At the liberal arts college where I teach, we talk a lot about curiosity. Intellectual curiosity is the bedrock of liberal arts education. Wanting to know more about ourselves, our neighbors and the world makes for a good student, and stoking that curiosity is what good liberal arts teaching does. We are in the business of creating lifelong learners who want to read, explore, study and travel long after their college days have ended. We hope they will forever desire to encounter and engage with people, places and cultures with which they are not intimately familiar. If the ultimate end of liberal arts education is to make good global citizens, then lifelong curiosity is essential. To address the world’s most entrenched problems, we need people who wish to know more about our world and the creatures with whom we share it.
Wanting to know more about ourselves, our neighbors and the world makes for a good student, and stoking that curiosity is what good liberal arts teaching does.
In the liberal arts tradition, education goes beyond developing specific skills or mastering a body of knowledge. A liberal arts education develops important capacities – like curiosity – that shape who a student becomes. This way of understanding curiosity resembles how theologians and philosophers throughout history have described virtue. For example, the Puritan William Ames described virtue as a moral habit. Virtue is not just the sum of good decisions or actions; instead, it is an admirable character trait that we intentionally develop and deepen. In other words, virtue defines a good person by who that person is, not just by what they do.
Curiosity as a moral habit
In his Marrow of Theology, a textbook widely used in the 17th century by Puritans in England and New England, Ames taught that the virtues are internalized tendencies that incline us to live well. Ames also argued that virtues and actions are inextricably connected. Good character prompts a person to act well, and acting well reinforces good character. Ames insisted that virtuous character is forever a work in progress: a moral personality that we must continually practice so that being good requires less and less intention. It becomes moral habit.
To say that curiosity is a virtue cultivated by the liberal arts suggests that college invites students to exercise and expand their curiosity in the classroom in the hope that they develop a habit of being interested in things they do not know. Curiosity becomes a mindset that leads a student to constantly want to learn more about other people, times, cultures, experiences, and phenomena. It makes learning a righteous addiction that the good liberal arts student feels compelled to feed even after their college experience ends. Curiosity, then, becomes a lifelong part of a person’s character.
Curiosity and the good Christian
I am certain that we can say the same thing about curiosity in the life of the good Christian. Curiosity is not just an intellectual virtue; it is a moral and spiritual one as well. The Westminster Catechism instructs us that the ultimate end of the Christian life is “to glorify God, and enjoy [God] forever.” If so, then a good dose of curiosity ushers us down the path to that end. Properly praising God for all God’s good gifts requires deep understanding and appreciation of that abundance. Curiosity invites us to search unceasingly for new signs of God’s grace and glory in our world. To enjoy God, we must commit to discovering God’s presence with us — in the natural world, among our neighbors and people we do not yet know. Ames might say that the curious Christian habitually looks for excuses to revel in God by constantly seeking God’s glory in the world around them. The curious Christian wants to learn and discover something new every day, as a matter of character.
Curiosity is not just an intellectual virtue; it is a moral and spiritual one as well.
Curiosity is a virtue in itself, but it contributes to other virtues, which only magnifies its importance to the Christian life. Curiosity about the world motivates us to know more about the wonderful globe on which we live. It inspires us with awe and gratitude: virtuous responses to the wonder of God’s creation. Curiosity also contributes to the virtue of discernment by making us more aware of our impact on our world and more informed as we consider our responsibility to the created order.
Similarly, curiosity about other people makes us interested in what other people think, what they value, and why they act the way they do. A habitually curious Christian wants to know others on their terms. When we are virtuously curious, we eagerly explore our shared humanity with others while seriously considering how they differ from us. This investment in and appreciation for other’s experiences equips us, in turn, to be more empathetic, an acutely rare virtue today. Empathy, in turn, contributes to forbearance, which I define as a constellation of virtues that allow us to live constructively with difference. Empathy also feeds our compassion because knowledge of others makes us more attuned to the needs of others — needs that we then can help satisfy as an expression of Christian responsibility. Curiosity as a virtue powerfully equips us to respond to the imperative to love others as we love ourselves, whether those others are human beings or the non-human participants in God’s creation.
Virtuous curiosity is directed not just toward others, though. Curiosity about ourselves compels us to explore what makes us tick. Why do I think the way I do? Why do I value the things I value, assume the things I assume, fear the things I fear? Such introspection deepens our self-awareness and, ideally, our humility as we grow more in touch with the limits of our perspectives and experiences.
Curiosity about the past drives us to ask what happened and why, think critically about what we read and hear and make connections between the past and the problems we face today. In this way, historical curiosity deepens our wisdom and understanding — both useful tools for navigating today’s conflicts. Similarly, curiosity about the future inspires us to dream about what might be. Curiosity about the future breaks us free from the paralysis of cynical resignation by marshaling the virtues of hope and imagination so we can envision a better future, a better world, one that more closely resembles Christ’s beloved community.
Developing the habit of curiosity
Curiosity is fundamental to the Christian life of glorifying God and enjoying God forever. But making a virtue into a habit requires us to practice it. As a matter of character, virtue is a discipline ingrained in us through repetition and intention. Acting on our curiosity by learning about other things, people, times and cultures makes us ever more curious. The desire to discover and enjoy God in this complicated world becomes downright infectious once we get started.
As a matter of character, virtue is a discipline ingrained in us through repetition and intention.
Moralists tell us that virtues mature from practice and within community. When we live and move in communities of people who share our investment in the life of virtue, we find it easier to deepen those habits as well. Sharing in virtuous community allows us to teach one another, support one another and keep one another accountable to the life of character. With all respect for the tradition of solitary mystics, virtuous curiosity is hard to practice alone, for it feeds off the curious appetites of others.
Curiosity requires community
I regard my liberal arts college as a community of virtue, at least in its best moments. A residential liberal arts college cultivates intellectual and moral virtues by giving students (and faculty) the chance to practice them over and over with one another in the classroom. But because they live together, students also get to practice the virtues of the liberal arts beyond the classroom through interactions with peers from very different parts of the world or with very different life circumstances. Students share classrooms, dining halls, dorms and gyms with others who have experienced life in ways they themselves cannot imagine. They must live with students who hold political or moral values that seem incompatible with their own.
This kind of residential education sustains and deepens curiosity. A college community’s health demands that students be willing to learn from their differences and respect the other human beings they discover more intimately. If students and teachers practice this openness to discovery, then virtues like curiosity become the character of the intellectual community itself.
Sharing in virtuous community allows us to teach one another, support one another and keep one another accountable to the life of character.
Curiosity as a Christian virtue works the same way. For it to become a habit, it must be practiced, and to practice curiosity effectively, we must deliberately cultivate it in a community of support and accountability. If we commit to developing the habit of curiosity as a spiritual practice undertaken together, then not only does our own curiosity deepen, but virtuous curiosity becomes the character of the church.
Four aspects of a virtuously curious church
What does a virtuously curious church look like? First, a curious church is contemplative. It encourages members to engage in regular prayer and reflective exercise, in part so that they might come to know themselves better. In a community of curious Christians, members take time to look deeply inside to understand the experiences and relationships that make them who they are. They honestly engage with their assumptions about what is true in the world – about what is right and wrong – so they might think more critically about how to understand themselves and their relationships with others.
Second, a curious church invests in fellowship. Regular opportunities to spend time with one another allow church members to learn more deeply about the people with whom they share community. Such opportunities provide occasions to celebrate the beliefs, values and loves members hold in common while also discovering the richness of their differences. In the process, a curious church whose members intentionally enjoy one another’s company deepens the ties that bind them.
Third, a curious church learns together. A telltale sign of a curious church is that its members always want to grow in knowledge and wisdom. A congregation who hosts regular opportunities to study history, Christian tradition, other religions and our complicated world invites its members to discover something new about who they are or should be in the world. A curious church works together to consider critically its understandings of the past and present, amplifying previously squelched voices in a spirit of justice. A curious church relishes the deep dive into Christian tradition to discover richly diverse perspectives from its shared history. From such diverse historical perspectives, we may receive fresh wisdom for meeting our present-day challenges to faithfulness. In learning about the past and the present, a curious church also engages honestly with its members’ distinct understandings of that past and present, learning rather than recoiling from different readings of what’s happening.
Fourth, a curious church reaches out. It lives beyond its own walls, constantly engaging people outside the community — not only to address important needs but also to hear stories. A curious church’s outreach offers an opportunity to learn from others as well as to serve. In other words, a curious church listens to those outside its community as an expression of solidarity and love and a virtuous opportunity for growth. We know that church is not a refuge from the world but a springboard from which we can embrace the world.
Back in the day, Lent was a season when folks who wanted to join the Christian community would undertake a period of prayerful reflection and instruction to prepare for Baptism and entrance into the Eucharist on Easter. Candidates for membership would be trained in spiritual disciplines and the practices of being church. Today, our use of Lent for this kind of catechism and spiritual discernment is more uneven than it was in our earliest history as a church. But Lent remains a wonderful time to rejuvenate our commitment to Christian character, including this virtue of curiosity. Lent offers us a moment to recommit to the contemplative, educational and other-regarding practices that deepen our habits of glorifying God. In this moment, we can discover and enjoy new ways to experience the Divine in our midst.
Lent remains a wonderful time to rejuvenate our commitment to Christian character, including this virtue of curiosity.
Learning is a good thing
John Calvin famously opened his Institutes of the Christian Religion by declaring that nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.” Calvin’s assertion means a lot of things to me, but one of his implications is that learning is a very good thing. That commitment to learning is why the fingerprints of Calvinism are found all over the history of American higher education. It is why insatiable curiosity is vital to a Reformed understanding of Christian faithfulness. Holy curiosity is part of the character to which we are called. As a virtue, it is essential to the social witness we are called to proclaim. We live in a cultural moment in which education is neglected or denigrated, when willful ignorance is celebrated as a desirable leadership trait, and when disconnect and suspicion are likelier responses to difference than engagement and conversation. Perhaps today, modeling the virtue in curiosity is a gift we can offer the world.
