structure. Plato recounts (in his work, the Apology) the trial of his teacher Socrates who argued that while it’s easy to swat at a gadfly (an intellectual rebel), to silence one is perilous: "If you kill a man like me, you will injure yourselves more than you will injure me.” Socrates argued that his role was comparable to that of the gadfly: "to sting people and to whip them into a fury, all in the service of truth.”
The goal of Protecting Veil's Gadfly Academy is to follow in Socrates’ tradition of questioning the cultural status quo, and pulling together the best minds who have worked, and continue to work, on the most burning questions.
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