Confessing History
189 pages
English

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189 pages
English

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At the end of his landmark 1994 book, The Soul of the American University, historian George Marsden asserted that religious faith does indeed have a place in today’s academia. Marsden’s contention sparked a heated debate on the role of religious faith and intellectual scholarship in academic journals and in the mainstream media. The contributors to Confessing History: Explorations in Christian Faith and the Historian’s Vocation expand the discussion about religion’s role in education and culture and examine what the relationship between faith and learning means for the academy today.

The contributors to Confessing History ask how the vocation of historian affects those who are also followers of Christ. What implications do Christian faith and practice have for living out one’s calling as an historian? And to what extent does one’s calling as a Christian disciple speak to the nature, quality, or goals of one’s work as scholar, teacher, adviser, writer, community member, or social commentator? Written from several different theological and professional points of view, the essays collected in this volume explore the vocation of the historian and its place in both the personal and professional lives of Christian disciples.


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Publié par
Date de parution 15 novembre 2010
Nombre de lectures 0
EAN13 9780268079895
Langue English
Poids de l'ouvrage 2 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,6250€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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C ONFESSING H ISTORY
C ONFESSING H ISTORY

Explorations in Christian Faith and the Historian s Vocation
Edited by
J OHN F EA , J AY G REEN, AND E RIC M ILLER
Univerity of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
www.undpress.nd.edu
All Rights Reserved
Copyright 2010 by University of Notre Dame
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Confessing history : explorations in Christian faith and the historian s vocation / edited by John Fea, Jay Green, and Eric Miller.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-268-02903-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-268-02903-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. History-Religious aspects-Christianity.
2. Christian historians-Intellectual life.
I. Fea, John. II. Green, Jay (Jay D.) III. Miller, Eric, 1966-
BR115.H5C59 2010
261.5-dc22 2010024242
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources .
ISBN 9780268079895
This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at ebooks@nd.edu .
To John D. Woodbridge, Christian historian
C ONTENTS
Preface
Introduction
A Tradition Renewed? The Challenge of a Generation
ERIC MILLER
Part One
IDENTITY
One
Faith Seeking Historical Understanding
MARK R. SCHWEHN
Two
Not All Autobiography Is Scholarship: Thinking, as a Catholic, about History
UNA M. CADEGAN
Three
Seeing Things: Knowledge and Love in History
BETH BARTON SCHWEIGER
Part Two
THEORY AND METHOD
Four
Virtue Ethics and Historical Inquiry: The Case of Prudence
THOMAS ALBERT HOWARD
Five
The Objectivity Question and the Historian s Vocation
WILLIAM KATERBERG
Six
Enlightenment History, Objectivity, and the Moral Imagination
MICHAEL KUGLER
Seven
On Assimilating the Moral Insights of the Secular Academy
BRADLEY J. GUNDLACH
Eight
After Monographs: A Critique of Christian Scholarship as Professional Practice
CHRISTOPHER SHANNON
Nine
The Problems of Preaching through History
JAMES B. LAGRAND
Part Three
COMMUNITIES
Ten
Coming to Terms with Lincoln: Christian Faith and Moral Reflection in the History Classroom
JOHN FEA
Eleven
For Teachers to Live, Professors Must Die: A Sermon on the Mount
LENDOL CALDER
Twelve
Public Reasoning by Historical Analogy: Some Christian Reflections
JAY GREEN
Thirteen
Don t Forget the Church: Reflections on the Forgotten Dimension of our Dual Calling
ROBERT TRACY MCKENZIE
Fourteen
On the Vocation of Historians to the Priesthood of Believers: A Plea to Christians in the Academy
DOUGLAS A. SWEENEY
Afterword
The Christian Historian and the Idea of Progress
WILFRED M. MCCLAY
Contributors
Index
P REFACE
One of the richest and most compelling theological concepts in the Christian tradition is that of calling . The Hebrew Scriptures and New Testament bear witness to the ways in which God calls his people into covenant relationship, to repentance, to holiness, and to special service in the Kingdom. Christian notions of calling, of vocation, also encompass the divine ordination of all lawful work into which men and women may serve, and the theological import of work itself. Especially with the latter meaning in view, the contributors to this volume have gathered here to ask what the vocation of historian might mean for those who are also followers of Christ. What implications do Christian faith and practice have for living out one s calling as an historian? And to what extent does one s calling as a Christian disciple speak to the nature, quality, or goals of one s work as scholar, teacher, adviser, writer, community member, or social commentator? Written from several different theological and professional points of view, the essays contained in this book constitute a free-ranging conversation about the vocation of the historian and its place in both the personal lives of Christian disciples and Christ s Kingdom at large.
In one sense, the preceding description of this volume seems simple and straightforward. But we know that a book of this stripe violates many of the standing and long-cherished conventions of professional history on at least two levels. First, most practicing historians still unofficially believe that matters of personal conviction and identity act as pollutants in the time-honored quest to tell true stories about the past. After more than twenty-five years of postmodern theory and forty years of identity politics, the historian s craft as practiced in the trenches remains a conventionally scientific one in its tone and temper. It s one thing to have personal identities and convictions; it s quite another to put these matters on display or to profess them as motivations for one s work.
On a second, deeper level, expressing the very humanness of the historian s craft is sure to elicit even greater suspicion when the stated identities and beliefs in question are religious in nature. We each undertook Ph.D. studies in the mid-1990s, a period that will undoubtedly be remembered for generating a kind of postmodern-inspired glasnost toward religious viewpoints in the academy. As devout believers interested in exploring the theological significance of our work as historians, we took courage from the bold discussions of religious advocacy and the outrageous idea of Christian Scholarship that were so widely heralded during our years of graduate training. 1 But after a decade of murderous religious fanaticism and an American president whose reputation for intellectual incuriosity and reckless foreign policy are regularly attributed to his Christian beliefs, academic tolerance toward religious categories may be reaching its limits. Rather than granting that religious commitment must be a shill for a theocratic conspiracy or the seed of anti-intellectual bigotry, we urge readers to judge the essays that follow on their own merits and, moreover, to consider the possibility that explorations of faith and scholarship have something meaningful to contribute to the wider academic conversation.
Historians of the Reformed theological heritage were the vanguard in making connections between history (and scholarship more broadly) and Christian faith, and have subsequently shaped most contemporary discussions on the relationship between Christianity and the historian s task. These scholars, led by George Marsden, Ronald Wells, and Mark Noll, have argued that the theological presuppositions (or background commitments) of all historians will variously inform their understandings of the past, and studying the past becomes distinctly Christian as faith and scholarship are thoughtfully integrated with one another. 2 While this position has been enormously fruitful, and the editors of this volume remain sympathetic with it, our book seeks to expand this conversation in significant ways.
Using vocation as our organizing principle has freed our contributors to think more broadly about the variety of ways that historians might be called by God to conceive of and conduct their work. The Reformed integrative strategy has tended to give exclusive attention to the ideational implications of the historian s worldview for historical research and writing. While this important dimension of Christian faith is by no means ignored in the essays that follow, the broader appeal of vocation enables authors to focus also on the different way historians connect their faith to their callings as in the varied roles they play: as teachers, church members, cultural critics, public citizens, and professional members of the academy. Such explorations consider the multi-layered identities of the historian, the place of moral inquiry in historical study, the social responsibilities of the historian in contemporary society, and the personal tensions that sometimes express themselves among callings to the academy, to the state, to their families, and to their churches.
In the undertow of Christian scholarship over the past twenty-five years, a number of voices have risen in protest to the ways that the Reformed paradigm has purportedly eclipsed alternate ways of thinking about the relationship between Christianity and academic life. 3 The vocational emphasis of this volume acknowledges these concerns, and serves to open the conversation to explorations of history as conceived among a variety of Reformed and non-Reformed Christian traditions. We believe this broadened conversation is evident in the essays that follow. Since no two Christian traditions interpret the meaning of vocation in exactly the same way, its broad application among a variety of theological and ecclesiastical traditions makes it an uncommonly fertile gathering place for thinking about the implications of Christianity for a faith-oriented life in history. We are only moderately interested in fostering the standing criticism of Reformed strategies, but we hope that the various Catholic, Lutheran, Episcopalian, and broadly evangelical, as well as Presbyterian and Dutch Calvinist, voices in this volume will illustrate that the conversation about Christian scholarship in history is a richly divergent one.
While it is true that notions of calling among all contributors to this volume have been, to one degree or another, shaped by both our respective local churches and our academic institutions, it is important that we here explicitly recognize a strategic hybrid institution that has played no small role in bringing us into conversation with one another. The Conference on Faith and History (CFH) is an interdenominational academic organization founded in 1968 for the purpose of providing fellowship, a venue for scholarship, and a space for conversation among Christians interested in e

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