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?”