Resume Virtues or Eulogy Virtues?

David Brooks is a cultural and political commentator and a journalist for the NY Times. He spoke back in January at the 40th anniversary celebration of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities. Despite the heat these institutions have been taking in the culture wars, Brooks was optimistic. Eric Metaxes shares why (emphasis mine):

Brooks is a graduate...of the University of Chicago, and he teaches at Yale... There’s no need for Christians to feel in any way inferior, he says, acknowledging that while his Ivy League students are “amazing,” they’re pretty one-dimensional. 

“They’ve been raised in a culture,” Brooks says, “that encourages them to pay attention to the résumé virtues of how to have a great career but leaves by the wayside … time to think about the eulogy virtues: the things they’ll say about you after you’re dead. They go through their school with the mixture of complete self-confidence and utter terror, afraid of a single false step off the achievement machine.” It’s flat, lifeless, and soul-killing.

But Christian schools attempt to educate their charges in three dimensions. Brooks told Christian college leaders that Christian universities “are the avant-garde of 21st century culture.” Christian colleges “have a way of talking about and educating the human person in a way that integrates faith, emotion and intellect. [They] have a recipe to nurture human beings who have a devoted heart, a courageous mind and a purposeful soul. Almost no other set of institutions in American society has that, and everyone wants it.”

Go HERE to read the rest. You may not be sending a child off to college, but thinking about eulogy virtues over resume virtues should be a priority for all of us.