I’m teaching research writing this semester, and part of that class is to introduce students to what it means to be part of the scholarly community. It’s kind of hard to explain what that means, especially to students who are in their first year of college. The distinction between high school and college is still emerging to them and the idea of “scholarliness” is still undefined.

I’m not even sure I know how to define what it means to be part of the scholarly community, let alone to be a Christian in that community (as opposed to being a scholar in the Christian community, which has real value but is quite a different activity).

But I’ve found a few resources to help me in those questions, and I wanted to pass them along to you.

The first comes from a professor in the program from which I just graduated at NYU. A student posed the question to him: “What is good scholarship?” After consulting with other members of the department, he wrote a two-part reply on the department’s blog. While it doesn’t address the “Christian” side of our question, it’s quite useful for understanding what it means to a productive, responsible member of the scholarly community.  You can read both Part 1 and Part 2. Here’s an excerpt:

To find your way, you’ll need a sense of balance between an openness to the world and a suspicion of its honesty, between faith in the reality of knowledge and skepticism that anything can be truly known, between construction and deconstruction. At the same time, you’ll want to rely on your ability to be creative. That doesn’t always mean coming up with a dramatically new argument or composing a revolutionary piece of literature. Most enduring knowledge builds by increments on what’s come before and the majority of scholarship—even some of the best—is more methodical than grandiose. There is creativity in finding (and recognizing) a new and valuable source of information, in saying things in subtly new ways that open up novel routes of thought and research, and in combining existing ideas in unexpected constellations.

To address the “Christian” side of this, the always-thoughtful Nicolas Wolterstorff delivered a talk at the Veritas Forum last fall that InterVarsity’s Emerging Scholars Network posted on their website.

I think of the various academic disciplines very differently. I think of them as social practices, some, like philosophy, with a long ancestry, some, like molecular biology, of recent origin. And I think of these practices as constantly changing due to all sorts of developments both inside and outside the discipline. I hold, thus, that natural science does not have an essence, nor does philosophy. What they have instead is traditions that are constantly changing, sometimes slowly, sometimes abruptly.

The application relevant to our topic is this: the Christian scholar participates as Christian in those social practices that are the disciplines. Those practices are not a project of the Christian community, nor are they the project of some anti-Christian community. They are human; they belong to all of us together – just as the state is not for Christians nor for non-Christians but for all of us together.

And now to make my opening point again: the mode of the Christian’s participation in these on-going, ever-changing, social practices is to think with a Christian mind and to speak with a Christian voice.

So, what do you think?