Rhonda and Douglas “Jake” Jacobsen, professors at Messiah College in Grantham, Pennsylvania, are spending the Spring 2010 semester as distinguished visiting scholars at Pepperdine University. Together, they have co-authored Scholarship and Christian Faith: Enlarging the Conversation (2004) andThe American University in a Postsecular Age (2008).
Their new book, The New Soul of the American University, is part of the Religion in
the Academy project, a major research initiative funded by the Lilly Endowment. The
project aims to advance higher education’s engagement with religion by developing
a new and comprehensive framework for understanding religion and its relationship
to college and university learning.
Rhonda and Jake sat down with Michael Williams, assistant professor of information
systems at the Graziadio School of Business and Management and interim director of
Pepperdine’s Center for Faith and Learning, to discuss their current project and key
issues addressed in their work.
You can find the full interview and more info about the Jacobsens at magazine.pepperdine.edu/religion-in-the-academy.
RELIGION IN THE ACADEMY PROJECT
JAKE: We’ve been talking to educational leaders in different capacities about what’s happening
with regard to religion, spirituality, and questions of meaning and purpose on their
campuses; how they’re handling those issues and what types of programs they are developing.
We’ve talked to people from community colleges, we’ve spent time at Harvard and MIT
and everywhere in between. We are trying to discover what questions the current generation
of students is asking—and what kinds of educational resources they need in order to
become leaders and intelligent citizens in a world that is increasingly religiously
diverse.
RHONDA: About 15 years ago a very well-known scholar named George Marsden wroteThe Soul of the American University, in which he observed and described the secularization of the American university.
In the 19th century and into the 20th century there had been an assumption of Christian
principles undergirding many universities—public, secular, private, and religious—and
in the latter part of the 20th century that was lost. What we’re describing is the
contemporary university interaction with religion that is broader than Christianity,
though Christianity certainly remains a major part of the conversation.
GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY
JAKE: Scholar Phillip Jenkins, for example, talks about the “southernization” of Christianity.
I tend to think and talk more in terms of an emerging flatness—in the same sense which
Thomas Freidman uses that term—of Christianity, where North America, Europe, Latin
America, Africa, and Asia all have very important things to contribute to the global
conversation on Christianity.
I think this is connected to higher education in two ways: first, Christian or not,
it’s important to understand that Christianity is the largest religion in the world.
A third of the world’s population is Christian and if you’re going to understand other
parts of the world, you need to understand that there is Christianity in those parts
too, especially in Africa and Latin America. Second, knowledge of other religions
is also very important, and studying any and all of our religions and cultures in
global perspective is crucial. For American Christians especially, understanding the
questions and issues that other Christians face around the world, I think, helps put
our issues into perspective. Hopefully that will help people to back off from some
of the fights that we think are so important. Viewed with a global perspective, they
may not be of all that great significance.
PUBLIC, PERSONAL, AND HISTORIC RELIGION
RHONDA: What we’re trying to communicate is that simply lumping everything into one “religion”
category and not distinguishing between different uses of the term can sometimes get
people talking past one another. So when we talk about historic religion, we’re talking
about communal religion, communities, churches, and traditions that are longstanding.
Public religion relates to civic engagement, national and international loyalties,
and the big picture of how we connect publicly together. Personal religion focuses
on how a person expresses religious convictions or owns certain religious perspectives
as an individual. Sometimes personal religion is equated with spirituality, but I
would hope that we could also identify personal religion with deeply communal practices
of religion. Our concern is not to separate spirituality and religion, but to look
at the interaction between the two.
JAKE: A lot of people in higher education are much more comfortable with “spirituality.”
Often spirituality is intensely private and in the moment, which can apply to religion
as well, but religion is also something that has been handed down generation to generation
and is embodied in communities. That context really enriches, or has the potential
to enrich, the kinds of conversation that are religious in the biggest sense of that
term.
TRADITION-ENHANCED LEARNING
RHONDA: We are hoping to encourage different church traditions to identify their own strengths
and the contributions they might make to the national conversation. How they could
say: ”This is something we’re nurturing on behalf of our community in order to contribute
to the larger academic world and to the common good.” So it isn’t an “us against them,”
not “my kind of Christianity vs. the rest of the world,” but instead it would be a
way of saying “here’s what my community is especially nurturing and we’re offering
it as a gift for the common good.”
JAKE: We think that one of the best ways of learning what you yourself think is to be able
to bounce your ideas off some other coherent understanding of the world. One of the
great gifts that religious traditions could give to higher education is to allow students
to have that insight. This doesn’t mean that church-related schools need to accentuate
their own tradition in a way that seemingly demands that students have to adopt it,
but it can be a focus that allows students to define themselves in support of, in
agreement with, or in disagreement with it. That kind of focus can help them define
their own profile of beliefs and values, perhaps more clearly.
We also think it’s generally helpful to have more, different kinds of perspectives
rather than fewer. Just as in the natural world we talk about keeping the biological
diversity of the planet alive, there’s a sense in which theological diversity is important
to maintain as well—not as a means of arguing with each other, but because different
theological traditions give us different lenses for looking at the world.