Graduate Roundtable
Spring 2012 – “Framing the Work: Toward a Religious Understanding of Scholarship”
What does it mean to root one’s academic work in a religious tradition? To many, this sounds like an unnecessary mixing of categories, at best, and an inappropriate invocation of religion, at worst. Can there really be connections between a scholar’s religious identity and her work? In the Christian tradition, there is a centuries-long tradition of applying theological frameworks to the existential questions which emerge from human experience. But for many Christians in late modernity, having suffered from too many false dichotomies, it isn’t natural 1) to think of the Christian tradition as an intellectual one which contains a body of knowledge or 2) to see Christian faith as anything other than a means to personal piety. In this reading group for graduate students at UF, we will look at what it means to frame academic work with Christian understanding. With such an understanding, the hope is not only to make connections between religious identity and scholarship, but to consider the qualitative difference it can make to place one’s scholarship within a Christian framework.
Mondays at 12:30 in Study Center Classroom
Jan. 30, Feb. 27, March 19, April 9
Full Semester Schedule:
January 30 – Rowan Williams – “Faith, Reason, and Quality Assurance – Having Faith in Academic Life”
Gregory Wolfe – “Thirty Seconds Away”
February 27 – Chapters 10 and 11 of “The Passionate Intellect: Incarnational Humanism and the Future of University Education” by Norman Klassen and Jens Zimmerman
March 19 – “Studying Christian Theology in the Secular University” by Paul A. Macdonald, Jr.
April 9 – Richard T. Hughes on “The Vocation of a Christian Scholar”