Archive for the ‘publicintellectuals’ tag
Is there a Christian intellectual presence on your campus?
One form of Christian presence on campus.
A few different strands of thought came together for me this morning in the form of a question. Let me throw out the question first, and then elaborate.
Is there a public Christian intellectual presence on your campus?
Here are the threads that came together for me. First, in our recent book discussion of John Stott’s Your Mind Matters, Stott describes a kind of intellectualism that is very public. For example, in chapter 3, he “examines six spheres of Christian living, each of which is impossible without the proper use of the mind”: worship, faith, holiness, guidance, evangelism, and ministry. These have internal and private aspects, but also external, public aspects. I’d be willing to bet that, on your campus, there are at least two or three of these which are very public indeed. Picture the sidewalk evangelists who roam through each year, or campus ministry student outreach events. On some campuses, worship or holiness might have similar public aspects.
Image credit: falonyates via Flickr.
Public Intellectuals
This week’s Chronicle Review features an article by Daniel R. Drezner entitled “Public Intellectuals 2.0,” ($, I think) about the role of public intellectuals in the age of blogs and non-stop media commentary. (If you’re unfamiliar with the idea of public intellectuals, here’s a quick description and two magazines’ list of the “top 100″ – think Paul Krugman, Nobel Laureate but also NY Times columnist, someone with high-caliber intellect and credentials but who can converse in the general cultural sphere.)
Drezner pulls together a quick, non-exhaustive list of current public intellectuals associated with academia (as opposed to journalists, essayists, non-university-affiliated authors, etc.):
Eric Alterman, Michael Bérubé, Joshua Cohen, Tyler Cowen, Jared Diamond, Stanley Fish, Francis Fukuyama, Jacob Hacker, George Lakoff, Mark Lilla, Patricia Nelson Limerick, Louis Menand, Martha Nussbaum, Steven Pinker, Robert Putnam, Eric Rauchway, Robert Reich, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Lawrence H. Summers, and Cass R. Sunstein
Who else would you include – Christian or nonChristian? N. T. Wright immediately comes to my mind. (Though he’s no longer affiliated with a university, he was previously on faculty at McGill, Worcester, and Oxford.) He exemplifies someone who can write and speak with authority for both academic and “popular” audiences.
So, who else would you add to the list above?
