No-mans land

Finally... an academic who very precisely verbalizes what I feel and makes me feel less alone in my calling.
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by Paul M. Gould, in chap 1 of The Two Tasks of the Christian Scholar

"...the secular ethos of the university presses Christian scholars to conduct their research and teaching in purely secular terms and motifs. If Christian scholars want a place at the table, they must play by the rules of the academic game. A strict wall of separation between church and state exists, and any effort to tear down the wall is looked on with either suspicion or outright incredulity.

On the other hand, the Christian scholar is committed to a particular view of he world that is often antithetical to the established secular ethos. The Christian universe is a God-centered universe. If Jesus is Lord, he is Lord of all areas of thought and life. In fact, the Bible claims that in Jesus "are hidden all treasures of wisdom and knowledge" (Col. 2:3). Thus, the Christian scholar himself often becomes disintegrated, compartmentalizing his "scholarly life" from his "spiritual life" as he attempts to navigate between the Scylla of religious fundamentalism and the Charybdis of accomodationism. Any attempts to invoke a Christian perspective to science (for example) in the university are quickly labeled as fundamentalist attempts to promote religion masquerading as science. Any attempts to utilize non-biblical conceptual schemes erected by thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle or Kant in order to shape and guide research and teaching are (sometimes) viewed by the church as selling out to accommodationism. The net result of these opposing pressures is that the Christian scholar is left in a sort of 'no-mans land' - viewed with suspicion by both the church and the university. And within the secular academy, religion is relegated to the sidelines. Religion is reserved for the scholar's personal life: meaningful to either the individual or one's own religious community only."


Ideas have consequences, and the university in general and professors in particular are the gate-keepers of ideas - influencing directly or indirectly all aspects of thought and life in our world.

YES! What takes places in universities' labs and especially, what research/theories/way of thinking becomes accepted and even dominant have effects on the future generations. We may not see the effects today, because they lay the foundation of tomorrow's thinking and paradigm. Whatever we see happening today in ALL segments of the society (e.g. public policy, lay theories, popular beliefs etc) is the result of what has been accepted yesterday in the universities - the core of ideas and mindsets.