For many of us, Easter has strong associations with studying. The Easter holiday is the one you won’t really get if you’re coming up to big exams, because Easter term is exam term. Easter also comes when preparations for end-of-year performances and summer sporting events step up a gear. In some of the most intense years of our lives, Easter can seem to be brushed aside by ambition.
Posts by Richard Gunton
For many people, “academia”, “PhD” and “scholarship” suggest intellectual pursuits, far removed from real life. If you want to change the world, don’t go and hide in an ivory tower! And some Christians would readily take Paul’s warnings against “the wisdom of this world” (e.g. 1 Corinthians 1:19-31) to be dismissive of learning in general, except perhaps for certain kinds of approved theology. So people who feel called to scholarly work – especially at postgraduate level – are sometimes seen as lost from the cause of the Church. The university may be a mission field, but why make your home as an academic in some obscure science, philosophy or sociology department where worldly wisdom is enthroned and conversions to Christianity seem very rare?
This is the title of a book by George Marsden – and it’s also the title that David Hanson took for his talk at the recent FiSch leaders’ conference. In this and the next few posts, we’ll share some of the things we heard at this conference, which took place in Leeds on 31 Jan – 1 Feb.
This blog is a space where a team of us – the FiSch Fellows and some friends – will be exploring how Christian faith can affect academic work and life. And you, dear reader, are invited to join in!