Christianity and Intellectual Inquiry

Abstract Christianity and Intellectual Inquiry explores the relationship between faith and learning in Christian history and in the thinking processes of contemporary Americans. The first half of the book describes the two-thousand-year history of diverse Christian reflections on faith and learning in Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, and Pentecostal communities. It then moves on to explain how standard presumptions about connecting faith and learning changed over the past century as the American intellectual ethos shifted from epistemological universalism to multiculturalism to its current prioritization of individual identity. During the same time, American perceptions of faith evolved, moving away from a focus on doctrines and dogma toward an emphasis on personal hopes, dreams, values, loyalties, and convictions. The second half of the book introduces the concept of pilgrimage as a frame for thinking appropriately and constructively in our present age of identity. Pilgrim thinkers of all identities, Christians included, are committed to thinking and living as self-aware participants in the marketplace of ideas, learning from each other as they proceed on their own intellectual journeys. Four specific pathways of pilgrimage thinking—attentiveness, contemplation, proclamation, and compassion—are given special attention because of their deep roots in both Christianity and American higher education. Greater awareness of faith’s influence on thinking and familiarity with the four pilgrimage pathways point all Americans, regardless of their identities, toward more collegial and productive modes of intellectual engagement.