As a Lipscomb University grad of nearly 30 yrs ago, I identify with much of what you're working on here. The convoluted, frequently uncomfortable, path(s) I have trudged since then are witness to it, in fact. Thank you. This is very well put "…the resolution to cognitive dissonance comes from a third, reconciling piece of information that allows the prior dissonance to turn toward harmony. The articulation required is not a one-time resolution that “all is well with the world”. It is more like “here’s what I understand at the moment'."
Bravo John! I rather like the term “academically-informed spiritual development.” It is a little lengthy, but the term is clear. On my office door I have one of my favorite William Barclay quotes: “Faith is a first-hand discovery, not a second-hand story.” I read that years ago and it struck a chord in me. Ever since then I’ve managed to share that quote with every general core class I teach. Near the end of each semester, once my students have a better feel for me, I share my Christian story and I try to emphasize that each person has their own unique story, and that we need to be okay with that—we need to embrace it.
“Christian worldview” is a term I’ve never really liked. What does it mean? I know how my pastor and church would likely define it, but there are other fine churches in the area with dedicated followers of Jesus that would likely define the term differently.
I really respect what you're working on. Many of the Christian college issues you raise here are issues rooted in the churches behind the schools. The secular university has the advantage of not trying to please two institutions at once that are so easily at odds with one another (financial institutions are ubiquitous and irrelevant here).
Faith and learning as "two entirely separate ideas that must somehow be brought together" is the way the church has treated those ideas, not the way any respectable liberal arts college (especially secular) would handle them. In that way, I think you've gotten right to the core issue on the first point. Faith is made of belief, not proof, and that makes it impossible to treat as monolithic in an institution that requires proof for advancement through it. The church is an institution dedicated to matters of faith. A school is dedicated to the claim-to-evidence relationship through the application of reason. Mistaking a belief about a vaccine for an education in epidemiology is a problem, not a matter of subjective diplomacy or reconciliation. You're up against that with this project, I think.
I'm very attracted to your strategy for dealing with it, though. The impossibility of the Christian college policing the subjective interpretation of faith by a graduate necessitates its not trying to do so to the pre-graduate. The value of applied reason and a respect for knowledge should risk a student's decision not to dutifully recite the college church's (ironically sectarian, therefore subjective) line about faith, but that's a risk Christian colleges don't want to take. I think it's the risk you're rightly asking them to take.
Faith is humanly inevitable, just not faith in a deity, let alone a specific one. The paradox of faith's universal presence in humanity and faith's subjectivity is the province of a number of disciplines in any college environment. That should provide a Christian college a great opportunity--to bring a perspective to the paradox that's at least theologically informed. Most Christian colleges, I would guess, don't even want to acknowledge the paradox as such. And that's where they fail as educational institutions--through that strident effort to succeed as religious ones.
We should be seeing students at Christian college being given one chance after another in their classes to work out how faith functions, even to the risk of their abandoning their faith in a personified God. Reasonable and informed professors can start conversations among curious and free-thinking students that will ultimately end where every kind of faith always ends: You either have that particular kind or you don't, and so on to the next possibilities until you find the faith you have ("what I understand at the moment"). Students are going to get there anyway, maybe just with more hope than frustration, more curiosity than repression.
You're talking about a Heraclitian faith, a Platonic faith that just requires a little bit of Aristotelian scaffolding, something fluid and adaptable to fact, a faith that acknowledges the impracticality of thinking that tomorrow will be yesterday. Trouble is, to the literal old schoolers that smacks of acquiescence and sin. I think it's blasphemy to try and prove the existence of God, because were one to succeed, there goes the necessity of faith. But I also think it's blasphemy to deny the capacity of the mind the God you believe in apparently gave you, to sell it out to certainty. It's ironic to me that people so obsessed with infinite blessing and omnipotence are so moored to presentism and terrified of knowledge.
The obstacle, at least from the perspective of my limited experience, is the set of presuppositions made by "people of faith" who will do all they can to keep someone from being "educated out of their faith." In higher learning, we don't study "our faith." We study, in part, faith--the same way we study every other idea. Christian colleges have a hard time with that. To the extent that they're denominational they're only going to suffer more from preclusive definitions that are regularly contradicted by living life in the world outside of a school.
The ivory tower is an actual problem; it became a cliche with good reason, not just because of townie misunderstanding. It strikes me, in a good way, that your project is about another tower or silo, the Christian version, one that enables a dysfunctional relationship between faith and learning by failing to address either in a practical, applied way. It's not an ivory tower. I don't know what it's made of, maybe because faith doesn't have a good tangible substance to complete the metaphor. The piety tower.
I love your point about cognitive dissonance, including the footnote. How to articulate that to decision makers? There has to be a way to start conversations in Christian colleges that don't begin with a list of keywords to be policed or accusations of ideological "grooming" cast against the secular universities they see as their opposition. By the by, the same thing happens in the secular denomination of literary theory, which controls publishing and professional discourse using faddish, opaque terms or neologisms; advancement is the bribe offered for compliance. That should prompt colleges on either side of the theism line to communicate.
I'm interested in your approach being oriented toward the personal, even confessional, story, especially given your training as a sociologist. This kind of public memoir of faith would probably keep authority figures in education more humble than dictatorial. But I've read other things you've written, including your posts here on crime, and it doesn't seem like you to tackle a subject without packing it in statistical context. An observation, not a judgment. You're probably going to do just that at some point. I have faith in you.
The "cloud of witnesses" is key here, because I've heard many a big shot's carefully crafted personal narrative of faith that was only ostensibly humble and ultimately designed to shape the institution and control the mass. Board members and upper-tier administrators are... let's say tempted by the hubris that integrates faith and learning into a manifesto only they get to institutionalize. Power easily prevents them from concerning themselves with the inevitable subjectivity of informed interpretation, and that increases the chance of a degree being misplaced during a move to the new apartment rather than its hanging on a wall in the study decades later.
One more thought on your project to this point: Christian colleges--that is, those known as Christian colleges--only have pedigree within their environment. This encourages, I think, a cavalier attitude by too many Christian college administrators (and, sadly, some professors) about what a degree from their institution is going to do for someone who leaves that environment. I have a degree from a Christian college, and it only proved an impediment to me as I continued in higher education. That's a collective shortcoming among the snobs in higher education, certainly, but it can't be denied as a flaw in Christian education as well. I wonder if you want to, or are planning to, tackle that subject a bit.
My faith wasn't the impediment to my advancing through the necessary degrees to become a professor. Many other professors at secular or ecumenical institutions have faith and understand it to be subjective, have been willing to discuss it, confess it, share their stories. My Christian college, especially the administration and board--that was the problem. My professors had to function as educators in spite of it.
Your thinking is making me think, so I'm grateful. Thanks for working your process on the board for us and with us.
As a Lipscomb University grad of nearly 30 yrs ago, I identify with much of what you're working on here. The convoluted, frequently uncomfortable, path(s) I have trudged since then are witness to it, in fact. Thank you. This is very well put "…the resolution to cognitive dissonance comes from a third, reconciling piece of information that allows the prior dissonance to turn toward harmony. The articulation required is not a one-time resolution that “all is well with the world”. It is more like “here’s what I understand at the moment'."
Bravo John! I rather like the term “academically-informed spiritual development.” It is a little lengthy, but the term is clear. On my office door I have one of my favorite William Barclay quotes: “Faith is a first-hand discovery, not a second-hand story.” I read that years ago and it struck a chord in me. Ever since then I’ve managed to share that quote with every general core class I teach. Near the end of each semester, once my students have a better feel for me, I share my Christian story and I try to emphasize that each person has their own unique story, and that we need to be okay with that—we need to embrace it.
“Christian worldview” is a term I’ve never really liked. What does it mean? I know how my pastor and church would likely define it, but there are other fine churches in the area with dedicated followers of Jesus that would likely define the term differently.
Thanks again! God bless.
I really respect what you're working on. Many of the Christian college issues you raise here are issues rooted in the churches behind the schools. The secular university has the advantage of not trying to please two institutions at once that are so easily at odds with one another (financial institutions are ubiquitous and irrelevant here).
Faith and learning as "two entirely separate ideas that must somehow be brought together" is the way the church has treated those ideas, not the way any respectable liberal arts college (especially secular) would handle them. In that way, I think you've gotten right to the core issue on the first point. Faith is made of belief, not proof, and that makes it impossible to treat as monolithic in an institution that requires proof for advancement through it. The church is an institution dedicated to matters of faith. A school is dedicated to the claim-to-evidence relationship through the application of reason. Mistaking a belief about a vaccine for an education in epidemiology is a problem, not a matter of subjective diplomacy or reconciliation. You're up against that with this project, I think.
I'm very attracted to your strategy for dealing with it, though. The impossibility of the Christian college policing the subjective interpretation of faith by a graduate necessitates its not trying to do so to the pre-graduate. The value of applied reason and a respect for knowledge should risk a student's decision not to dutifully recite the college church's (ironically sectarian, therefore subjective) line about faith, but that's a risk Christian colleges don't want to take. I think it's the risk you're rightly asking them to take.
Faith is humanly inevitable, just not faith in a deity, let alone a specific one. The paradox of faith's universal presence in humanity and faith's subjectivity is the province of a number of disciplines in any college environment. That should provide a Christian college a great opportunity--to bring a perspective to the paradox that's at least theologically informed. Most Christian colleges, I would guess, don't even want to acknowledge the paradox as such. And that's where they fail as educational institutions--through that strident effort to succeed as religious ones.
We should be seeing students at Christian college being given one chance after another in their classes to work out how faith functions, even to the risk of their abandoning their faith in a personified God. Reasonable and informed professors can start conversations among curious and free-thinking students that will ultimately end where every kind of faith always ends: You either have that particular kind or you don't, and so on to the next possibilities until you find the faith you have ("what I understand at the moment"). Students are going to get there anyway, maybe just with more hope than frustration, more curiosity than repression.
You're talking about a Heraclitian faith, a Platonic faith that just requires a little bit of Aristotelian scaffolding, something fluid and adaptable to fact, a faith that acknowledges the impracticality of thinking that tomorrow will be yesterday. Trouble is, to the literal old schoolers that smacks of acquiescence and sin. I think it's blasphemy to try and prove the existence of God, because were one to succeed, there goes the necessity of faith. But I also think it's blasphemy to deny the capacity of the mind the God you believe in apparently gave you, to sell it out to certainty. It's ironic to me that people so obsessed with infinite blessing and omnipotence are so moored to presentism and terrified of knowledge.
The obstacle, at least from the perspective of my limited experience, is the set of presuppositions made by "people of faith" who will do all they can to keep someone from being "educated out of their faith." In higher learning, we don't study "our faith." We study, in part, faith--the same way we study every other idea. Christian colleges have a hard time with that. To the extent that they're denominational they're only going to suffer more from preclusive definitions that are regularly contradicted by living life in the world outside of a school.
The ivory tower is an actual problem; it became a cliche with good reason, not just because of townie misunderstanding. It strikes me, in a good way, that your project is about another tower or silo, the Christian version, one that enables a dysfunctional relationship between faith and learning by failing to address either in a practical, applied way. It's not an ivory tower. I don't know what it's made of, maybe because faith doesn't have a good tangible substance to complete the metaphor. The piety tower.
I love your point about cognitive dissonance, including the footnote. How to articulate that to decision makers? There has to be a way to start conversations in Christian colleges that don't begin with a list of keywords to be policed or accusations of ideological "grooming" cast against the secular universities they see as their opposition. By the by, the same thing happens in the secular denomination of literary theory, which controls publishing and professional discourse using faddish, opaque terms or neologisms; advancement is the bribe offered for compliance. That should prompt colleges on either side of the theism line to communicate.
I'm interested in your approach being oriented toward the personal, even confessional, story, especially given your training as a sociologist. This kind of public memoir of faith would probably keep authority figures in education more humble than dictatorial. But I've read other things you've written, including your posts here on crime, and it doesn't seem like you to tackle a subject without packing it in statistical context. An observation, not a judgment. You're probably going to do just that at some point. I have faith in you.
The "cloud of witnesses" is key here, because I've heard many a big shot's carefully crafted personal narrative of faith that was only ostensibly humble and ultimately designed to shape the institution and control the mass. Board members and upper-tier administrators are... let's say tempted by the hubris that integrates faith and learning into a manifesto only they get to institutionalize. Power easily prevents them from concerning themselves with the inevitable subjectivity of informed interpretation, and that increases the chance of a degree being misplaced during a move to the new apartment rather than its hanging on a wall in the study decades later.
One more thought on your project to this point: Christian colleges--that is, those known as Christian colleges--only have pedigree within their environment. This encourages, I think, a cavalier attitude by too many Christian college administrators (and, sadly, some professors) about what a degree from their institution is going to do for someone who leaves that environment. I have a degree from a Christian college, and it only proved an impediment to me as I continued in higher education. That's a collective shortcoming among the snobs in higher education, certainly, but it can't be denied as a flaw in Christian education as well. I wonder if you want to, or are planning to, tackle that subject a bit.
My faith wasn't the impediment to my advancing through the necessary degrees to become a professor. Many other professors at secular or ecumenical institutions have faith and understand it to be subjective, have been willing to discuss it, confess it, share their stories. My Christian college, especially the administration and board--that was the problem. My professors had to function as educators in spite of it.
Your thinking is making me think, so I'm grateful. Thanks for working your process on the board for us and with us.