Nick Duhm
Like many of the parents and children who attend Evangelical churches in this country, both today and over the past 100 years, I was a proud product of the public education system. Upon graduation from my public California high school, I attended The Master’s University in Santa Clarita, California, and ultimately received a bachelor of arts degree in English. At this point, it should be noted that I did not pursue and English degree out of a love for literature, but rather because it was suggested to me that it was an ideal undergraduate degree if one were to pursue law school and a legal career. However, it was during this time at university that I was first introduced to the classical method. In my four short years I did not become fluent in Latin or learn my catechisms by heart as many classical educated students do today, yet I did come away with something distinctly classical: something I would like to call Classical Christian Moxie.
Classical Christian Moxie is an extension of the notion of the liber (free man). The liber is the one who has been trained in the liberal arts to the end that he would be free – knowing how to think and live and move in this world. He is free in Christ to take responsibility for those around him and to do what God has called him to with skill and excellence. It is the ability to walk into any situation with the confidence that my education has prepared me to learn any vocation under heaven and become world class. And so it was that at the end of my coursework in English I put this idea of the liber to the test and embarked on a career in commercial real estate finance and investments – a career that I am still engaged in to the present nearly a decade later. Before you ask, I firmly believe it was my time studying Homer, Virgil, Milton, Blake, Dostoevsky, Lewis, and Tolkien all under the authority of Christ that made it possible for me to have not only the career that I do, but also to become a man, a husband, and a father. It is with solemn joy and excitement that I get to take a small part in handing down the Paideia of God to the next generation through the work of the Beza Institute. The world desperately needs more Christians who are classically trained to pursue every human endeavor with excellence, are wholly submitted to Jesus Christ, and so are not sitting around waiting for some bureaucrat to give them permission but rather have the moxie to simply do what God requires.
If you have read this far, I suppose it’s only fair to offer you a few personal tidbits about myself that are a little more…. “earthy”. I take my coffee black, both because I am lactose intolerant (though I will not admit so to my wife as she constantly tries to limit my cheese intake on account of it so I kindly ask you not to bring it up with her) and also because when I was a child, my grandpa - an august expert on all subject matters as most grandpas are - told me that’s how cowboys drink it. In the winter, for fun I like to strap on a helmet and slide down steep mountains covered in snow at high speeds. Being postmillennial as I am, the event which I commonly refer to as “the rapture” takes place every evening around 6:00 PM when I come home to see my beautiful bride. Under the Treasure Valley sunset, we walk along the Boise River near our home and dream of what our fledgling life together might someday grow into. We sing hymns and tell stories to our infant son who is still far too young to understand any of our words and far too old for us to believe that they are wasted on him. Besides everything my wife does, my love languages are whiskey, good books, deep conversations about or involving whiskey or good books, and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. My life is a greater kindness of God to me than I could ever merit, so to sum up my feelings about this life I get to live I leave you with this paraphrase from Milton Vincent:
Deserve it? I don’t
on my holiest day;
But this is [God’s goodness],
and herein I’ll stay.