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By Brandon Burley · Friday Book Review

The easiest way to misunderstand Leadership and the Liberal Arts is to expect a book about leadership techniques.

It is not really that.

There are no ten habits of effective executives, no management formula, and relatively little advice about how to run a meeting, motivate a team, or build an organization.

The deeper question is more important:

What kind of person should education produce before that person is handed responsibility for other people, institutions, technology, money, or power?

Edited by Westmont College president Gayle D. Beebe, Leadership and the Liberal Arts makes a sustained Christian case that higher education should do more than prepare students to enter a profession. It should form people capable of thinking across disciplines, recognizing moral obligations, understanding the limits of their own knowledge, living faithfully, and applying specialized expertise within a larger understanding of what human beings are for.

That distinction matters. A person can be technically competent and still exercise terrible judgment.

Education as formation

Beebe begins with an increasingly contested question: What does it mean to be educated?

The book’s answer reaches backward before it moves forward. Beebe traces the liberal arts through Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, the early Christian tradition, Augustine, Hugh of St. Victor, Aquinas, Bacon, Locke, Newman and others. The point is not historical tourism. The older tradition assumed that education involved an ordered development of the person.

Language mattered because people needed to think and communicate clearly. Mathematics trained forms of reasoning. Ethics and politics dealt with human action. Theology asked the final questions about God, purpose and reality.

Professional competence mattered, but it existed inside a larger account of human formation.

The book argues that much of contemporary higher education has reversed that relationship. Institutions increasingly feel pressure to prove their value through employment outcomes and marketable skills. Those outcomes matter. Students have every right to expect an education that helps them build a life and earn a living.

But employment is not the same thing as education.

A university can teach someone how to build an algorithm without teaching that person how to evaluate what the algorithm should be allowed to do. It can teach economics without asking what an economy is ultimately supposed to accomplish. It can teach persuasive communication without adequately considering whether the thing being persuasively communicated is true.

The contributors to this volume repeatedly return to that gap.

One education, many disciplines

The book moves through Scripture, theology, history, language and rhetoric, mathematics, science, the social sciences, creative arts, economics, technology, student life and spiritual formation.

That breadth could easily have produced twelve unrelated essays. It mostly does not.

The common argument is that the disciplines illuminate different parts of the same reality and that a Christian education should resist treating them as self-contained silos.

Tremper Longman III places Scripture at the center of the Christian liberal-arts project, not simply as another required course but as a framework through which students understand God, humanity and creation.

Telford Work then makes an important distinction between knowing theology and knowing God. Intellectual sophistication, in this account, does not automatically produce spiritual maturity.

Other contributors work outward from that foundation. History becomes a means of understanding people across time. The verbal arts train not simply expression but responsible expression. Mathematics trains the mind to perceive order and abstraction. Science becomes both investigation and wonder. The social sciences ask what enables human beings and communities to flourish. The creative arts become formative rather than merely decorative.

Even the chapter on capitalism attempts to reconnect economic thought with moral reasoning by recovering the Adam Smith of both The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments.

The argument is cumulative: specialization is necessary, but specialization without integration can produce people who know increasingly more about one part of reality while losing the ability to recognize how that part affects everything else.

The AI chapter may be the clearest test

One of the most contemporary chapters addresses artificial intelligence, machine learning, data analytics and decision science.

It could have aged badly before the book even reached publication. Instead, its strongest point has relatively little to do with which AI model is currently winning.

The authors treat technology as something more consequential than a collection of tools. Technology changes institutions, behavior, incentives and eventually culture. That makes technical knowledge insufficient.

Someone still has to decide what the technology is for. Someone has to ask who benefits. Someone has to notice who absorbs the risk. Someone has to distinguish efficiency from wisdom.

And someone must be willing to say that the technically possible and the morally permissible are not always the same thing.

That may be one of the best arguments in the book for the liberal arts themselves. AI can increasingly perform specialized intellectual tasks. That makes the human capacity for judgment less expendable, not more.

Where the book is strongest

The most convincing chapters are those that refuse to separate intellectual formation from lived formation.

Kim Battle-Walters Denu and Edee Schulze argue that education does not occur only in classrooms. Residence halls, mentoring relationships, athletics, worship, service and ordinary community life all become part of what forms a student.

Steve Porter pushes the argument even further in the book's closing chapter. He connects intellectual attention with spiritual attention.

Humility, curiosity, carefulness, courage and the willingness to admit uncertainty are not merely academic habits. They are characteristics of a person learning to see reality without making the self the center of it.

That is particularly compelling because it challenges a familiar caricature of Christian education. Faith, in this account, is not supposed to protect students from difficult questions. It should make them more capable of asking difficult questions without being threatened by the answers.

Where the argument is less complete

The book also carries a limitation that readers should understand. This is not simply a defense of liberal education in the abstract. It is, to a significant degree, a defense of Westmont's understanding of Christian liberal education.

That gives the volume coherence and concrete examples, but at times the book moves from argument into institutional self-description. The conclusion is explicitly framed around “The Westmont Way,” and several contributors rely heavily on Westmont programs and experiences. Readers from other Christian traditions or institutions may need to do some translation.

The edited format also creates some unevenness. Certain chapters offer broad intellectual arguments. Others feel more like theological reflection or descriptions of institutional practice. The word leadership in the title therefore promises something slightly different from what the book ultimately delivers.

The book is much stronger as a philosophy of formation for future leadership than as a book about leadership itself.

There is another tension worth acknowledging. At points, the critique of modern higher education becomes broader than the evidence presented within the book can carry. The authors are persuasive when demonstrating what Christian liberal education can offer. They are somewhat less persuasive when implying that higher education outside that model has largely abandoned character, citizenship or coherent educational purpose.

The strongest case for this vision does not require the weakest version of everyone else's.

The deeper test

Still, the central argument survives those limitations. Higher education is under enormous economic pressure to justify itself through measurable returns.

Parents want to know whether graduates will find jobs. Students want to know whether the degree is worth the debt. Employers want people who can contribute immediately. Those are legitimate questions. But they are not the only questions.

A society also has to ask what happens when highly trained people possess enormous technical capacity without the historical perspective, ethical reasoning, humility or moral imagination necessary to govern its use.

That problem is visible everywhere from artificial intelligence and medicine to government, business, journalism and criminal justice.

Expertise tells us what can be done. Education at its best should also help us decide what ought to be done.

Leadership and the Liberal Arts is ultimately a defense of that larger purpose. Its argument is unmistakably Christian and unapologetically tied to a particular vision of higher education. Readers do not have to accept every part of that vision to recognize the question underneath it.

If education merely produces more capable workers, it has accomplished something important.

If it produces people capable of thinking carefully, acting morally, living faithfully, recognizing the limits of their own expertise and carrying responsibility for something larger than themselves, it has accomplished something more.

The difference becomes visible when those graduates begin to lead.

Disclosure: IVP provided a digital review copy. The opinions in this review are my own.

The book: Leadership and the Liberal Arts: An Education to Last a Lifetime, edited by Gayle D. Beebe. IVP Academic. Publication date: October 13, 2026.

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