Athens, Jerusalem, and Places in Between: Secular Learning and Christian Faith in Historical Perspective

Author's preface: This novella-length essay began life as an introductory chapter in the draft version of a text on pedagogical practices in church-related higher education. The project was made possible by a $25,000 grant received by the author in 1996 from what was then known as the Lilly Fellows Program in Humanities and the Arts (now the Lilly Network of Church-Related Colleges and Universities). Fordham University Press expressed interest in publishing the book but required that the opening chapter be shortened considerably. Consequently, what eventually became Teaching as an Act of Faith: Theory and Practice in Church-Related Higher Education (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002) contained a much-abbreviated twenty-three-page version of the original essay titled “An Odyssey of the Mind and Spirit.” The chapter included key aspects of the original seventy plus page manuscript, but although the main thesis and some of the supporting evidence remained, I always hoped an audience for the full study could be found. The vast majority of research for the chapter took place in the mid to late 1990s and reflects with a significant degree of accuracy the breadth of secondary scholarship on the germane issues at that time, although my basic argument remains somewhat unique and is not unchallenged. To do justice to the current state of scholarship and update the bibliography on the topics I address in the essay would take me away from other pressing endeavors, and frankly I am on to other projects in my retirement years and do not have the ambition to do so. Scholars such as Charles Taylor, Douglas and Rhonda Hustedt Jacobsen, Alasdair MacIntyre, Brad Gregory, John Schmalzbauer, Kathleen A. Mahoney, Paul Griffiths, and Leon Kass among many others have added much to the debate I engage in these pages and should be consulted for the reader to be fully apprised of the contemporary contours of the relevant matters. Although now a bit dated, the 2017 issue of Intellectual History Review 27: 1 analyzed various issues surrounding the debate over secularization and would be helpful to consult. The controversies swirling around the enterprise of higher education have also evolved beyond the secularization question over the past quarter century to include disputes over diversity, equity, and inclusion, distance/online learning, the impact of AI technologies, and the rise of the Christian polytechnic university. Even though early twenty-first century scholarship has introduced newer perspectives on some of the issues developed in the essay and raised others pertinent to it, I do believe that interested educated laypersons and scholars wading into the history and culture of higher education in the West, should find enough in the pages that follow to whet their appetite for deeper inquiry.