Last week I posted excerpts and a link to a “message to college freshmen.”  One of my favorite authors, James K. A. Smith, recently wrote his own “letter to college sophomores” that serves as a nice kind of sequel.  He takes a similar approach in terms of forthrightness but takes it to an interesting level of academic disposition:

It’s not just that you’re a year wiser; you carry the air of the newly enlightened. Your curiosity has hardened into a misplaced confidence; your desire to learn has turned into a penchant to pronounce, as if wisdom were a race to being the quickest debunker. You used to wonder about the social vision behind Philip Larkin’s poetry, or whether Thomas Aquinas’s notion of natural law could really work in a secular age, but now you seem more intent on unmasking “micro-aggressions” and detecting colonial prejudice in a canon that you increasingly disdain.

And:

Unlike during those first few months of freshman year, your thinking on almost any subject now is becoming easy to predict. The causes you’re passionate about, while not without merit, are almost clichéd. You seem less interested in mining the complexity of problems and more interested in making a hasty display of moral outrage and coming down on the correct side of any debate—because of course there’s only one right way to think.

Pendulum’s swing, for sure.  That’s definitely true for knowledge and our quest for it.  It’s something we all struggle with.  You can read the whole letter here.