Christianity and Intellectual Inquiry

Thinking as Pilgrimage

Douglas Jacobsen, Rhonda Hustedt Jacobsen (Autoren)

Buch | Hardcover

232 Seiten

2025
Oxford University Press Inc (Verlag)
978-0-19-782034-6 (ISBN)

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America has entered a new intellectual era in which personal identity is assumed to play a significant role in how every person thinks. Today's academy acknowledges that who we are shapes how we view ourselves and the world, which unavoidably injects religion, spirituality, secularity, and faith-a person's deepest convictions, commitment, hopes, fears, and loyalties-into the thinking process. The new emphasis on individual identity has made academic methodologies broader and more multifaceted, enlarging the pursuit of truth but sometimes leading to unsupported and false claims about reality.

Christianity and Intellectual Inquiry focuses specifically on how American Christians are trying to negotiate this new terrain. The first section of the book recounts the long, complex, and diverse history of Christian reflection on the connections between faith and learning. The second section analyses the past 150 years of American thinking, tracing the changing intellectual paradigms that governed how all Americans reflect on reality and describing how Christians made their ways through the evolving landscape. The third and final section proposes a new way of understanding intellectual inquiry that is relevant for thinkers of all religious and secular persuasions and minimizes the potential for identity-informed thinking to go astray: thinking as pilgrimage.

Pilgrimage thinking recognizes that faith of some kind plays a role in how everyone tries to understand and make sense of reality while also insisting that religious convictions and markers of personal identity are not beyond critique. Thinking as pilgrimage is not dependent on one all-encompassing cognitive orientation but instead encourages a range of approaches to reality. Four specific intellectual pathways are discussed in detail: attentiveness, contemplation, proclamation, and compassion. Both American higher education and Christianity use all four cognitive pathways, and each path is a shared space where people who are seeking a better understanding of reality can challenge and learn from each other.

Douglas Jacobsen (Ph.D., University of Chicago) is a scholar in the field of religious studies and Rhonda Hustedt Jacobsen (Ed.D., Temple University), is a psychologist and scholar of higher education. Together they co-direct the Religion in the Academy Project, and their innovative work has enhanced teaching and scholarship at colleges and universities around the world. This is their fourth book with Oxford University Press.

Introduction
Part I. Intellectual Inquiry in Christian History
Chapter 1: Faith and Learning in the Roman and Persian Empires
Chapter 2: Faith and Learning in Four Christian Communities
PART II. Americaâs Shifting Intellectual Terrain
Chapter 3: Epistemological Universalism
Chapter 4: Cognitive Pluralism
Chapter 5: An Age of Identity
PART III. Intellectual Pilgrimage in an Age of Identity
Chapter 6: Intellectual Pilgrimage
Chapter 7: The Pathway of Attentiveness
Chapter 8: The Pathway of Contemplation
Chapter 9: The Pathway of Proclamation
Chapter 10: The Pathway of Compassion
Conclusion: Christianity, Intellectual Inquiry, and the Marketplace of Ideas

Erscheinungsdatum	17.10.2025
Verlagsort	New York
Sprache	englisch
Maße	165 x 229 mm
Gewicht	476 g
Themenwelt	Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Religionsgeschichte
	Religion / Theologie ► Christentum ► Kirchengeschichte
	Religion / Theologie ► Christentum ► Moraltheologie / Sozialethik
	Religion / Theologie ► Christentum ► Religionspädagogik / Katechetik
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Pädagogik ► Allgemeines / Lexika
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Pädagogik ► Bildungstheorie
ISBN-10	0-19-782034-4 / 0197820344
ISBN-13	978-0-19-782034-6 / 9780197820346
Zustand	Neuware