the THREEFOLD LAMP: Christian Memoir on Faith, Philosophy, and Wisdom of Everyday Life

A professor of philosophy and theology spends a lifetime discovering that his three teachers, the Bible, the philosophers, and the natural world, were never really strangers to one another.George Chukwuemeka grew up in a house with three lamps: his mother's Scripture, read aloud every evening from Proverbs; his father's philosophy books, carried out of his own schooling; and his grandmother's wordless, weather-reading wisdom, learned from a lifetime spent close to the soil. For forty years he believed he had to choose between them. The Threefold Lamp is the record of discovering he didn't.Moving between a Nigerian childhood, a crisis of doubt sparked by Descartes, a sister's early death, a seminary education spent reconciling Aquinas with Aristotle, and a father's slow death decades later, this memoir weaves together biblical wisdom, philosophical argument, and the plain, unlettered good sense of farmers and grandmothers, showing how each corrects, deepens, and ultimately completes the others.Inside these pages, you will walk with the author through: - A collision with Descartes that nearly cost him his footing, and the farmer who cured it- Job's whirlwind, and what it teaches about the limits of argument- Solomon and Socrates, held side by side for the first time- A body's collapse that taught him what no philosophy course ever had- A deathbed where all three wisdoms were finally needed at onceWritten with the rigor of a scholar and the candor of a man who has buried a sister and a father, The Threefold Lamp: A Christian Memoir on Faith, Philosophy, and the Wisdom of Everyday Life is for anyone who has ever felt torn between faith and reason, between the classroom and the church, between what they were taught and what they have lived. It offers no easy synthesis, only the hard-won conviction that Wisdom is not stingy with her teachers.Perfect for readers of reflective, faith-and-reason memoirs in the tradition of C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris, and for anyone drawn to biblical wisdom literature, philosophy of religion, or the quiet second half of a well-examined life.