Thursday, August 27, 2009
Why the title
I had a number of thoughts roll around in my head before selecting the title for this blog. I originally wanted to call it, “Integrations,” since my desire is to see Christian scholars’ faith integrated with their study. However, I don’t have any guarantee that I’ll achieve that goal, and I also don’t want to claim to have the answer. Rather, I just want a space to ask the questions and see where the conversation goes. That led me to the idea of seeing faith and scholarship interact with each other.
Unfortunately, the URL for “Interactions” was already taken… by a blog that hasn’t been updated since the early aughts. (I think that’s what we’re calling this decade. We should probably come to a consensus before it ends.) That led me to think about how these interactions are occurring at the corner of society.
Why at the “corner?” Because, as I hope to describe in future posts, the secular university and the Christian church are both marginalized in American culture. Geometrically speaking, then, a Christian in the secular university is doubly marginalized, or in the corner. Sadly, Christians in the secular university often feel like outsiders in both margins: We feel like outsiders in the university because of our commitment to our faith, and we fell like outsiders in the church because of our profession.
But even though the corner is small and often lonely, being in the corner gives us the ability to make positive changes to both the university and the church. Sommerville points out that Christian faculty can offer a reinvigorated perspective on the university’s academic pursuits that have lost their oomph in our culture thanks to secularization. Christian faculty can help the church tune into the cultural wavelength to communicate the gospel in a relevant and engaging manner. And Christian faculty are the primary workers in bridging the gap between the university and the church, who both suffer the same affliction of marginalization and can perhaps learn from each other about interacting with the rest of culture.
What do you think? What are other advantages or disadvantages to being “in the corner?”
Unfortunately, the URL for “Interactions” was already taken… by a blog that hasn’t been updated since the early aughts. (I think that’s what we’re calling this decade. We should probably come to a consensus before it ends.) That led me to think about how these interactions are occurring at the corner of society.
Why at the “corner?” Because, as I hope to describe in future posts, the secular university and the Christian church are both marginalized in American culture. Geometrically speaking, then, a Christian in the secular university is doubly marginalized, or in the corner. Sadly, Christians in the secular university often feel like outsiders in both margins: We feel like outsiders in the university because of our commitment to our faith, and we fell like outsiders in the church because of our profession.
But even though the corner is small and often lonely, being in the corner gives us the ability to make positive changes to both the university and the church. Sommerville points out that Christian faculty can offer a reinvigorated perspective on the university’s academic pursuits that have lost their oomph in our culture thanks to secularization. Christian faculty can help the church tune into the cultural wavelength to communicate the gospel in a relevant and engaging manner. And Christian faculty are the primary workers in bridging the gap between the university and the church, who both suffer the same affliction of marginalization and can perhaps learn from each other about interacting with the rest of culture.
What do you think? What are other advantages or disadvantages to being “in the corner?”
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
About Me
“Abraham believed God, traveled to Egypt, rescued Lot, and was the father of Isaac. Now, was that before or after he became the sixteenth President, fought the Civil War and freed the slaves?” –Me, Age 8
I was often very confused as a child. I knew for certain there were two things I needed to succeed at: school and church. And these were both very similar: We read at both school and church, we learned history at both school and church, we were asked questions at both school and church, we moved from one grade to another at both school and church. They were so similar that I thought that they surely must be related.
That’s where the confusion came in, leading to questions like the one I quoted earlier. School seemed to get more serious (requiring more reading and more homework, playing fewer games and getting fewer breaks) while church (particularly Sunday school) didn’t seem to change all that much (never requiring homework, playing games even when we seemed too old for them, and spending as much time in chit-chat as we did opening the Bible). There was also a growing difference in content. In school, we learned more details year after year, had to memorize the years that events happened, had to learn how everything (science, math, American history, the Renaissance, the French Revolution, technology, etc.) fit together. In church, though, no one ever seemed to say in what year the events in the Bible occurred, nor did we really learn how everything fit together; I had the vague feeling that Jesus came after everybody in the front of the Bible, but not much else.
Little did my middle-school-self know, my questions about how the things I learned at school and church related to each other told the story of conflict and estrangement between the church and the academy.
I remember in ninth grade when one of my classmates in Biology who also attended my church asked our Youth Pastor to pray for us, since we were studying evolution. “We’re not studying evolution,” I responded. “We’re just studying taxonomy. Evolution’s not until the next chapter.” It was as if getting even close to evolutionary theory was like looking into the sun for this student, and I didn’t understand why.
I remember in tenth grade in World History, we spent a chapter studying the Reformation. “Luther,” I read in my textbook, “made the radical claim that salvation was based on faith in God, and not on works.” “But,” I responded, in shock, “that’s what I believe!” I then had two questions that have haunted me ever since: 1. What did people believe before that? 2. Why did no one in church tell me about this history? The first question has been more or less settled in my mind. The second question, I have come to realize, is a form of the tension between Christian faith and academic study that has developed over the years.
Experiences like those in Biology and World History have largely shaped me today, leading me to ask questions about how my faith as a Christian relates to my study and teaching as a professor. I’ve received abundant help from other Christian scholars in venues such as the Christian Study Center of Gainesville and in books such as The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship, Habits of the Mind, and The Decline of the Secular University. It’s my hope that this blog will serve as a sounding board for those questions and provide help to others as they wrestle with similar issues. Thank you for joining me.
I was often very confused as a child. I knew for certain there were two things I needed to succeed at: school and church. And these were both very similar: We read at both school and church, we learned history at both school and church, we were asked questions at both school and church, we moved from one grade to another at both school and church. They were so similar that I thought that they surely must be related.
That’s where the confusion came in, leading to questions like the one I quoted earlier. School seemed to get more serious (requiring more reading and more homework, playing fewer games and getting fewer breaks) while church (particularly Sunday school) didn’t seem to change all that much (never requiring homework, playing games even when we seemed too old for them, and spending as much time in chit-chat as we did opening the Bible). There was also a growing difference in content. In school, we learned more details year after year, had to memorize the years that events happened, had to learn how everything (science, math, American history, the Renaissance, the French Revolution, technology, etc.) fit together. In church, though, no one ever seemed to say in what year the events in the Bible occurred, nor did we really learn how everything fit together; I had the vague feeling that Jesus came after everybody in the front of the Bible, but not much else.
Little did my middle-school-self know, my questions about how the things I learned at school and church related to each other told the story of conflict and estrangement between the church and the academy.
I remember in ninth grade when one of my classmates in Biology who also attended my church asked our Youth Pastor to pray for us, since we were studying evolution. “We’re not studying evolution,” I responded. “We’re just studying taxonomy. Evolution’s not until the next chapter.” It was as if getting even close to evolutionary theory was like looking into the sun for this student, and I didn’t understand why.
I remember in tenth grade in World History, we spent a chapter studying the Reformation. “Luther,” I read in my textbook, “made the radical claim that salvation was based on faith in God, and not on works.” “But,” I responded, in shock, “that’s what I believe!” I then had two questions that have haunted me ever since: 1. What did people believe before that? 2. Why did no one in church tell me about this history? The first question has been more or less settled in my mind. The second question, I have come to realize, is a form of the tension between Christian faith and academic study that has developed over the years.
Experiences like those in Biology and World History have largely shaped me today, leading me to ask questions about how my faith as a Christian relates to my study and teaching as a professor. I’ve received abundant help from other Christian scholars in venues such as the Christian Study Center of Gainesville and in books such as The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship, Habits of the Mind, and The Decline of the Secular University. It’s my hope that this blog will serve as a sounding board for those questions and provide help to others as they wrestle with similar issues. Thank you for joining me.
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