This title offers a look at how Baptists have formed and sustained scholarly life in America.
The Scholarly Vocation and the Baptist Academy: Essays on the Future of Baptist Higher Education
is the product of a group of Baptist scholars interested in critically examining the history, challenges, and possibilities of a scholarly life in the Baptist Academy. The underwriting project is assessing the fruitfulness of a notion like the ‘Baptist Academy’ for their self-understanding and institutional identity. Authors include Thomas Kidd, Adam English, Stephen Chapman, Chad Eggleston, Doug Henry, Barry Harvey, Elizabeth Newman, Roger Ward, Scott Moore, David Gushee, and Paul Fiddes. Baptists and the intellectual establishment have often been at odds, as Paul Fiddes notes in his examination of Matthew Arnold’s
Culture and Anarchy , which criticizes non-conformists as dismissive of high culture, jealous of an established religion, and advocating a morality of ‘doing your own thing’. The voices of the young scholars in the Baptist Academy challenge the prevailing metaphors of the academy in their respective disciplines with a variety of arguments and observations that illuminate the continuing vitality of communities of learning and communities of scholars called into a covenantal understanding of themselves and the world.