Document Type
Article
Publication Title
The Craft of Christian Higher Education
Abstract
Although “the integration of faith and learning” quite rightly promotes holistic Christian higher education, the language itself may suggest two separate spheres that must be combined, thus subtly reinforcing the very dualism the phrase seeks to overcome. Understanding Christian higher education as a craft, situated within a tradition that extends historically across cultures but that is also locally inflected, counterbalances the abstract notion of “integration” by re-positioning our academic work as skilled labor. “Craft” focuses our attention on tradition, apprenticeship, well-chosen materials and tools, and artifacts, creating an image that can help to transform the modern university into an inculturated, faithfully Christian academic endeavor.
First Page
Visions of Christian Higher Education In her succinct and helpful book Joining the Mission: A Guide for (Mainly) New College Faculty (2011), Susan VanZanten, a professor at Seattle Pacific University in the United States, makes this claim: “The most distinctive aspect of the mission-driven college or university is the fact that Christian faith is a crucial part of its educational enterprise” (p. 97). Few would disagree with this statement, but it does raise a further question: “What exactly does it mean for faith to play a crucial part in the educational enterprise?” Neither the claim nor the question, however, would have occurred to anyone teaching in an institution of higher learning within Global Christendom before the nineteenth century. From the third-century Catechetical School of Alexandria (known as the Didascalium), to the ninth-century Ohrid Literary School in Bulgaria, to the eleventh-century Oxford University in England, to the University of San Ignacio in the Philippines founded in 1590, faculty and students would simply have assumed that faith was integral to learning. It is only with the rise of the modern university and its separation of faith
Last Page
on Christian Higher Education (pp. 64-86). Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Xing Ling and Susan M. Felch. (2011). Selected Readings of Bible Stories / 圣经故事选读. Kunming: Yunnan University Press. Yang, Huilin. (2014). China, Christianity, and the Question of Culture. (M. E. Sharpe Inc. and others, Trans.). Waco, TX: Baylor University Press. Author Biography Susan M. Felch is Professor of English at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan, and director of the Calvin Center for Christian Scholarship. She is the Executive Editor for the Tyndale Project and has published numerous articles and chapters on a variety of topics. Her book publications include The Collected Works of Anne Vaughan Lock (RETS, 1999); Bakhtin and Religion: A Feeling for Faith (Northwestern UP, 2001) with Paul J. Contino; Elizabeth Tyrwhit’s Morning and Evening Prayers (Ashgate, 2008); Elizabeth I and Her Age, with Donald Stump (Norton, 2009); Selected Readings of Bible Stories / 圣经故事选读, with Xing Ling (Yunnan UP, 2011); Teaching and Christian Imagination (Eerdmans, 2016) with David I. Smith; and The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Religion (Cambridge UP, 2016).
Publication Date
2018
Recommended Citation
“The Craft of Christian Higher Education,” in Christian Mind in the Emerging World: Academic Faith Integration in Asian Contexts from a Global Perspective, edited by Peter Ng. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018. 380-400.