A faithfully integrated heart and mind can discern the difference between a cultural step forward and a mere click of the ratchet of excess. If students do not learn to integrate faith and learning during their undergraduate years, then it may not occur. In graduate school and professional life, students may adopt the current paradigms of the field without realizing that those paradigms include a set of metaphysical assumptions, often naturalistic and humanistic, that conflict with Christian truth not because there is a conflict between faith and fact but because there is a conflict of worldviews, producing a conflict of interpretations and assumptions. Not knowing this, the student may incur a split between faith and mind, with faith weakening as the mind grows more and more into the subject. Without integration, Christianity tends to become an emotional commitment and response, relying exclusively on feelings which can change more easily than an intellectually grounded and reinforced belief.
Personal feelings are more subject to doubt than intellectual commitment.
Without integration, the students will risk compartmentalizing their faith, putting it in a box separate from their intellectual and working life. It will become intellectually irrelevant and emotionally useful only as long as the blessings keep coming. Without integration, students will tend to exhibit a passive acceptance of current cultural values, lacking an active engagement and response to them, unable to separate entertainment values from moral and artistic values. A faithfully integrated heart and mind can discern the difference between a cultural step forward and a mere click of the ratchet of excess. Such a one can recognize that many of the productions of modern culture are not contributing to a more humane, compassionate world where beauty and truth are celebrated, and that some entertainment products are harmful to such a vision.