Bringing Discipleship and Scholarship Together-Part One

If there is one thing about the graduate school context that I wish more people would understand, it is that graduate school is a powerfully formative experience. Going to grad school isn’t just about information–it is about formation–shaping you into a person who is part of the “academic guild” or a member of a particular profession, like law.

Graduate school is a powerfully immersive experience. You are embedded in a disciplinary community. You are not only engaged in a process of intellectual formation but you are being inducted into the practices, values, and worldview that undergirds your discipline. Furthermore, the social norms and social acceptance of peers and especially advisers who can further or block your career progress have a powerful formative effect.

And much of this is good. Whether it is training in rigorous research protocols or best practices in surgical technique or legal reasoning–all of this prepares one to perform in their calling with a level of excellence, integrity, and skill that serves a much wider good.

What I think is critical for Christ-followers (and equally for other religious adherents from multi-faith conversations I’ve been a part of) is understanding the power of this formative community and where its beliefs and worldview may clash with one’s most deeply held beliefs. It could be the metaphysical (as opposed to methodological) naturalism embraced by many in science and engineering. It could be the results-oriented pragmatism that may inform fields as disparate as public policy and business. Or it may just be an indifference that considers faith nice but irrelevant.

Sadly, I’ve witnessed the corrosive effect this has even on those who have been leaders of undergrad Christian communities (reflecting those with whom I’m most familiar). Some may say that if their faith could not stand up to the rigor of grad school and the intellectual challenges, then it is fitting that they should abandon their faith as youthful delusion.

In theory I would agree except that I know scholars in every area of the university who have not turned from their faith–Christian or otherwise–but rather have gone deeper into it as they’ve pursued their scholarship. All all of them deluded? Perhaps, but it seems to me that this is too facile and dismissive.

So what makes the difference between those who I would say “assimilate” into the prevailing assumptions of their discipline and those who “constructively engage” their disciplines while going deeper in their faith? James K.A. Smith, in Desiring the Kingdom speaks of the importance of “thick” formative practices to counter socially pervasive practices in the broader culture. These are communally supported and personally embraced “habits of faithfulness” that reflect and sustain one’s beliefs. These cannot be a retreat into a kind of personal pietism that divorces the sacred from the secular but rather a constellation of practices that sustain both spiritual and intellectual vitality as well as a posture of hospitable participation in one’s disciplinary or professional community.

In tomorrow’s post, I will explore what “thick formative practices” I believe can sustain the constructive engagement of Christ-followers in their disciplinary or professional contexts.