An Essay on Academic Disciplines, Faithfulness, and the Christian Scholar
Christian scholars inhabit at least two communities: the community of Christians and the community of scholars. Each community has its own distinctive set of beliefs, practices, and criteria for membership. To avoid incoherence, the Christian scholar seeks to understand the relationship between the two communities. The Christian, we are told, must integrate all of her life as a scholar—her teaching and research—with her Christianity. Descriptions of how this integration is supposed to look are often opaque or unhelpful. Further, the fact that the scholarly enterprise looks quite different for the historian, the mathematician, and the physicist adds to the difficulty of prescribing an approach to the integration of faith and scholarship that is helpful across all of the academic disciplines. In this article, I highlight the topic of integration by exploring the anatomy of an “academic discipline.” In doing so, connections between faith and the scholarly enterprise emerge in ways that seem less opaque and m...