The first selection in my summer research project: James S. Bielo’s Words Upon the Word: An Ethnography of Evangelical Group Bible Study. This summer, inspired by T.M. Luhrmann’s When God Talks Back, I am reviewing several books that provide an academic perspective on North American evangelicals. My goal is to see evangelicals through the eyes of professional academics who have made a point of studying them with academic rigor. Unfortunately, the most commonly heard “academic” opinions about evangelicals are also the least academic — that is, they are formed mostly from unreflective personal experience.
To draw on my own personal experience, which has been confirmed as the experience of many of my friends, my professors who spoke the most about religion at my public university were usually those with the strongest emotions on the subject and the least professional expertise. George Yancey’s Compromising Scholarship: Religious and Political Bias in American Higher Education is an excellent introduction to this phenomenon. (Tom Trevethan reviewed the book for ESN a while back.)
In the modern university model, however, when one wants to learn about a subject, one doesn’t turn to the person with the strongest opinions and the loudest voice. As I proceed with this project, I hope that I’ll not only learn more about evangelicals, but also gain some insights that can help evangelical academics and campus ministers interact with non-evangelicals on campus.
Studying the Bible Study
Bielo’s Words Upon the Word is an ethnography of nineteen Bible study groups at six Protestant churches in Lansing, Michigan, including United Methodist, Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, Vineyard, and Restoration Movement (Church of Christ/Christian Church) congregations. Altogether, Bielo’s fieldwork encompassed 324 separate Bible study meetings over a 19 month period. [Read more…] about Bielo: Bible study as a social institution