Archive for the ‘Pluralism’ tag
Outrageous Idea 3: Rules of the Game
Can followers of Christ play by the rules of the academic game and still follow Christ faithfully?
According to Stanley Fish (Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor and a professor of law at Florida International University, in Miami, and dean emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago) the answer is “No.” Marsden summarizes Why We Can’t All Just Get Along (Stanley Fish, First Things, February 1996):
“Though secular himself, Fish cites the authority of John Milton to argue that true faith in God changes everything else. Reason, says, Milton, following Augustine, is subject to prior faith. That world will look very different to those who start with faith in God in contrast to faith in self or in material contingency. It follows, Fish argues, that Christians, if they are serious about their faith, should not compromise with liberalism, which is built on antithetical principles:”
‘To put the matter baldly, a person of religious conviction should not want to enter the marketplace of ideas, but to shut it down, at least insofar as it presumes to determine matters that he believes have been determined by God and faith. The religious person should not seek an accommodation with liberalism; he should seek to rout it from the field, to extirpate it, root and branch.’ — George Marsden. The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. p.44. [Update 10/22/2009, 12:40 pm: The second paragraph is a quote which Marsden excerpts from Stanley Fish's Why We Can't All Just Get Along (First Things, February 1996)].
How would you respond? Read the rest of this entry »
Is God Relevant in the Public Square?
A special thank-you to the Emerging Scholar from Johns Hopkins University who passed along notes from Is God Relevant in the Public Square? Living with our deepest differences in a world of exploding pluralism — Os Guinness (March 26, Veritas Forum).* Anyone have testimonies regarding or reflections upon the creation, cultivation, encouragement, and/or maintenance of a “Civil” Public Square on their campus, in their discipline?
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Os Guinness, an author and social critic, began by asking us to take a look at history. In the last century, someone has been killed every moment in the name of religion. Yet — as we’ve discussed here before — if we look at those killed by secular regimes in this century, the number is greater by far than all those killed by religions in all of past history combined.
What lessons can we learn from this? Guinness proposed three.
