What No One is Asking Tom Cruise
Tom Cruise is back in the news with the fifth installment in his Mission: Impossible series. Last April, he made headlines for a far different reason: the documentary Going Clear alleged that the actor profited personally from the slave labor of Church of Scientology members. Many thought that Cruise's controversial commitment to the church would be part of the media's run-up to his movie's premiere last weekend.
However, the issue has not come up in interviews a single time. Even Jon Stewart, who won an Orwell Award for "distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language," avoided the subject when he interviewed the actor last week.
Meanwhile, a group of nuns in Hollywood are blocking singer Katy Perry's attempt to purchase their convent. Their property is for sale, but the nuns looked through Perry's music videos and weren't pleased with what they saw.
In these cases, the media doesn't care about a performer's personal morality, but a group of elderly nuns does. And our culture's confusion over right and wrong continues.
Dorothy Sayers, in her classic 1947 essay, "The Lost Tools of Learning," observed that effective learning progresses through three stages. The first is the acquisition of information. Children learn the alphabet and numbers, name things, and collect knowledge. In the second stage, children and adolescents seek to understand what they have learned. "Why?" becomes their dominant question. In the third stage, students begin to synthesize knowledge, making it their own and applying it to life.
I wonder what Sayers would think of learning in our digital age. Educators worry that the Internet makes cheating easy, shortens attention spans, and affects our work ethic. Most significantly, they note that we don't feel the need to learn information as we once did. So long as your smartphone is handy, the world is a few clicks away. But we cannot understand what we don't know. And we can't apply what we don't understand.
As I once heard Henry Kissinger say, we have more information than ever before, but less wisdom.
The dictionary defines wisdom as "the ability to discern or judge what is true, right, or lasting." If we cannot "judge what is true," we are left to the vagaries of popular opinion and shifting cultural sands. From same-sex marriage to marijuana legalization to euthanasia, reality has not changed, but public perceptions have. And perception is reality, or so we're told.
Where do you need "the ability to discern or judge what is true" today?
First, value wisdom: "By wisdom a house is built, and by understanding it is established" (Proverbs 24:3). Second, spend time with wise people: "Listen to advice and accept instruction, that you may gain wisdom in the future" (Proverbs 19:20). Most of all, turn to your Lord: "If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given him" (James 1:5).
Seven different groups in the New Testament called Jesus "rabbi." But not all who called him their rabbi obeyed what he taught. He understood the reason: "If anyone loves me, he will keep my word. . . . Whoever does not love me does not keep my words" (John 14:23,24).
Would Jesus say that you love him today?
Publication date: August 3, 2015
For more from the Denison Forum on Truth and Culture, please visit www.denisonforum.org.
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