Faith and Learning on the Edge: A Bold New Look at Religion in Higher Education

The faith community includes some of the most brilliant minds in academe. Yet many have felt compelled to check their faith at the doors of our educational institutions. Intimidated by a daunting amalgam of naturalism and postmodernism, they have been silenced by secularists' insistence that faith has no place in the quest for knowledge. In Faith and Learning on the Edge, David Claerbaut refutes this fallacy. He shows how those who espouse a values-neutral approach to knowledge and research fail to live up to their own standard. In capitulating to them by separating faith from learning, Christians abdicate their responsibility toward both higher education and the culture at large. Believers must reintegrate their faith as a crucial component of learning, insists the author, and he explores ways in which this can be accomplished. Examining the worldviews that govern contemporary research and academe, Claerbaut unmasks the often vehement, sometimes subtle, disdain toward Christian thinking in both mainline universities and Christian institutions. More than that, he shows why believers who step in to fill the deep need for such thinking stand on firm intellectual ground---indeed, have the advantage in terms of fact and reason. And he considers how to apply a faith-and-learning approach across a broad spectrum of disciplines in the physical sciences, the arts and humanities, and the behavioral sciences. Praised by Protestant and Catholic scholars, Faith and Learning on the Edge looks at such issues as: Christian education versus 'baptized paganism' Naturalism, postmodernism, and their impact The high-stakes politics of the academic mainstream The nature of 'faith and learning' Being true to the role of learning in Christian scholarship The mindset of the Christian in the physical sciences Guidelines for the Christian artist Philosophy under a Christian lens Faith and the mental health models Sociology: faith in the eye of naturalism . . . and much more. For provosts, academic administrators, professors, college and graduate students, and everyone interested in the state of education, Faith and Learning on the Edge offers insights that are illuminating, convincing, and convicting.