Enough Room to Think

If you could have something named after you, what would it be?

What I would like is not so much to have something named after me as to help create something that reaches into the future.

I would love to establish a scholarship that allows a postgraduate student to devote themselves fully to research for a season. I know the strain of trying to balance work and higher degree research. It is difficult to do deep and careful work when your attention is always divided. To give someone the gift of time, focus and freedom for that task would be a meaningful thing.

I would be especially interested in supporting research that holds the wisdom of Athens and Jerusalem together. Thought and faith. Reason and revelation. Intellectual seriousness and spiritual depth. That is no easy task. Both matter, and in the end they need one another.

I am ambivalent about whether my name would go on such a scholarship or not. Life is full of hopeful actions. We plant things we may never fully see. We help shape the future. In one sense, that is what all meaningful work does: it fills the future up with something of ourselves. Whether or not a person’s name is attached to that finally matters very little.

What matters is that something good continues. That a person is given room to think. That wise and faithful work is made possible. That the future is strengthened by what we choose to give ourselves to now.

Daily writing prompt

If you could have something named after you, what would it be?

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