Scholarship and Christian Faith: Enlarging the Conversation

Douglas and Rhonda Jacobsen argue that, while there has recently been a lively discussion about religious faith and higher education in America, the idea of Christian scholarship itself has been remarkably under discussed. Most of the literature has assumed a definition of Christian scholarship that is Reformed and evangelical in orientation: a model associated with the phrase "the integration of faith and learning." The authors offer a new definition and analysis of Christian scholarship that opens the way for dialogue between evangelicals and Catholics and Protestants from a variety of church traditions. The book itself is organized as a conversation. Five chapters by the Jacobsens alternate with four contributed essays that sharpen, illustrate, or complicate the material in the preceding chapters. The goal is both to map the complex terrain of Christian scholarship as it actually exists and to help foster better connections between Christian scholars of differing persuasions and between Christians and the academy as a whole.