Faith and Learning on the Edge

By David Claerbaut

Subjects: Church and college, Postmodernism and education, Postmodernism and higher education

Description: The faith community includes some of the most brilliant minds in academe. Yet many have felt compelled to check their faith at the doors of our educational institutions. Intimidated by a daunting amalgam of naturalism and postmodernism, they have been silenced by secularists' insistence that faith has no place in the quest for knowledge. In Faith and Learning on the Edge, David Claerbaut refutes this fallacy. He shows how those who espouse a values-neutral approach to knowledge and research fail to live up to their own standard. In capitulating to them by separating faith from learning, Christians abdicate their responsibility toward both higher education and the culture at large. Believers must reintegrate their faith as a crucial component of learning, insists the author, and he explores ways in which this can be accomplished. Examining the worldviews that govern contemporary research and academe, Claerbaut unmasks the often vehement, sometimes subtle, disdain toward Christian thinking in both mainline universities and Christian institutions. More than that, he shows why believers who step in to fill the deep need for such thinking stand on firm intellectual ground -- indeed, have the advantage in terms of fact and reason. And he considers how to apply a faith-and-learning approach across a broad spectrum of disciplines in the physical sciences, the arts and humanities, and the behavioral sciences. - Publisher.