From Chapter Nine, Why "Applying It to Your Life" Is Boring: Or, How the Gospel Is Beautiful.
To see what I mean, try this thought experiment. Imagine you're someone who likes poetry and drama, and you're looking at courses being offered at a local community college. Two courses have caught your attention, one titled "The Poems and Plays of Shakespeare" and another titled "The Relevance of Shakespeare to Our Lives." Which one would you rather take? I figure that if it's poetry and drama you really want -- if you're eager to encounter the beauty and power and wisdom in Shakespeare's poems and plays -- then you'll avoid the second course. You want to take in Shakespeare's words, not listen to some professor going on for a whole semester about how they're suppose to be relevant to you. At least that's what I'd choose. When I want to learn something interesting or beautiful, the last thing I want is a series of lectures on how that thing is relevant to my life. I want to encounter the thing itself: literature or history, math or biology, music or the gospel, all of which move me because of their beauty as well as their truth.
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