The Christian Academic in Higher Education The Consecration of Learning

Abstract

the post-enlightenment university has lost its way; not because it has ceased to produce much of real value but because buffeted by every storm in the market place and by governments com mending largely utilitarian ends, it is fast losing its coherence as a learn ing and enquiring community. The ‘university’ resembles too often a disconnected ‘multiversity’ with self-contained academic units that have little or nothing to do intellectually with each other. Scholars often exist within it as self-contained ‘monads.’ These days, ‘think tanks’, ideologi cally predisposed, influence ministers of state much more than a coun try’s best scholars and thinkers—notwithstanding the endless ‘consultations’ about what has already been decided. T his book dares to talk about learning communities and the inner compulsions of the teaching and researching scholar. The fact that Professor John Sullivan has to make a case (and a much needed one) for Christian scholarship today, describing its distinctiveness and its role in the modern Academy, shows to what extent our age suffers from histori cal myopia. The unease about the importance (and the indispensability) of religion in understanding human society or about the naturalness of faith and serious intellectual enquiry is the accumulated result of much ignorance about how we came to be Europeans or British, or literate, for that matter.