Why wear blinders.

During my senior year at Hillsdale, a friend of mine, Jacob, a triple major in philosophy, English, and classics, shared a house with a religion/philosophy major and an alumnus, both of whom were pre-seminary, and our mutual friends. As the year waxed full, these two spent a huge amount of time debating the finer points of justification in reference to a perceived heresy of a religion prof. Reacting to this, Jacob observed--and it's always stayed with me--"I just can't understand how good people can be so exclusively interested in theology, to the point of being oblivious to everything else."

Unfortunately, most (though not all) of the Reformed people I've met are basically like this. This is one of the reasons why I think that many of the brighter and more open Reformed people (and even more evangelicals) eventually leave the austerity of their ghetto for the cultural depth of Rome or the oriental opulence of Constantinople. And, while I am theologically more or less an orthodox neo-Augustinian, I'm culturally more "catholic" than Puritan, and identify myself with the orthodox pluralism of the Old West rather than with the modern sectarianism of the Isles.