"Christianity and Intellectual Inquiry explores the relationship between faith and learning in Christian history and in the thinking processes of contemporary Americans. The first half of the book describes the two-thousand-year history of diverse Christian reflections on faith and learning in Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, and Pentecostal communities. It then moves on to explain how standard presumptions about connecting faith and learning changed over the past century when the American intellectual ethos shifted from epistemological universalism to multiculturalism to its current prioritization of individual identity. During the same time period, American perceptions of faith evolved, moving away from a focus on doctrines and dogma toward an emphasis on personal hopes, dreams, values, loyalties, and convictions. The second half of the book introduces the concept of pilgrimage as a frame for thinking appropriately and constructively in our present age of identity. Pilgrim thinkers of all identities, Christians included, are committed to thinking and living as self-aware participants in the marketplace of ideas, learning from each other as they proceed on their own intellectual journeys. Four specific pathways of pilgrimage thinking-attentiveness, contemplation, proclamation, and compassion-are given special attention because of their deep roots in both Christianity and American higher education. Greater awareness of faith's influence on thinking and familiarity with the four pilgrimage pathways point all Americans, regardless of their identities, toward more collegial and productive modes of intellectual engagement"-- Provided by publisher.
Christianity and Intellectual Inquiry examines the many ways that Christians, past and present, have tried to make sense of themselves and the world around them, weaving together an intellectual and epistemological history of Christianity in America. The book introduces the concept of pilgrimage as a metaphor that describes intellectual inquiry as an open-ended search for truth that is in steady dialogue with others.
America has entered a new intellectual era in which personal identity is assumed to play a significant role in how every person thinks. Today's academy acknowledges that who we are shapes how we view ourselves and the world, which unavoidably injects religion, spirituality, secularity, and faith-a person's deepest convictions, commitment, hopes, fears, and loyalties-into the thinking process. The new emphasis on individual identity has made academic methodologies broader and more multifaceted, enlarging the pursuit of truth but sometimes leading to unsupported and false claims about reality.
Christianity and Intellectual Inquiry focuses specifically on how American Christians are trying to negotiate this new terrain. The first section of the book recounts the long, complex, and diverse history of Christian reflection on the connections between faith and learning. The second section analyses the past 150 years of American thinking, tracing the changing intellectual paradigms that governed how all Americans reflect on reality and describing how Christians made their ways through the evolving landscape. The third and final section proposes a new way of understanding intellectual inquiry that is relevant for thinkers of all religious and secular persuasions and minimizes the potential for identity-informed thinking to go astray: thinking as pilgrimage.
Pilgrimage thinking recognizes that faith of some kind plays a role in how everyone tries to understand and make sense of reality while also insisting that religious convictions and markers of personal identity are not beyond critique. Thinking as pilgrimage is not dependent on one all-encompassing cognitive orientation but instead encourages a range of approaches to reality. Four specific intellectual pathways are discussed in detail: attentiveness, contemplation, proclamation, and compassion. Both American higher education and Christianity use all four cognitive pathways, and each path is a shared space where people who are seeking a better understanding of reality can challenge and learn from each other.
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