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Intro Definition of Technometry

Worldview.  The integration of theology, piety, and work.

I guess those are the concepts closest to technometry that we modern Christians might recognize.

The Puritans of the 17th Century were interested in personal piety and sound, Biblical theology.   They were interested in the whole human - head, heart, and hands.  Technometry was the study of how we give glory to God by studying, via the liberal arts, what He has created and then applying what we learn to all sorts of work.  It was a study of how to apply God's wisdom to every area of life, from farming to politics.  Ames' Technometry was a textbook at Harvard for quite some time and had a wide influence on American philosophy.

David Hill Scott has a good preliminary paper about technometry here.  I recommend reading that to get a general overview of the concept and of Ames' book.

Piety and Christian education are inseparable. In The Liberal Arts Tradition: A Philosophy of Christian Classical Education, Clark and Jain picture Christian education as a tree rooted in piety with a banner of theology over and around it to govern it.  Those familiar with Christian classical education know the concept of ordo amoris, Augustine's description of piety.  If piety is the proper ordering of loves, our current public education system is, as Clark and Jain affirm, "fundamentally impious." 

Via technometry, Puritan intellectuals tied together scholé (truth-seeking) and work (productive vocations) and so touched all spheres of American life with Biblical piety.

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