The outrageous idea of Christian scholarship

by George M. Marsden

This book is a thought-provoking text on the relationship between religious faith and intellectual scholarship. The book argues that mainstream American higher education needs to be more open to explicit expressions of faith and to accept what faith means in an intellectual context. The book points out that while other defining elements of a scholar's identity, such as race or gender, are routinely taken into consideration, the perspective of the believing Christian is dismissed as irrelevant or antithetical to scholarly enterprise. The book rebuts the various arguments commonly given for excluding religious viewpoints, such as the argument that faith is insufficiently empirical for scholarly pursuits, the fear that traditional Christianity will reassert its historical role as oppressor of divergent views, and the received dogma of the separation of church and state, which stretches far beyond the actual law in the popular imagination. The book argues that scholars have both a religiou