Our series “What is good scholarship?” has examined nine aspects* of God’s created order in which we can discern norms – different kinds of “goods”. We believe these norms are recognised to varying degrees by everyone, thanks to God’s grace.
In this post I want to show how faith lies at the heart of scholarship – perhaps in some ways that we hadn’t thought of before. I also want to explain why faith comes as the final virtue in our series ‘What is good scholarship?’
This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. … Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. (1 John 4:9,11)
The fact that Christians put a strong emphasis on justice is nothing new. At my church we’re currently working through Amos in our home groups. Amos surveys the surrounding lands and finds great injustices occurring there. He notices that injustices are occurring in (i) the law courts (Amos 2:6), (ii) the market place (Amos 2:7), (iii) the bedroom (Amos 2:7) and (iv) religious temples (Amos 2:8). They’re all areas where justice is not being done; areas that God, so it seems, cares equally about but where His good standards are not being applied.
Popularity of FiSch blog posts plotted against their length… Are we obsessed with our economics?
Q: Why did the social scientist talk to her colleague?
A: To reveal her ontological security
OK, the one about a broken drum being the best Christmas present is a better cracker joke – in fact you just can’t beat it. However, like many jokers our social scientist does reveal something about our social interactions: academics are rarely recognised for their social virtues.
Continuing our series on values for scholarship, David Hanson looks at God’s calling for humans to innovate.
Scholarship is subject to cultural-formative norms. Humans never fabricate ex nihilo – only God does that. Yet the bringing of ‘new things’ into existence reflects God’s creative power in our calling to stewardly dominion of the world. Cooking a meal, composing music, writing a nation’s constitution: all respond to this calling.
Our series on “good scholarship” has so far considered the logical and lingual aspects of reality. Here I want to explore a particular kind of offence against principles of both logical distinction and lingual clarification.
Have you ever thought of clarity as a virtue? In the last post, Roy Clouser started our series on intellectual virtues by explaining the importance of the ‘logical’ or ‘analytical’ aspect of reality for scholarship. Clarity is a norm (a kind of goodness) that presupposes the norm of distinguishing logically; once we have good distinctions, we should seek to communicate these clearly. But why should Christians have anything to say about these basic norms?