I ran across an article today from one Brendan Case, an editor of a student-run on-line magazine called The Gadfly. Case and his fellow editors are students at The King’s College–a Christian college that occupies a few floors of the Empire State Building in New York City. They have big ambitions–to “foreshadow the seeming impossibility of a Christian liberal arts college that rivals the Ivy League.” The spirit of their publication reminds me a great deal of Philip Vickers Fithian’s ambitions for his tiny club of young friends and thinkers in the eighteenth-century New Jersey countryside. They called it the Bridgeton Admonishing Society. At one point, Fithian wrote that he hoped this club of mutual improvement in the remote woods of southern Jersey might gain a “reputation abroad.” Another time he dreamed of becoming another John Locke or John Witherspoon.
While these students at The King’s College have big ambitions, they, like Fithian, want their “way of improvement” to ultimately lead them home. Here is how Case concludes his essay on “The Virtues of Cosmopolitanism”:
Finally, I would suggest that there is a discipline of place that could be the salvation of culture, if men could learn to practice it. The hallmark of the cosmopolitan seems to be that every place is as good as any other (for all are “interesting,” a mine of quaint stories, knick-knacks, and other ghostly abstractions). However, to love a place because it is yours—not because you have chosen it, but because it has in some sense chosen you (by birth, most naturally, but perhaps some other providential entanglement is possible)—is to begin the process of creating true culture. To love the deep emptiness of a blue winter sky, or a gnarled oak dangling a tire swing from its twisted fingers; to prefer bacon and eggs to a croissant: these are the first stirrings of a truly human existence. And I would venture that it is the man who loves bacon and eggs above all who might truly appreciate the startling savor of a French pastry.
This is some pretty darn good writing for an undergraduate. Fithian could not have put it any better.
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