Faith and Knowledge: Mainline Protestantism and American Higher Education

by Douglas Sloan

Douglas Stone explores the impact that the Protestant theological renaissance (1925-1960) had on colleges and universities. He focuses on the way the churches did, and did not, deal effectively with this faith-knowledge situation.

Genres: Christian

252 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 1994

Reviews

[Ted Newell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely eye opening. Sloan has a story to tell: the story of how an organized attempt to restore Christian faith to higher education (the toughest place to do so in Western culture)dating from the late 1930s finally failed by the middle 1960s. Not to be able to make a convincing difference within mainstream higher education is to be relegated to cultural vulnerability and marginalization. Sloan moves his story along briskly. Various campus groups have chaplains to believing Christian students -- Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox -- but perspectives from C, P, or O scholars are rarely taken seriously by professors. The reason is not all that professors are scoffers, contrary to what some might think. Sloan traces the failure of the effort to restore orthodox Trinitarian Christianity to intellectual respectability ultimately to a flawed theory of knowledge that accepted (positivist?) history's right to stand in judgment on scripture. I ate this book.