Foolish the World’s Wisdom: Epistemology Across the Arc of Life

ABSTRACT Composed in response to the invitation to speak at the annual conference luncheon, this article offers reflections on my epistemological meanderings from maternal knowledge and children’s unique capacities to tree intelligence and pastoral theology’s special ways of knowing. Following the arc of life, however, it ultimately turns to the paradox of human foolishness (my own) and God’s wisdom, voicing what one aging specialist calls the countercultural role or prophetic vocation that can arise when people reach later life and begin to see the relativity of our work as we relinquish our callings. The article invites further reflection on the dynamics of relinquishing callings, the tensions between the academic life and the Christian life, and the need to hold our callings lightly, not absolutizing the work we do and recognizing the illusory and/or transient nature of many of the things to which we are drawn to give ourselves.