Faith and Learning: Faith & Learning Books

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. 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. Book jacket.

Christian colleges expect faculty to clearly articulate an understanding of the impacts that Christian faith has on their teaching, research, and service. Many faculty find this dimension of their work-often labeled the integration of faith and learning-confusing and difficult to realize in practice, to assess, and to describe. This volume begins by clarifying two things. It summarizes the faith/learning discussion and offers a working conception of faith/integration specifically for Christian college faculty. It then outlines what deans, provosts, and tenure-promotion committees typically expect faculty in Christian colleges to know and do. Allen and Badley introduce the highly regarded framework of Ernest Boyer and the Carnegie Foundation (Scholarship Reconsidered, 1990). They then present both a framework for assessing faith/learning integration in the three dimensions of teaching, research, and service and step-by-step instructions for reporting and describing the individual faculty member's approach and success. The book closes by calling both the Christian college and the individual professor to the vocation of teaching, shaping, and sending.