What Should We Teach?

There's this great quote from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: “Not everything can be named. Some things draw us beyond words. Art can warm even a chilled and sunless soul to an exalted spiritual experience.”

If Solzhenitsyn is correct, one might be inclined to believe that since somethings cannot be named, that we shouldn't try to name things at all, and simply use art as a means of communicating what we think is real. For, they'd say, who are we to talk about truths, if we can't name that truth with certainty.

Jaroslav Pelikan, a historian from Yale University, shows the problem with a world without laying out what you believe.

Dr. Pelikan: Emerson was a graduate of Harvard Divinity School and was a Unitarian minister, so he was quite prepared to believe that everyone should compose a creed different from the tradition. He said to the Divinity School students at Harvard in 1838, "You must be yourself a newborn bard of the Holy Spirit and sing it out." The trouble with that is, you do it and then you do it a little bit more, and pretty soon you have to teach your children something, and so the best you can do is to teach them what you have, and you do that a generation or two, and all of a sudden, there you have…

Ms. Tippett: …a new creed.

Dr. Pelikan: …a new creed. And the only alternative to tradition is bad tradition.