Abstract
RECOVERING PRACTICAL WISDOM THROUGH THE INTEGRATION OF LIBERAL AND PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION The Problem: The Disordered Relationship between Liberal and Professional Education Of all the virtues that we hope to find in a university-educated person, wisdom should stand out as pre-eminent: that noble quality whereby knowledge and information are ordered to the good of the whole. Law was examined not as a specialty unrelated to inquiries of a liberal education, but as a discipline that related to the nature of the human person and society, to virtue and in particular justice, to the meaning of civil and ecclesial authority, to the social nature and private ownership of land and property, and others. The same is true of political scientists and foreign policy experts who have failed to take seriously an understanding of religion to evaluate developments in the Middle East or in Africa, a failure with enormous and continuing consequences for a right understanding of cultural and political realities in those regions of the world.7 And more recently, universities increasingly speak about the importance of social justice as well as diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), but little about wisdom. Universities are subject to what G. K. Chesterton calls modernity's temptation of "wild and wasted virtues": The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. [...]some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.9 For Chesterton and the Greco/Roman and Christian traditions, there is a unity to the virtues, and our temptation is that we isolate certain virtues where they become unhinged from other virtues and a larger understanding of the human person.