Report on the Fifth Meeting of the

Lilly Seminar on Religion and Higher Education

Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California
May 14-16, 1999

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Lilly Seminar Members in Attendance:
Nancy Ammerman (Hartford Seminary)
Richard J. Bernstein (New School for Social Research)
Denis Donoghue (New York University)
James L. Heft, S.M. (University of Dayton)
Monika Hellwig (Executive Director, Assoc. of Catholic Colleges & Universities)
David Hollinger (UC Berkeley)
Richard Hughes (Pepperdine University)
Eugene Y. Lowe, Jr. (Northwestern University)
Richard Mouw (Fuller Theological Seminary)
Mark Noll (Wheaton College)
Francis Oakley (Williams College)
Mark Schwehn (Valparaiso University)
Peter Steinfels (Religion Editor, New York Times)
James Turner (University of Notre Dame)
Frank Turner (Yale University)
Diane Winston (Center for the Study of American Religion)
Alan Wolfe (Boston University)
Nicholas Wolterstorff (The Divinity School, Yale University)
Robert Wuthnow (Princeton University)

Seminar Members Unable to Attend:
Michael Beaty (Baylor University)
Allan Boesak
Barbara DeConcini (Executive Director, American Academy of Religion)
Craig Dykstra (Lilly)
Jean Bethke Elshtain (The Divinity School, University of Chicago)
Philip Gleason (University of Notre Dame)
Nathan Hatch (University of Notre Dame)
Stephen Haynes (Rhodes College)
Jeanne Knoerle, S.P. (Lilly)
Douglas Sloan (Teachers College, Columbia University)
Eleonore Stump (St. Louis University)

Guests:
Clarke Cochran (Texas Tech University)
Serene Jones (The Divinity School, Yale University)
George Marsden (The University of Notre Dame)

Lilly Seminar Staff:
Donna Ring
Andrea Sterk
 
 
 

 SESSION I - FRIDAY AFTERNOON
 

  Before commencing the first meeting of the third and final year of the Lilly Seminar, Richard Mouw, Seminar member & president of Fuller Theological Seminary, welcomed participants to Fuller and gave a brief introduction to the institution and its history.
 The theme of our meeting was "Scholarship Grounded in Religion", and Jim Turner explained that our purpose was to consider whether scholarship can have a substantial relationship to religion other than taking it as an object of study.  In other words, can a person's personal convictions or religious tradition or experience provide some kind of legitimate & useful basis for scholarly work?  The topic was deliberately stated in rather vague terms in order to leave the discussion as open-ended as possible.  The Friday session would consider the bearing of personal conviction & attitudes on scholarship while Saturday would be devoted to the influence of religious traditions on scholarship.
 

Presentation #1:  Nick Wolterstorff, The Divinity School, Yale University

 Nick explained that Jim Turner had suggested he talk about the influence of Abraham Kuyper on American evangelical scholarship.  That is actually to talk more about a tradition than about personal attitudes, but Nick thought it would be useful nonetheless.  He began with a quote from a recent article of Turner's called "The Evangelical Mind" (included among several articles Seminar members had received prior to the meeting) in which Jim had explained that while American evangelicalism as a movement seemed to rest on rather feeble intellectual traditions, it had in recent decades produced a distinguished cohort of scholars.  Nick suggested that this flowering of evangelical scholarship was not based on feeble intellectual traditions but arose due to the influence of the turn-of-the-century Dutchman, Abraham Kuyper, transmitted in good measure through Calvin College.  According to Nick, in the last quarter century there have been 2 major intellectual traditions influencing Christian academics: neo-Thomism & the neo-Calvinism of Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920).  He proposed to outline the main lines of Kuyper's thought on the intellectual life, to speculate on why it has proved so influential, and to offer some of his own qualifications & criticisms along the way.
 Following a biographical sketch of the polymath’s career (which ranged from parish ministry to establishing the Free University of Amsterdam & serving as the Dutch prime minister for 4 years), Nick presented 5 characteristic features of the Reformed tradition, especially the Dutch Reformed tradition, which have been influential in the U.S. by way of Kuyper's transmission of them:
 1. The Calvinist/Reformed tradition has never shied away from theology nor from learning in general.  What has appealed to many evangelicals is the virtually complete absence of an anti intellectual attitude in this tradition & a love of books.
 2. The Calvinist/Reformed tradition has almost never seen itself as a restorationist or repristination tradition, i.e. one that leaps over the Middle Ages to get back to a presumed golden age of the church.  Rather it has always seen itself as a reform movement.  Therefore, traditionally it has honored the whole tradition of Christian culture & learning.
 3. The tradition has usually not given pride of place in the Christian life to conversion but to sanctification.  It has emphasized education, bringing people up into faithful learning & action.  E.g., catechetical instruction has been stressed & there has been no emphasis whatsoever on revival meetings.
 4. The piety of the tradition has been in good measure the piety of the "God loveth adverbs" variety, a phrase Nick drew from the title of a chapter in Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self.  One's piety is to be located primarily in how one goes about one's ordinary activities.  It is not that church & other religious activities are unimportant, but there is a profound emphasis on the how of sweeping the floors, making the candles & so forth.
 5. The attitude toward nature & toward culture has seldom been that of avoidance (i.e., stay away from it) but instead has typically been one of critical discrimination.
 While these are rather standard features of the Calvinist/Reformed tradition which have been transmitted to evangelicals, Nick moved on to what was unique in Kuyper's take on this tradition,
specifically his ideas on intellectual life.  In opposition to empiricism, which proposed use of one's indigenous capacities (reason, perception, etc.) to become aware of the facts, Kuyper emphasized the "subjective consciousness" in the development of the academic disciplines.  The goal of the disciplines is not just isolated facts but things in their "organic interrelationships".  In order to capture the organic interrelationships in reality one needs a developed subjective consciousness which is attuned to the interrelationships of the facts.  Though Kuyper believed the subjective consciousness is largely acquired by induction into an ongoing discipline, it is not only something we acquire in the discipline.  We also bring components of the subjective consciousness with us from everyday life.  He was deeply convinced that there is no hope of fully bracketing what we bring with us from life, thereby having a purely academic subjective consciousness.
 Nick acknowledged that all of this could be seen as generically Hegelian in spirit, but the decisive move on Kuyper's part was to emphasize that we live in a fallen world.  The most important manifestation of this fallenness in the academy is that the subjective consciousnesses that we bring with us to our practice of the disciplines do not nicely harmonize or complement each other.  They conflict, and many of these conflicts perpetuate themselves within the disciplines.  Hence we get Kuyper's emphasis on perspectives.  We must expect in the academy that we will find distinct perspectives at work in the disciplines.  Kuyper offered an informal typology of ways in which our fallenness, that is, our failure to share complementary perspectives, gets reflected in the academy.  Nick outlined these types & the examples Kuyper gave to illustrate each.
 Among major themes that Nick discussed was Kuyper's fondness for referring to those passages in the Gospels in which Jesus talks about conversion as rebirth--palingenesis.  This rebirth pervades one's consciousness.  Kuyper insisted adamantly that rebirth has consequences for one's thought, and not just for one's action & emotions.  Kuyper also spoke of 2 kinds of people, 2 kinds of consciousness, 2 kinds of science.  (Christianity was not just one among many consciousnesses.)  But  for several reasons Nick thinks it is both misleading for Kuyper's own thought & dangerous in its consequences for him to speak in those terms.  First, said Nick, in this kind of picture, outside of Christianity all cats are equally gray.  Second, it is dangerous to neglect the fact of commonalities, which Kuyper himself insists on.  The twoness emphasis rides roughshod over commonality.  Third, it is dangerous & misleading to suggest (without actually saying it) that Christians are always right in their disputes with other people.  And lastly it is misleading of Kuyper's thought because it ignores the point with which we began, namely the many kinds of learning.
 In conclusion Nick speculated on why Kuyper has had such an influence on American evangelicals over the past 25 years.  He described the anti-intellectualism & a particular Lockean approach to the relation between learning & religion typical of evangelicalism.  Against this background, he suggested 4 elements in Kuyper that have appealed to evangelicals:  1) Kuyper was theologically orthodox but also socially progressive, at least until he became prime minister.  2) Instead of avoidance of the intellectual life & social issues, his plea was for discrimination, i.e. for discriminating between what you want to affirm & what you want to disagree with.  3) Kuyper was socially & politically engaged to an intense degree.  4) He offered a very different model of the Christian in the academy from the Lockean 2-tier model.  His model acknowledges that we bring with us from everyday life different convictions, attitudes & emotions which play themselves out in the academy.  We have to engage in dialogue hoping for consensus but finding it ever eluding us.  It is a model which is fascinatingly contemporary in its general contours.
 Nick ended with a final criticism.  He believes that what shaped almost all of Kuyper's thought was the question:  How can one think & act with religious integrity within the structures & practices of our shared society & culture?  (Kuyper never recommended an Anabaptist "pulling out").  He cared especially about Christian integrity but also thought about how Jews & secularists could act & think with integrity in the Netherlands.  Sometimes, however, Kuyper is carried away by the influence of an expressionist model & its concomitant imagery.   Sometimes he, & especially his followers, talked as if what the Christian scholar does is "express" his or her convictions in philosophy, sociology, psychology, etc.  Some of his followers even talk of "beginning over", which Nick described as preposterous language.  No scholar begins over.  He thinks that expressionist language, as opposed to entering an ongoing practice and asking how one can act & think with integrity within it, has been calamitous among some of Kuyper's followers.
 

Presentation #2:  Richard Bernstein, The New School for Social Research

 Dick Bernstein set the context for discussing his own scholarly work by summarizing some of the points he had made at the Lilly conference at Notre Dame in March.  One session of this conference was provocatively entitled "Scholarship Grounded in Religion: Should we? How Could We?"  Obviously these are loaded questions, Dick commented.  To the question should some people in the university be doing scholarship which is grounded in religion, Dick's answer is clearly affirmative; not all people, and of course there is ambiguity about what we mean by "religion", "grounded" & "scholarship".   Nevertheless, he stands on the affirmative side because it fits with a conception of what he considers an ideal society.  If he had to give a name to his position he would call it "engaged fallibilistic pluralism".  For understanding Dick's point of view, each of those terms is essential & each qualifies the other terms.
 "Pluralism" is a term which is becoming very faddish & abused, making it very difficult to distinguish pluralism from forms of relativism.  Dick finds that any gestures toward a more pluralistic view are immediately seen in terms of incommensurable frameworks.  He is very skeptical of this notion.  Equally objectionable for him is the notion that one is caught up in a framework, a language, a cultural orientation, or whatever, and that one is locked in it like a monad.  If so, then you really can't communicate with someone who is locked up in a different kind of framework.  Though this is unfortunately the way in which most people think, Dick finds it thoroughly unsound.  The pluralism that he wants to represent is very wary of incommensurability.  He thinks that people who make the move to incommensurability are demonstrating a moral & practical failure.  It's an impatience with trying to get the imagination to really understand what is different & what is other.  If your own framework & is incommensurable with everyone else's, then no effort is needed to reach out & engage the other.
 The significance of "fallibilistic" for Dick's position lies in the fact that he rejects, whether epistemologically or in any other form, ultimate foundationalism, any claims of absolute certainty.  It isn't that we are not knowing reality & truth, he explained, but Dick would argue that the claim that one is ever in a position to say one knows something with absolute certainty is ultimately incoherent.  He thinks that this is equally applicable to general epistemological concerns as it is to religious concerns.  He would take a strong stand against all forms of fundamentalism, & he added that the worst forms of fundamentalism are secular.  Some secular forms of fundamentalism are so convinced that they have the only legitimate perspective that they will not listen, tolerate or pay any attention to any other views.
 The term "engaged" is perhaps most important for Dick because the kind of pluralism he advocates is one in which there is real encounter, a serious effort to understand what is other & different.  This is something that many people pay lip service to yet very few practice.  It's a kind of normative ideal that requires a tremendous amount of hard work & a whole series of virtues.  It requires imagination, courage, a willingness to really listen, to see what really is true in what we encounter that is different.  It is making the attempt to engage in serious dialogue.  This is an ideal, Dick admitted, but he tries to defend this ideal in a lot of his work.
 This ideal, Dick suggested, ought to govern a context of thinking about religion & scholarship.  All knowledge is in a good sense perspectival, influenced by tradition, & prejudices can be enabling as well as blinding.  There has been an Enlightenment prejudice that all prejudices are blinding & that we can somehow bracket them, but Dick thinks there is no possibility of knowledge without some kind of selectivity.  This point has been made from many different schools & approaches--by Popper, by Peirce, and so on.  In fact, he thinks it is because of prejudice or selectivity that one can frequently have a kind of sensitivity or openness, a hermeneutical perspective on certain matters.  Not just religious traditions but other kinds of traditions can make us much more sensitive to certain areas.  Dick doesn't believe there is a special Christian or a special Jewish view of the world.  However, if "grounded" [in religion] means that it’s going to lead someone to certain kinds of questions or issues where others might not be led, or to see things that others don't see, he is clearly supportive.  But he also doesn't believe we can give up on regulative ideas.  Formal perspectivalism--e.g., to say there's a feminist truth or a Christian truth--ultimately undermines it's own position.   However, if one is a true believer, one believes in something that makes a universal claim.  E.g., if one believes that Jesus saves us, it is not just for oneself or one's own community.  Such validity claims always go beyond one's limited context.  That doesn't mean we have clear criteria or that we can agree.  But we are making those sorts of claims if we're serious about the things we believe & profess.  And that provides for the kind of conflict & engagement that he's after.
 Dick ended his introductory comments with 2 qualifications.  First, according to his ideal of engaged fallibilistic pluralism he doesn't believe that there is a single model or paradigm of how scholarship may be grounded in religion.  This itself is a pluralistic issue.  Second, Dick doesn’t want to deny that there are hard cases in which there may be competing views about what is legitimate & what is not.  Most of our interesting arguments are about what constitutes a good reason.  It's not as if we have some universal matrix to which we can appeal.  But to deny that there are a priori standards for demarcating what is & what is not acceptable scholarship grounded in religion is not to deny that there are effective standards; & these have to be hammered out on a case by case basis.  If the virtues & practices he outlined for realizing the ideal of engaged fallibilistic pluralism are seriously cultivated & concretely embodied, then there is reason to believe that in particular instances we can discriminate acceptable from unacceptable approaches.  Moreover, Dick added, we can be bold, imaginative & risky in our conjectures, and rigorous, analytical & intellectually demanding in our critical evaluations of scholarship grounded in religion.

 The position just described applies to what Dick has tried to do in his own work.  By way of illustration he discussed 2 books he had published in recent years:  Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question and, more recently, Freud and the Legacy of Moses.  These works were prompted by an invitation from a colleague to write explicitly on a Jewish topic.  Dick realized that there was a book dealing with Jewish themes that he wanted to write, a book he actually hasn't written yet.  The other 2 books are like 2 chapters of it.  In a certain sense, then, this writing came out of personal questions.  He has always identified himself as a Jew.  He has never considered himself religious in a conventional sense but has always been interested in theological issues--Jewish & non-Jewish.  Moreover, for Dick, all writing is ultimately personal.  So, he wanted to take a series of 20th-century Jewish intellectuals who had made major contributions to different fields & who had at some point asked themselves what was the meaning of their Jewishness & how did it affect their writing.  His original idea was to take a whole range of such figures--from people like Freud, who was a militant atheist but strongly identified himself as a Jew, to Arendt, to people like Sholem, Walter Benjamin, Derrida  & others who identified themselves more explicitly as Jews.
 He decided to start with Hannah Arendt because he knew her & her work.  He also knew that there were certain Jewish writings which he'd always considered peripheral, as if they represented a phase that had no great significance.  When he started to work on this project he found himself doing something he rarely did as a philosopher, namely archival work.  He started reading letters & correspondence. He came to see Arendt quite differently from the picture many people had of her being completely remote, getting her ideas of politics from the Greeks, & so on.  What became increasingly clear to him was how deeply she was struggling with what was called "the Jewish question" in all its ambiguities.  For Dick this provided a whole new context.  It situated her thinking.  It showed how she was dealing with everyday life issues.  He was also fascinated by some of the distinctions she was making; why she saw the Jewish question as primarily a political question; why she seemed to think that Jewishness had nothing to do with Judaism.  Dick tried to understand this.  Other people could have written this book,  he said, but here is a case where the questions he was asking himself provided a certain perspective & sensitivity.  He saw things he’d never seen before.
 Wolterstorff had told Bernstein that he found this a deeply moving & personal book, & Dick admits that there is much of himself in it.  He thinks that in part he wanted to find out how Arendt answered questions that he was asking as a way of furthering his own inquiry.  At the same time he makes all kinds of claims in the book.  E.g., he makes claims about how this gives us a deeper dimension in our understanding of politics.  He makes the claim that it is false to see Arendt as a Grecophile.  Those are claims about which Dick Bernstein could be right or wrong.  As a public document it's open to any kind of criticism.  Dick also noted that this was not the only way to engage in such a work.  But it is one example of how one's own questions & reflections can give a certain focus & sensitivity at the same time that one is engaged in a public discourse which is open to any person.  He rejects violently any suggestion of special epistemologies--whether they be Christian, Jewish, feminist or whatever--as if there is something that you can know from your perspective that somebody else can't know.
 The Freud book was very different but motivated by the same set of questions.  Freud wrote a preface to the Hebrew edition of Totem and Taboo which fascinated Dick.  In his 2-paragraph preface Freud raises the question of how he, who had rejected the religion of his fathers & indeed all religion, could still consider himself to be a Jew.  Freud answers, perhaps "in the most essential sense".  This preface always intrigued Dick because it is cryptic, lucid & completely illusive.  He had always been interested in Freud's last book, Moses and Monotheism, a book which on first reading seems completely mad.  But he found passages in it that were deeply moving.  He couldn't make sense of all this until he came up with an idea which forms the thesis of his own little book.  He argues that in Moses and Monotheism  Freud is trying to articulate what he sees as the essence of his Jewishness.  Dick pointed out that it was precisely because he was interested in certain questions (though not "merely" personal issues) about what it means to be a Jew today who doesn't accept certain aspects of Judaism that his eyes opened to these dimensions of Freud & led him to a thesis that he really wanted to develop.  What  he also finds important in the book is that Freud is bringing out aspects of the nature of religious tradition which go far beyond Judaism & which very few people have discussed, namely unconscious dimensions in the transmission of a tradition.
 This isn't just the biography of Dick Bernstein, he concluded.  There is a thesis to the book.  There is a thesis about the nature of tradition;  there is a thesis about the unconscious.  And again, he may be right, he may be wrong.  But in his scholarship he gives reasons.  Dick thinks they are good reasons, but other people, regardless of their orientation, may be critical.  This is not the only model.  Clearly one's tradition, experience, background, thoughts & meditations influence one's perspective on the world, what one is sensitive to, what one can see & not see.  Yet insofar as one is engaged in public scholarship, one always has to defer to the regulative ideas of what counts as evidence, argument & so forth, even when these are contested.
 

Discussion of Presentations

 The first part of the group discussion focused on Kuyper starting with a question from Richard Hughes.  He asked Wolterstorff whether Kuyper could get us to Bernstein’s position of "engaged fallibilisitic pluralism," a question Richard considered critical if we're going to consider Kuyper's implications for doing higher education.  Nick affirmed that Kuyper would support engagement & that his picture of the academy is pluralistic.  It is with regard to "fallibilistic" that Kuyper has probably been most problematic in his influence.  There are certainly many passages where he says that Christians get it wrong.  But there is also a kind of arrogance in him, Nick admitted.  Richard then referred to an oft-quoted statement of Kuyper to the effect that there is not one square inch of this earth of which Jesus Christ does not proclaim "This is mine."   This passage reflects a triumphalist note.  Richard asked whether it was characteristic of Kuyper, and if so, how it figures into the equation.  Nick explained that when Kuyper is giving a theological justification for social or intellectual engagement he will almost always use the biblical language of kingship.  Christ is lord or king over all of life.  So, when fellow Christians are urging people to stay out of politics or the intellectual life, he will argue in effect that that is heretical.
 Dick Bernstein felt that there is no religion that doesn't make strong cognitive universal claims.  If you're a Christian then in some sense Jesus Christ is the Savior, and that is a cognitive claim, however symbolic you want to make it.  He was very skeptical of a way of speaking in our times that doesn't want to offend outsiders & therefore wants to make all language symbolic.  There are strong claims & strong clashes, and these have to be honestly engaged if one is going to take any religion seriously.  However, he is also very sensitive to statements that are simply conversation stoppers indicating that someone is not really in the discourse any more.  Even if you take your Christianity & your universality seriously, you have to find a place for the other.  He had the impression from what Nick was saying at a certain point that Kuyper was a failure in this regard, that there was a way in which the lines get sharply drawn in Kuyper despite his pluralistic sensitivity.  Nick admitted that that was true.  On so many issues there were 2 sides of Kuyper.
 Returning to Richard’s initial question, Rich Mouw suggested 3 elements that one could find in the tradition & in Kuyper that could move him toward an engaged fallibilistic pluralism.  First, there is a very radical distinction between Creator & creature.  Calvinism has been very much like Judaism in emphasizing the greatness of this gap, he pointed out.  Because of this we always have to worry about idolatry & we can't make final, absolute claims on behalf of anything human.  So, there is an epistemic humility in the tradition.  Mouw thinks there are hints of this in Kuyper as well, though very often the triumphalist or the polemical strain overwhelms the epistemic humility.  Second, there is the Calvinist view of original sin.  It requires that we be constantly to be open to critique, wherever it comes from, as a possible way of exposing our own sinful tendencies, even epistemically.  Third, there is a strong sense of mystery.  There are two strands in Kuyper.  There is the antithesis type of Kuyper with its emphasis on 2 minds & 2 kinds of people, but there is also a common grace side of Kuyper.  This is the idea that God is somehow mysteriously working in places where you don't expect God to be working, and that we can see positive signs in the strangest places because there is a non-salvific but nonetheless gracious operation of God that not only holds sin in check but actually promotes positive truth & positive righteousness.  It is not unlike a sacramentalist pattern that Roman Catholicism might draw on.  Mouw thinks one can find these ideas in Kuyper.

 The discussion turned to the subject of the academic community.  Frank Turner asked what kind of community Kuyper was imagining in which such a conversation was taking place.  He knows high & low energy physicists who simply don't talk to each other, & it seemed to Frank that this ending of discourse has marked the life of this century.  He wondered whether the community in which the conversation is taking place is so narrow that it's not very meaningful; that's it among people who have agreed they can disagree & work things through.  But there aren't many folks like that today.  Kuyper's attitude was that everybody in the academy ought to talk to everybody else in the academy, Nick responded.  But Frank Turner interjected that nobody believes that today--even within departments, let alone between departments.  Kuyper, of course, was writing before the modern department.  Nick saw this as an issue of fundamental respect for fellow human beings.  To close off dialogue, to refuse to talk to someone else, is to fail to honor that person as a human being created in the image of God.  He felt that insofar as the description Frank was hinting as is correct, for him personally it is a challenge to keep fighting for a community not in which everyone agrees, but in which everyone keeps talking to each other in the hope of arriving at some agreement about what things are really like.   Even if people don't agree with that, Jim Heft added, it doesn't take away for him the imperative to try to work at it.  The alternative is quite grim.
 Dick added that we shouldn't romanticize about the kinds of professionalism that exist in the American academy.  With all our rhetoric about commonality & humanity, we violate it all the time.  One has to be realistic.  But Dick rejects a monolithic picture, the idea that things are everywhere & in every way getting worse.  We know that there are people who think that what we're doing is of no interest or import.  Nevertheless, he believes that one has the obligation as an educator to enlarge, to try to keep a kind of conversation going that takes others seriously.
 Diane Winston commented that on the one hand she has a feeling of futility, but then she looks at Nick & Dick here talking to each other & thinks that there's hope.  Dick said that the two of them had been arguing for 40 years, & they can't stop talking.  Drawing from anecdotal experience in their own relationship, Dick & Nick felt similarly about the possibility that with a certain amount of good will there is a way to try to empathize & understand.  Dick felt strongly that when we retreat, when we accept barriers, it is a practical moral failure.  One has to make the effort to break these barriers down.  Diane reflected that people like Nick are rare, and she wondered how often we try to break those barriers down when we keep hitting our heads.  Someone might be willing to struggle with Dick because he is a Jew & they come from a common Mosaic tradition, but how is such a person ever going to talk to a Hindu or a Buddhist who doesn't come from a basically monotheistic tradition?  Dick thinks that that is assuming a kind of wholism which he finds forced.  His Jewish concerns define one aspect of what he is, and likewise Nick's Calvinist concerns.  But the idea that this somehow puts you in a box bothers him.  Diane pointed out that she talks more to believers than to academics, and perhaps that's part of the disconnect.  Maybe academics can talk to each other because they can agree to disagree--on a good day.  Dick added a criticism of contemporary society.  Many people are living in their own frameworks, ordinary people speaking completely different kinds of language who don't even have the interest or the aspiration to do anything more.  He thinks this is something to be fought & opposed, & he doesn't see it as just an academic issue.

 Frank Oakley returned to the central issue of scholarship grounded in religion or faith-informed scholarship.  It has increasingly puzzled him exactly what the issue is.  He finds himself in broad agreement with Dick's summary of his position & in very firm agreement with his rejection of any sort of special epistemic privilege.  Yet he senses that that is what has been claimed in the recent literature, i.e. some special epistemic privilege.  He was  recently re-reading George Marsden's Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship  in which there are specific examples of what one might call faith-informed scholarship.  But the examples puzzle him.   He mentioned Dale Van Kley's history of the religious origins of the French revolution.  If that is scholarship grounded in religion, Frank remarked, there's a heck of a lot of it all over the place!  If he were to categorize his own work over the years he would say that about 3/4 of what he's done would come under such a heading.  The agenda was set by certain preoccupations, the perspective was in some sense framed by those; he can see a tenacity of engagement with certain themes, a certain counter-suggestibility when encountering a sort of lazy hegemonic secularist interpretation, even fleeting moments of hermeneutical sensitivity!  But he doesn't find it very interesting or helpful to categorize it in terms of religious or faith-informed scholarship.  He doesn't  know what this adds.  Frank sympathized with a comment Bob Wuthnow had made (at the last meeting) about it not being a good idea to flaunt some sort of religious identification.  It seems obvious that whoever we are, we bring the whole of what we are to what we're doing, and presumably this will show & help frame what we're doing.  But what is the big debate about?  After being involved in all these profound discussions about this, Frank thinks he understands it less than he did when we began.

 Serene Jones discussed the overlap between the two presentations.  Juxtaposing Nick’s comments on Kuyper & Dick’s discussion of engaged fallibilistic pluralism, Serene felt that Nick’s description showed exactly the places where Kuyper got it wrong in that he didn’t follow the trajectory of Calvinism as sharply as he should have.  If he had, his position probably would have looked a lot more like the position that Dick articulated.  In the Calvinist tradition the doctrine of original sin would drive one directly into the notion of fallibilistic knowledge.  Where Kuyper got it wrong, Serene thought, was in seeing difference & pluralism as a product of the fall.  For Calvin, difference--even incommensurate difference--is a fact of creation.  It doesn’t necessarily have to be described as sin.  Serene thought it was the collapse of difference into sin & not a strong enough doctrine of sin that were problematic in Kuyper.  She added that the notion of engaged knowing is precisely Calvin’s definition of what faith is.  It is a kind of knowledge that cannot be had apart from a whole life context; but that whole life context is always a community of knowing, i.e. the church.  If you put things together in this way, Serene thinks the Calvinist tradition comes remarkably close to having the elements Dick described, albeit out of a different context.
 Mark Schwehn also commented on the fact that Bernstein & Wolterstorff ended on similar points.  He referred to Nick’s conclusion that he wanted to reject strongly some of the disciples of Kuyper who suggested we have to begin anew.  Instead Nick wanted to raise the issue of how we act with integrity within certain discursive practices in which we find ourselves.  But, said Mark, when you begin to reckon with these empirical realities in light of the way some communities are in fact now constituted, the question is:  Might acting with integrity within these formations not always mean submitting yourself to the regulative ideals?  Can those regulative ideals, in other words, become not just contestable, which they always are, but finally antithetical to the very kind of practices that are essential for advancing the truth of matters?   Might acting with integrity sometimes mean taking a position over against what has corrupted the whole community at a particular moment of its history rather than committing oneself to regulative ideals which may themselves be thoroughly contaminated?  Nick recognized the possibility of such a scenario.  It may be that certain philosophy departments would in his view be so corrupted in some way that the only act of integrity on his part would be to resign.  Similarly, it might happen that some part of politics becomes so corrupted that an elected representative sees as his only course of integrity to pull out of it.  In his view one does that with regret.  One doesn’t begin there, each person simply pronouncing his or her perspective.  You try to work together in the academy.  But it may be that integrity requires departing.
 In connection with this discussion, Dick asked what’s new about power & hegemony in the academy except the forms it takes?  Schwehn thought Bernstein answered this question himself when he spoke of the rise in talk about incommensurability.  Though it is empirically true that there was always hegemony of a certain kind, few people made the claim that the aspiration through conversation & conflict to arrive at something that had a kind of universal validity was vain & foolish, and that instead we were going to be locked in incommensurable positions.  That’s very new, said Mark, and it gives a kind of edge to this empirical reality that it didn’t have before.  And it requires the kinds of weapons that Dick has brought to bear upon it.  Though Bernstein basically agreed with Schwehn’s observations, he noted that at least in the field of philosophy there was a certain kind of prestigious hegemony that was far worse 50 years ago than it is today.  There is far more space for different kinds of people to do different things today.  In that respect Dick thinks there is far more openness and real pluralism in philosophy than there was 50 years ago.

 Alan Wolfe said he doesn’t know much about either Kuyper or Calvin, but he knew that Calvin was a revolutionary who engaged in a fundamental reformation of Christianity & that Kuyper was a prime minister who must have known something about power & the uses of power.  Yet what he heard in both talks & in the discussion was a kind of resignation to marginalization in the academy, as if people felt that as long as the academy gives us our little place to talk to each other everything is fine & we don’t have to do what Calvin did.  There’s not going to be an academic reformation as there was a Protestant Reformation.  Or, if there’s going to be an academic reformation, we’re not going to lead it.  Alan had a very different sense of the situation.  Though he emphasized that he was not speaking as a declensionist, he thought in this one particular area of academic culture the world is worth reforming quite radically.  He pointed out that when Schwehn asked Wolterstorff a question about how he would respond in a particularly difficult situation, Nick’s immediate reaction was "I would resign";  it wasn’t  "I would try to change the situation."  Alan thinks this indicates a certain comfort level with the present environment.  Nick clarified that he would fight a long time before he would resign.  In any case, Alan added, in the fields he knows in the social sciences, almost everyone who is doing a kind of social science that he thinks is valuable is 75 years old or older.  It makes him wonder, especially since the ‘60s generation was supposed to be a revolutionary generation that was really going to shake things up.  He thinks it has actually produced a more insular & more conservative academic scholarship, even though the politics of the people who do it may be very radical.
 Alan also said that he doesn’t see the same world of philosophy that Dick sees.  E.g., at the New School for Social Research, where Dick teaches, they are not even considered to be doing philosophy by some percentage of academic philosophers in the U.S.  They might say it’s interesting intellectual history, but they probably wouldn’t even say that.  They would essentially read people like Bernstein & Dick Rorty out of the profession as not being serious philosophers.  In his own analysis [at the March conference], Alan talked about the difference between parallelism & a kind of opportunism.  He thinks Dick & Nick are arguing for a kind of parallelism, i.e. just give us a little piece somewhere & let us pursue our parallel ways of doing things.  Dick, however, thought that Alan was saying contradictory things:  on the one hand there is a dominant hegemony that is running everything, but on the other hand we have a kind of chaotic fragmentation.   Alan is talking as if the academy is monolithic, & Dick didn’t think this is true.
 At this point Rich Mouw asked why Wolfe doesn’t consider himself a declensionist.  Alan explained that he doesn’t accept the idea that we’ve fallen from some kind of "golden age", but that’s what makes this particular decline in academia so puzzling to him.  The rest of society has changed in very positive ways, yet in the academic world things have gone in the opposite direction.  He finds it bizarre, though he thinks that the explanations have to do with generations & tenure, i.e. we have a particular generation (Alan’s own generation) frozen in the academy with tenure & therefore impervious to anything going on in the rest of the world.
 Nick added that when he & Dick were in grad. school the big divide in philosophy was between the analytic tradition & the continental tradition.  He thinks it’s safe to say that that divide is slowly being overcome over the last 10 years from both sides.  So a philosopher of their age sees an important healing of the big breach.  Alan noted that economics is in exactly the opposite situation.  It has become a completely hermetically isolated discipline that no longer has any room for anything that ever happened once before.  He does, however, accept what Nick was saying about philosophy & thinks it’s good news.

 Turning to the theme of fallibilism, Mark Noll commented that he liked very much what Bernstein had said both in his presentation here & in his paper for the March conference, but he also noted that Dick was strongly against all forms of fundamentalism.  Noll agrees that there are certain wrong kinds of fundamentalist answers.  E.g, to the question of why the American constitution succeeded, a fundamentalist response would be to say that it was because Ben Franklin called for prayer.  But Mark wondered about the fallibility of an intensely religious experience, e.g., reading George Herbert, re-reading the Psalms, singing the right kind of hymn, or taking the Eucharist.  He supposes that in some hypothetical sense he is open to the suggestion that God in Christ was not reconciling the world to himself, but even to imagine that that disconfirmation was a possibility is almost inconceivable.  So, said Mark, he is a fundamentalist.  He believes in special revelation.  But, it seemed to him that this kind of fundamentalism is tied into a lot of theology that opens the doors wide for fallibilism.  He believes in the cosmic Christ, but the cosmic Christ is always a Christ on the cross, and Christ is on the cross because of our sins, including the sins of Christians.  So any Christian who presumes to speak with God-like authority is violating the fundamental character of Christianity.  Any Christian who looks upon the other as somehow non-human or as somehow not potentially redeemable by the Christ on the cross is violating the core value of this kind of Christian faith.  So, Mark thought that his fundamental Christian belief actually is the foundation for supporting the rightness of fallibilism in virtually every academic topic, but not on the kind of balancing ball that for him holds absolutely everything together.
 Dick said he doesn’t know whether he and Mark actually disagree, and if they do disagree they might have a theological disagreement.  Dick didn’t see his own view as being at all incompatible with a conception of Christian fundamentalism that takes certain things to be fundamental but sees the place for doubt, for inquiry, for further interpretation.  What he objects to is a self-authenticating episode such that there is nothing more in principle that ever could be said.  He would object to this on epistemological grounds.  Dick thinks that very frequently fallibilism gets misinterpreted.  People assume that if you’re a fallibilist you can’t take something as fundamental.  For Dick the issue is taking something as fundamental.  Mark found that helpful.  Dick also pointed out that the very example he used in his presentation at the March conference was not religious but secular fundamentalism.
 Nancy Ammerman remarked that we might have just witnessed a bit of what she wanted to comment on.  What is this ideal community really all about?  She thought that we’d been more concerned about aiming toward a situation in which it is possible to keep the conversation going rather than a situation in which we are able to arrive at an agreement about what is really true.  The exchange between Mark Noll & Dick Bernstein was an example of this.  Nancy wasn’t sure they were going to agree on what is really true about the nature of the world.  But their conversation led her to reflect on the very nature of the conversation between differences.  One model we heard about was a model of difference as sin or the idea that distance is alienation.  Another model suggests that in that space between the differences is the space where this conversation takes place.  She was also intrigued by Dick’s use of the relationship between biography & history, between the personal & the public, to use terms that were used at our last meeting.  Nancy sided with Dick & not with David Hollinger in this way of thinking about the relationship between personal & public.  Dick offered a picture of the relationship between personal & public that also opens up a space for the critical; that lets the personal make statements that enter the public both as personal & as public & then act back on the personal.  Between the personal & public there is a creative, critical space.  Nancy questioned how we make sense of these spaces.  Do we see them as irreconcilable alienation, or do we see them as creative, critical spaces that are necessary, that allow us to engage in the enterprise that we want to engage in?
 In response to Nancy, Nick drew upon an example in Locke’s penultimate chapter, in which he undercuts his earlier argument about our direct awareness of reality.  The example illustrates that what we bring to an enterprise shapes what we take the facts to be.  We don’t start out with certitudes but rather, as Locke himself acknowledges in this chapter, we come with however we’ve been shaped.  And we get together & do our best to investigate & talk with each other & listen to objections, and so forth.  Though this is a point that Kuyper doesn’t really write about, Nick thinks the conflict is often creative, if we allow it to function creatively as opposed to each speaking our piece & saying we’ll agree to disagree.  Sometimes one actually manages to arrive at consensus on some matters.  Now & then he & Dick agree on something after they’ve talked about it for several years.

 An interchange between Denis Donoghue & the 2 presenters concluded the first session.  Denis wanted to pursue a particular word that Nick had used in his presentation.  He had used the word "dangerous" a couple of times, especially with regard to Kuyper’s feeling that, in Nick’s terms, "outside of Christianity all cats are equally grey."  Nick represented this notion as being "dangerous" as well as misleading.  Denis wondered why it would be dangerous to say this.  What is dangerous, Nick responded, is falling into a picture of the academy as comprising 2 parties, 2 sciences or disciplines--Christians & all others.  The danger is to neglect the reality of a whole gamut of differing affinities & dissimilarities.  It is dangerous in that it profoundly distorts what Nick believes is the actual situation of agreements & disagreements in the academy.
 Donoghue’s final observations concerned Dick Bernstein’s emphasis on the personal character of his books on Arendt & Freud.  It seemed to Denis that there is a problem of designation.  Nick, for example, referred to "what things are really like", as if that were the privileged object of  all our concerns.  In fact, however, there are many objects of concern which do not coincide with the designation of "what things are really like".  E.g., Denis imagined that it would be entirely possible to read Dick’s book on Arendt without particularly engaging oneself with the question of whether or not Bernstein is right about Arendt or about the Jewish question, or about the relation between those 2 entities.  If you were to take very seriously the personal emphasis of his books, you could remove the whole issue to an autobiographical concern.  As a reader you could simply ask whether these books are interesting, even if you had no interest whatsoever in Hannah Arendt and/or the Jewish question.  The question of the "interestingness" of the book could to some extent diffuse the particular substantive issues involved in Arendt and/or the Jewish question.
 In an effort to correct a wrong impression, Dick Bernstein explained that he wouldn’t want people to think that his books are personal confessions.  That wasn’t the point he was trying to make.  He wanted to use them as an illustration of the fact that he participates in a certain tradition, as an illustration of concern about a certain type of religious problem.  This is manifested in the way he went about the task of writing the books, & the point of the first part of his talk was to show this.  He didn’t want to make a strong defense only of what he has done.  He would be an advocate for all kinds of Christian scholarship.  He also commented that Denis writes eloquently about certain Irish affairs because this is constitutive of what he is.  The content can be evaluated independently.  That is the nature of the argument Dick wanted to make.
 Donoghue asked whether Bernstein would regard it as reductive if his books were thought to be documentary of his life story.  From a literary point of view, Dick responded, clearly we can all read things in multiple ways.  He wouldn’t like people to read his books asking what they reveal about Dick Bernstein, but he can understand that.  Denis noted that Dick had made the point that the questions he was raising are acutely intrinsic to his life.  Dick agreed, but said he would not like to think of it as just his own idiosyncratic life.  He had been trying to make another point.  Insofar as he is making all kinds of claims in his books, they have to stand on their own.  Denis thought that this theme was not very dissociated from what others had been talking about this afternoon.  The rhetoric of "interestingness" would very likely help at a certain level, but one would pay a price for it.  The price would be that one would be reading in a way that would disengage from the substantiality of the issues.  Dick said he has become a bit disturbed by the whole genre in academic life of the memoirs, as if this is a replacement of scholarship, as if one’s personal story is the most interesting thing in the world.  If it’s merely confessional, it can easily reach an excess.
 Nick admitted, however, that Denis rightly takes him to task with the reminder that there are other categories at work in scholarship than getting at the truth of the matter--categories like significance, interest, & other forms of worthwhileness.
 
 

SESSION II - SATURDAY MORNING

 The theme for the morning was the impact of religious traditions on scholarship.  Jim Turner & David Hollinger gave presentations, which were followed by a plenary discussion.
 

Presentation #1:  Jim Turner, University of Notre Dame

 Jim Turner proposed to argue the proposition that scholarship will benefit if scholars today pay renewed attention to deploying within their different disciplines the intellectual traditions associated with Judaism, Christianity & Islam.  The listing of those 3 faiths was not meant to disparage the intellectual traditions of other faiths, which might also prove helpful.  It is simply to point to 3 historical facts:  the overlapping intellectual entailments during many centuries of each of these religions with the others, the highly rationalized character of some traditions within each, & the contributions of all three over the past couple of millennia to the evolution of the European academic culture out of which the various disciplines we practice emerged.  This is not to ignore what is often called the secularization of knowledge from the 19th century onward, a subject on which he himself has written.  It is simply to say that despite the secularization of knowledge there are still what might be called structural & subterranean continuances of these intellectual traditions within the modern.
  Jim’s concern in the presentation was with the intellectual consequences of what he described as impersonal traditions--intellectual resources potentially available to anyone regardless of individual faith or background.  Put differently, he wants to ask & try to give a positive answer to the question: Are there academic grounds, and not just religious ones, for encouraging what would amount to a partial reintegration of the intellectual life of religion with the intellectual life of universities?  He says "partial", he explained, because he doubts that collapsing the one into the other would benefit either, even if it were possible.
 A famous example provided the starting point for Turner’s reflection.  In Sources of the Self (p.131), Charles Taylor makes the point that "it was Augustine who introduced the inwardness of radical reflexivity and bequeathed it to the Western tradition of thought.  The step was a fateful one, because we have certainly made a big thing of the first-person standpoint...It has gone so far as generating the view that there is a special domain of ‘inner’ objects available only from this standpoint; or the notion that the vantage point of the ‘I think’ is somehow outside the world of things we experience."  If Taylor is right, Jim suggested, one of the most deeply formative concepts underlying our thinking today has a Christian origin.  One might plausibly point out that where the idea came from doesn’t matter, except to historians.  It now exists & functions in our thinking in purely secularized form, stripped of any religious implications or connection with a God.  This answer seemed to Jim to be partly true, but also too easy.  For, as Taylor goes on to note, Augustine developed his "radical reflexivity" precisely as "a step on our road back to God." (p.132)  Jim thinks it highly unlikely that this telos left no permanent mark on the character of Western subjectivity.  Yet the very fact that the Christian origins of subjectivity have, so to speak, gone underground may hide such distinctive marks from us.  Were scholars to excavate & explore the specifically religious lineaments of subjectivity, they might help us better to understand prevailing notions of self-consciousness & inner life, whether in psychology, philosophy, or other disciplines.
 Jim used 2 other examples to illustrate a similar point.  First, he referred to the eulogy of the medieval historian David Herlihy given by Caroline Bynum at his memorial service.  Bynum spoke of Herlihy’s role as a great pioneer of women’s history in medieval studies.  She traced his innovations back to their source in Herlihy’s interest in the discourse of spiritual friendship of men & women in the monastic tradition.  Simply as the origin of an historiographic revolution, this connection deserves note.  But Jim wondered how this specific context shaped Herlihy’s thinking & whether, therefore, the conceptual apparatus of gender in medieval studies is inflected by these Catholic intellectual traditions.  Turning to another discipline, Jim thought that the social efficacy of symbolism in cultural anthropology, post Malinowski, would be hard to imagine without the precedent of Catholic thought, e.g., that of Evans-Pritchard, Victor Turner, & Mary Douglas.  But, he queried, has anyone asked how these roots nourish & limit the anthropological category?
 Jim was not suggesting that we should be doing more religious studies or theology, but something quite different:  trying to forward through research within so-called secular academic disciplines the rediscovery & reappropriation of the efficacy of Catholic & other monotheistic religious traditions.  Paradoxically, the full development of "secular" knowledge may require reversing the secularization of knowledge.  Were such a shifting of gears to occur, researchers in the various academic disciplines might actually discover or rediscover intellectual resources that enable them to work out new lines of thinking, develop approaches to problems that could not evolve from standard sources in their fields.
 David Herlihy’s research in women’s history already hints how this could happen.  Another example, Jim suggested, may be the rapid & rather remarkable development of just-war theory in political science in the past 2 decades.  In the wake of the Vietnam War, American political theorists found themselves searching for better tools for analyzing the circumstances under which military force might become a valid option for a government.  Scholars like Jean Elshtain found such instruments not in the "secular" toolbox of their discipline, but in ancient Jewish & Christian thinking about the use of force & violence by the powers-that-be:  in Jean’s case, especially Augustine’s writings.  As a result, just-war theory has been habilitated as a key discourse within political science & seems even to have affected war planning in the Pentagon.
 After mentioning several other examples, Jim also acknowledged an immediate objection to the general call for a revival of attention to Catholic (& more broadly, Abrahamic) intellectual traditions.  A skeptic might well say that the whole business amounts to much ado about nothing.  Scholars are already free to graze in whatever fields they wish.  There’s no bar to exploration of the intellectual traditions of Western monotheism--as the examples he cited make clear.  Anyway, what makes Christianity, Judaism & Islam so important?  Couldn’t the same claims be made about Hinduism, Buddhism or Confucianism?  And if so, aren’t you simply urging scholars to keep their intellectual horizons open to all kinds of possibly fertile ideas from outside their disciplines?  Who would say no to that?
 Those are well-aimed questions, but Jim thinks they actually miss the point.  Of course, there is no formal bar to the use of any intellectual tradition in contemporary scholarship.  But he believes that there is a scholarly culture, dominant since the later 19th century, that tends to assume that religion is a dead force intellectually, & that therefore its intellectual traditions, however interesting as objects of study, don’t speak to the live issues in scholarship today.  So, a scholar of literature is far more likely to recur to Nietzsche than to Augustine; a political scientist is far more likely to pay attention to John Rawls than to John XXIII.  Jim doesn’t think it’s accidental that the scholars he mentioned as explorers of the intellectual potential of religious traditions all have personal allegiances to religion.  And, precisely because western monotheism now lies beyond the pale of the academy, it has going for it, in Kathryn Tanner’s words, "a strangeness, an ability to startle."
 What Jim was proposing, he said, is simply that academic work would benefit very substantially from a self-conscious, well planned return to the sources; from a deliberate, thoughtful effort to recover & reappropriate for contemporary scholarship the intellectual traditions of Judaism, Christianity & Islam.  He described this as a modest proposal, put forth in a tentative voice.  But he thinks that scholarship would benefit from this resourcement.  Nor would scholarship be the only beneficiary.  Though he had been speaking as a scholar with the interests of scholarship in mind, Jim said that he is also a Christian & finds the individual Christian in an unhealthy situation in today’s intellectual world.  On the one hand, she or he believes that the fundamental character of reality has to be explained in terms of the existence of the Creator God.  On the other hand, she or he daily dwells in an intellectual world in which the existence of God is bracketed in academic work; in some cases, though not in most, militated against.  Jim thinks it would be a good thing for Christians, & especially for scholars who are Christians, to be able to relate their own intellectual traditions to the intellectual work of the academy directly--not in an imperialistic voice but in an exploratory way; not attempting to define the agenda of the academy but rather in an attempt to refine their own beliefs.
 He ended with some questions concerning what he had proposed.  First, Jim asked, is he right?  Does the project of reappropriating the intellectual traditions of Western monotheism need doing, or is he wrong in thinking that the secularization of knowledge has turned attention away from what are still intellectually viable religious traditions?  Second, is the project worth doing, i.e., could substantial results be expected, or have we already got the good out of Western monotheism, intellectually speaking?  Finally, if the answers to the first 2 questions are positive, what results might be predicted?  Is it possible at this point to speculate on what differences a reappropriation of monotheistic intellectual traditions might make for specific disciplines?  Perhaps, Jim suggested, these questions would be useful to pursue in discussion.
 

Presentation #2: David Hollinger, University of California, Berkeley

 Motivation & warrant; discovery & justification; origins & verification.  These, David Hollinger began his presentation, are 3 variations on a distinction about science & scholarship that is sometimes drawn too sharply.  He offered several reasons why the dividing lines between these categories have been too rigid.  Having entered these caveats, however, David went on to affirm that the old distinction does have real merit, especially when it comes to talking about the relation of religiously-defined intellectual traditions to science & scholarship as practiced today.  The motivation for an inquiry, for a working hypothesis, for a claim one hopes to vindicate, he explained, may well reflect an individual’s religious orientation.  But when it comes to warrant, what matters most are the rules, formal & tacit, of the relevant epistemic community.  If these rules fail to reflect a given religious orientation, then that religious orientation loses is salience in the warranting process.  Though this seemed to him to be obvious, David sometimes gets the impression that when the topic of the relation of religion to learning comes up, those bringing it up are hoping somehow that the epistemic community can be reorganized in such a way as to make one’s own religious orientation part of the warranting process, not just part of the process of motivation.
 One source of his impression that "warrant reform" rather than mere "motivation evangelism" is going on, he explained, is a book of several years ago by Warren A. Nord, Religion and American Education: Rethinking a National Dilemma.  Hollinger read this book in an effort to understand the phenomenon it represents.  The book plays to a feeling that de-Christianized intellectuals have somehow stolen the culture to which American Christians have a right.  Nord seems to think that epistemic communities have been constituted unfairly, on the basis of the wrong rules, and that as a result the ideas of Christians in particular are deprived of a warranting role that Nord would like to see restored.  In David’s view, this book is a convenient example of the effort to move a religion, in this case Christianity, from what he is calling the context of motivation to the context of warrant.
 Nord makes this move on the basis of a historical analysis.  He provides, up to a certain point, a readable version of what might be called the standard narrative of de-Christianization, not unlike the one offered more cogently by Peter Berger in The Sacred Canopy in 1966. Central to this narrative are changes in the structure of plausibility, David explained,  & this relates to the context of warrant.  Aquinas, Luther & Calvin could deal with classical Christian notions of the Bible, the church, sinful human nature, God & the work of Jesus Christ.  But such notions faced challenges of varying intensity generated by economic, social & political transformations as well as by the intellectual innovations associated with the Scientific Revolution & the Enlightenment.  Especially in the course of the 19th century supernaturalistic explanations lost credibility to naturalistic ones.  The accumulated investigations of  Marx, Weber, Durkheim, & Freud, in addition to the more decisive transformation produced by Darwin, added credibility to the view that Christianity was a historical product of human action & imagination rather than of the supreme being written about in Genesis, the Gospels, etc.  Intellectuals in the U.S. in the 20th century generally followed the path of these developments & operated in large part within a structure of plausibility according to which the classical truth claims of Christianity were simply implausible.
 According to Nord, however, the people who operate within that structure of plausibility constitute a mere "faction."  This is the point at which Nord makes a turn relevant to our discussion, said David, the turn from the distinctive cognitive power of science.  Science affords just one kind of evidence for the way things are, Nord insists.  After all, many people find other kinds of evidence, in particular religious evidence, just as convincing.  Let’s take all the evidence into account, not just the evidence favored by one faction.  "Why," Nord asks, "should we accept scientific method as our final authority in delineating reality?"  This rhetorical question Nord seems to believe powerful enough to knock skeptics right out of the conversation, Hollinger commented.  However, missing from this account is the basic historical truth that a lot of people honestly found that science gave them better answers to questions they cared about than did science’s rivals.  Nord diminishes the authority of science by placing it on equal epistemic footing with other ways of looking at the world.  Nord acknowledges that science has won great cultural authority among modern intellectuals, but leaves the basis for this authority a mystery.  It’s like a history of the California gold rush that fails to mention gold, David thought.  What drops out of history, in Nord’s telling of it, is the common experience of finding that science worked reasonably well for a number of important purposes.
 The "faction" of de-Christianized intellectuals, explains Nord, has taken over American education & thus "disenfranchised" religious folk.  David finds this choice of vocabulary highly significant.  Nord formulates his ultimate understanding of de-Christianization in the constitutional language of rights & votes.  If Christianity’s constructions of what makes the world work turned out to be hard to warrant scientifically, then let them be warranted by popular vote.  Our schools, insists Nord, should reflect the differences of opinion found in the American community as a whole & should not privilege the opinions only of learned communities.  Let the epistemic community be redefined, he seems to be arguing, so that the narrow warranting conventions of modern inquiry can be supplemented once again by the warranting conventions of old.  In that in this post-Kuhnian era, David acknowledged, we all know that the progress of science is made in political & social contexts & involves factions of a kind.  But Nord’s turn from cognitive to constitutional analysis trivializes the record of science & ignores the grounds for its enduring appeal.  Can a struggle lost in the laboratory be won at the ballot box? David asked.  At issue of course is the character, the scope, & the specific boundaries of the community of warrant.
 The world of American higher education, which is the focal point for the Lilly Seminar, is more than a community of warrant.  It is also, David hopes, a culture of sorts, using the term "culture" in the cocktail party sense.  Throughout the social sciences & humanities, & even in the sciences, many university intellectuals turn out to have a lot in common.  He mentions this, he explained, because he wants to raise for discussion here his own uncertainty about what to make of religious distinctions within this large & sprawling academic culture so clearly influenced by the conventions of warrant, of modern scientific inquiry.  His own puzzlement about just what significance there can be to the line between a) men & women of learning who manifest religious commitments, & b) men & women of learning who do not, derives from a lifetime of experience in which the lines that divide people, that establish solidarities & counter-solidarities within academia, seem to him to be almost never the lines of religious orientation.  David’s interest in & engagement with such a dividing line predates but has been reinforced by his experience in the Lilly Seminar, in which he has come to know & appreciate many people whose values & ideas he shares in many ways except when it comes to religion.  One might ask, are the important issues those that divide him from his Catholic friends here & elsewhere?  Or, are the important issues those that put him & most of his Catholic friends on one side of the line & put on the other side of the line a lot of other Catholics he could name.  To say that the issues that do divide him from these Catholic friends are "not important" risks treating Catholic commitment as trivial, risks making a judgment about the lives, sensibility & character of his friends that he is reluctant to make.  On the other hand, to say that these issues that divide him from his Catholic friends are really important risks diminishing a basis for cooperation, & indeed, solidarity in relation to other causes.
 Of course, we all participate in multiple solidarities.  We’re simultaneously within many different & sometimes overlapping "circles of the we," but the Catholic solidarity, which he has been using as an example, may or may not be a big deal depending on one’s perspective.  Are his Catholic friends more importantly Catholic, more importantly part of the world solidarity of Catholics, or are they more importantly part of those solidarities that he knows that they and he are part of when he is in their presence?
 David’s closing remarks drew upon his personal experiences with friends & colleagues in the academy. As Jim Turner was talking he had made reference to Caroline Bynum, and it occurred to David that he had only very recently met Caroline Bynum, though he had admired her work for years.  At a recent function in New York they talked for about 3 hours & found a great many things they both cared about a lot.  In this earnest conversation there was no question that they were connecting on important issues, many of which were quite contentious in the academy, in the history profession, in the world as a whole.  But it just occurred to David that he has not the faintest idea on the basis of that conversation what Caroline Bynum’s religious orientation is.  He doesn’t know if she’s a believing Protestant or Catholic, Jewish, or a free thinker like himself.  He hasn’t any idea.  This was a conversation about really important things, yet one in which religious orientation was not manifest.
 He also mentioned 3 friends in his department.  One David described as a very serious Catholic; another is very serious about his Judaism; the third is a churchman in one of the local Protestant congregations.  David likes all 3 of these colleagues, & he finds that he generally agrees with them about national politics, about university policies, about intellectual directions within the historical profession, about what counts as good scholarship in the social sciences & the humanities, about the personal character of almost all their colleagues in the university, about what obligations family members owe to one another, about what makes a good son or daughter, and so on.  David is tempted to say that differences in religious orientation are trivial in this case, but he’s not sure how far to push the point.  He concluded by referring to 2 kinds of comments that might be made in this context.  One is a comment that is made to him quite often by friends of strong religious commitment.  They say, "Oh David, you’re still a Protestant."  David takes the point; he understands what they mean.  But generally he doesn’t go to these people & say something that has almost the same logic.  He might say to one of them, "All this God & Jesus stuff, you don’t believe that."  But he doesn’t want to say that.  He can’t say that; or can he?  He asks our advice.
 

Discussion of Presentations

 Alan Wolfe began the discussion by saying that he was very sympathetic to everything David had presented with one "but".  What if, Alan proposed, the scientific model or the scientific understanding, which in his view is perfectly appropriate for studying all kinds of objects in nature, were extended to human beings?  And what if was found to be a profound mistake?  What if we simply discover that this was the wrong thing to do, the wrong thing to do scientifically?  It was wrong because human beings turned out to be a different object than nature, than the objects for which that scientific method were developed.  If that were the case, then the epistemic rules that were in place are unscientific in some fundamental way.  It seemed to Alan that one could accept everything that David was saying about science requiring a particular kind of warrant if one could conclude on that basis that those sciences which study human beings need to take into account the fact of this human difference; & one of the things that makes human beings different from other objects in nature is that historically they’ve manifested either more generally a search for meaning or more specifically some kind of religious or spiritual aspect.
 Hollinger replied that what the warranting rules in the social sciences & in the study of human beings have been contested for a long time & still are.  So, we have an ongoing conversation about those issues.  But when we come to identify what will count as a mistake, he thinks Alan was right to phrase his comment in the way that he did, namely that we might discover  it was wrong scientifically.  How would we discover that it was wrong?  What standard of proof would be used to say that we’ve blown it?  David would say that it is no different than other situations we’ve faced.  We’ve often been wrong in the history of learning.  Peirce & those in his tradition would simply say that one must get more evidence which fits in with the gradually changing epistemic rules, & then overthrow them.  But you don’t in the process go back to religiously-based notions of warrant.

 Frank Oakley found both papers extremely interesting but wanted to speak to the process of discovery that Jim Turner had discussed.  Certainly, he commented, an enormous amount of scholarship has been done precisely along the lines Jim suggested.  He finds it impossible to grasp with any understanding the development of a European or a western philosophic tradition without facing up to the complexity of its rootage.  He kept thinking of examples even as Jim was speaking, and mentioned several.   The obstacles to the kinds of scholarship Jim discussed seem to him to have less to do with dominant secularist modes than with the very fragmentation of the way we go about understanding things & the limits in any of our disciplines in nudging people beyond the more ordinary grasp of things.  Frank has always thought that the payoff of such scholarship was bringing home the degree to which human thinking is ecological, i.e., the moves you make in one area within the totality of human thinking have consequences elsewhere.  E.g., if you change your notion of God in any way there are remote consequences elsewhere in your thinking.  Frank thinks this sort of study is highly pertinent.  It’s not a religious objective but an attempt to understand the totality of human thinking.  Its value is that it presses the issue with great tenacity at a time when we’re drawn constantly into more provincialized pursuits.  Maybe one has a heightened sensitivity toward some aspects of human thinking because of imbeddedness in a given religious tradition.  So all he can think is yes, yes, yes, but aren’t we doing it?  Oakley noted that this was precisely one of the responses Jim had evoked.
 Like Oakley, Dick Bernstein was not at all convinced that what Jim Turner described is not going on.  He referred to 2 instances with which he is very familiar--just war theory & the use of Charles Taylor.  The first contemporary work on just war was written by Michael Waltzer.  Waltzer, like Taylor, takes his religion seriously.  But these scholars are of interest because they develop powerful arguments in their disciplines.  That brings us right back to David’s point, Dick said.  To the extent that something is a convincing argument it’s because it meets certain standards.  In response to Jim’s presentation Dick also remarked that he gets very nervous about what he calls "the football coach approach" in academic life, i.e. calling for a certain type of scholarship.  That’s not the way it works.  It works because somebody comes along who succeeds in doing something, & that then sets an example & opens up certain other possibilities.  Dick is very skeptical about calling for things.
 Dick then returned to the theme of obstacles that both Turner & Oakley had mentioned.  We all know that there are places where if somebody declares their religion it’s simply unacceptable, he commented.  But he wondered whether this is different from other kinds of brutal "in" & "out" group things that are always taking place in academic life.  E.g., if somebody says that Derrida is a serious thinker, others might be snickering & thinking,  "Who reads him?  He’s not a philosopher."  This seemed to Dick to be the structure of academic politics.  There are things that are in, that are considered the fashion, & if you do the other sort of thing, you’re out of it, you’re not "one of us".  What sometimes gets projected is that in some sense Christian scholars are more victimized than other kinds of scholars who find themselves on the outs.
 With regard to this last point, Jim Turner hoped that nothing he said would align him with the view that there is a kind of special persecution of Christians within the academy.  There are prejudices of all kinds afloat in the academy.  You’ll find some people who think that Christianity is intellectually retrograde, but he doesn’t think that’s a dominant prejudice.  Jim certainly never felt in his own career that people didn’t listen to him or take him seriously because he’s a Christian.  With regard to Bernstein’s comments about "the football coach approach," Turner didn’t think that calling for what he was describing would accomplish anything.  He completely agrees with Dick that it is actual academic work that comes to be seen as significant in a particular context by particular people that makes a difference.  The point of his paper was to describe his sense of the landscape & what elements might usefully be more prominent in the landscape; not to exhort or encourage people.
 Jim then returned to the question of whether this is already being done.  He fully conceded that it is already being done to some extent.  The examples he cited could not have been cited were that not the case.  It is also his sense, however, that in most disciplines there is a kind of historically-grounded prejudice that the intellectual traditions of western monotheism are played out.  In psychology, economics or most areas of political science & anthropology, there are intellectual resources that are being overlooked because of the historical process by which we got to the point where we are now.  Jim repeated that this was a modest claim.  He completely agrees with Frank, David & Dick that there ought to be no epistemic privilege for particular groups within the academy, whether those be Christians or feminists or whatever.

 Much of the ensuing discussion focused on some of David Hollinger’s comments about warrant and warranting rules.
 Nancy Ammerman returned to David’s image of the culture of academe--now no longer "the dinner party" but "the cocktail party"!  It is an image of people coming together & discovering that they have much in common, Nancy remarked.  She suggested that they not only discover  they have much in common, but they actually create commonalities as well in that conversation that constitutes the academic culture.  David had also suggested that as we come into that conversation we bring with us multiple solidarities, & Nancy added that even a given person brings multiple solidarities into the conversation.  In light of all this, she wondered whether it is possible to envision the conversation as including not only multiple solidarities but also multiple warranting rules.  What we’re looking at perhaps is a moment in which there are wider ranges of warranting rules that are contending for a place in the conversation & are perhaps being heard in different ways.  To presume a kind of dichotomy between motivation & warranting rules, between origins & verifications, as David has suggested, truncates the degree to which even the notion of personal motivation is brought into the conversation.
 David agreed that we seem to be in a time where the warranting rules that operate in a lot of disciplines are subject to scrutiny & critical revision.  But he was not yet persuaded that among the critical revisions that are productive are those that try to move us toward a more traditional religious warrant for truth claims.  The kinds of changes that seem to be getting the most attention & credibility are rather those that are based on personal testimony.  You see this a lot in the social sciences, the law schools & some of the humanist disciplines, David noted.   David described the situation as a failure of epistemic nerve, according to which it’s only the individual’s experience that has epistemic authority.  The pretense of intersubjective testability of propositions goes by the way.
 Rich Mouw also wanted to push Hollinger on the idea of epistemic warrant.  Some people do think that religious data have a kind of epistemic warrant status, Rich said.  He gave a social-scientific example.  A few years ago he read a study co-authored by a social psychologist & a sociologist on a Jesus-people commune.  The kind of things they said could be equally applied to a monastic community.  They used a lot of phrases like "normal patterns of social interaction".  They found that the Jesus-people were very "sociable" & seemed to like communal activity a lot; but they noted that this was in tension with some "delusional" & "anti-social" behaviors.  The delusional & anti-social patterns, it turns out, had to do with the fact that the people examined spent a lot of time alone praying.  If you really believe that there’s a God, angels, saints & the like, there’s nothing particularly anti-social about praying, Rich noted.  Yet he said he sees a lot of this.  Maybe these scholars weren’t doing very good sociology or social psychology.  But the rhetorical force of such phrases as "delusional" & "anti-social" seemed to him to have a lot of similarities to the ways in which feminists might use terms like "patriarchal" or "hierarchical" as quasi-descriptive terms in talking about institutions & the like.  So, Rich runs into a lot of situations in which he would say that he would define terms differently; he would analyze a situation differently on the basis of his Christian assumptions.
 To David it sounded like the claim that prayer is anti-social behavior was being put forth on the basis of an exceedingly inadequate social science, and he might agree with Mouw entirely in his skepticism about it.  He might say that the people who put forth this claim don’t have a sophisticated understanding of "the praying subject" (to borrow a term from our English departments), David suggested.  So, if you want to evaluate appropriately the praying subject & then say something about how that fits into social interaction, then it seemed to David that he & Rich might come to complete agreement about what will count as an adequate explanation for their behavior & even with an analytic language for representing it to the world that would not be predicated at all on Christian belief.  Mouw agreed, but he added that he could imagine a room full of very smart people at Berkeley in which somebody could get away with such a claim, & no one would challenge it.  For those who feel that there is a link between their religiously-based understanding of reality & the kinds of things that people get away with saying in the academy, said Rich, this situation feels a bit more in the neighborhood of epistemic warrant than it does in the neighborhood of motivation & evangelism.  David said that he was on Rich’s side in this regard.  There is a kind of religion bashing that sometimes goes on in these circles that David thinks is entirely unjustified.

 Changing the subject slightly, Frank Turner explained that what he finds most disturbing in the academy is a practice of exclusion of questions.  It would be very hard in many disciplines, especially in the humanities, to examine certain subjects.  E.g., one of the great undiscussed subjects in modern European history since the 18th century is modern Roman Catholicism.  There are very few books written on this because the American & the European academy is overwhelmingly secular or Protestant.  There is also an exclusion of discussing in real detail the wisdom traditions in the academy, & consequently, we leave these to people outside the academy.
 Frank also commented that we tend to equate Christianity with a rather romantic concept of what religion is.  But in the New York Times tomorrow there will be an entertainment section, and he challenged the group to think about the conversation we’re now having in that context.  Our conversation not only becomes rather precious in every sense of the word,  said Turner, but it also suggests that the whole role of both religion & science in these different epistemic orientations we’re talking about are beside the point when one looks at what is happening in terms of secular culture & new age religion.  It’s not only that most of us here represent the old line denominations, but the rest of us are old line agnostics!  We’re operating in such a narrow spectrum of discussion of what influences the academy that we’re all very comfortable with it.  If we opened this to the large forces in society, which are going to & already are affecting the academy, then this conversation takes on very different contours.
 Hollinger acknowledged that Frank Turner had just opened up a whole range of troubling & important issues that we hadn’t discussed yet, but he wanted to respond to his comments about exclusion in the academy.  David believes that there is a special problem with things religious, not so much because secularists don’t want to discuss them but because religionists want to claim religious documents, particularly the Bible & the history of Christianity, as something subject to its own epistemic traditions.  There is a quaint feeling on the part many people that in order to study Christianity you have to believe in it.  David finds that one of the reasons that you can’t get more people to do topics in that area is because of such a of barrier.  E.g.,  some dissertation students tell him that if they write on missionaries everybody is going to assume they’re some kind of Jesus freak.  He tries to demystify this, and has had more & more success in this regard.  Nor does he want to deny that there is blame to be proportioned quite widely among a variety of kinds of people, but he thinks that the continued insistence that there’s something special about Christianity & about the Bible has an affect on all of this.
 Frank Turner was not convinced.  He reflected on how much attention was directed to very obscure writings of Marx in the course of the professional careers of many people in the room.  In contrast, there has been very little effort in literature classes to include portions of Scripture that clearly influenced everything else that came in the western tradition.  It is this that causes Frank to become interested in the ways in which exclusion has taken place & what this has meant.

 After a break, Jim Turner re-opened the discussion by juxtaposing Hollinger’s usage of such terms as "warrant" & "truth claims" with a comment that Denis Donoghue had made yesterday.  We’ve been talking mostly in terms of how the world is & in terms of warrants for truth claims, said Jim.  But as Denis had properly pointed out, by no means is "how the world is" everything that academics talk about.  We may find texts interesting not because they represent how the world is but because they have some other appeal to us.  In this light, to what extent could it be argued that religious perspectives might have more gravity or catch in areas of academic work where we’re concerned not with warranting truth claims but with interpreting meanings?

 Mark Schwehn suggested a thought experiment that might help open up the question Jim had just raised but also not leave altogether behind the issue of warrant.  Suppose, Mark continued, that he were coming up for tenure in sociology at Berkeley.  Having been stirred by Jim Turner’s presentation this morning, he embarks on a project to write a book called "Understanding Littleton".  His methodology for this project is impeccably anthropological & sociological--grounded in the most extensive kind of field work, in interviewing people, growing familiar with the history, getting up to date on all kinds of theories of adolescent psychology, & so forth.  In his first 4 or 5 chapters, everyone acknowledges that in terms of review of the literature, field work and considering all kinds of theories that might explain what happened, he has gone through the material very thoroughly.  But he has shown by chapter 6 that thus far he still hasn’t gotten to the point that he thinks he can understand what happened & why.  So chapter 7 invokes ideas like "radical evil" & even draws on certain Augustinian notions in a thick way; not something simply lifted out of Augustine, but something fully embedded in his theological understanding.  He employs these terms to try to make sense of not only what happened at Littleton but why.  Let’s assume further, Mark proposed, that everyone agrees that the book is elegantly written, thoroughly researched, & so forth, and that he offers it up to the sociology department for consideration.
 What is important to see here, Schwehn thought, is that there are not just 2 possible responses to that book--that is, either it’s good or bad, true or not.  What he was trying to get us to do with this thought experiment was not to dichotomize things so sharply as though there are clear epistemic communities on one side & then there is something like a religious warrant which should get us nervous because it looks like some folks out there in the religious community want to contaminate epistemic procedures with religious warrants.  Mark thinks that hearkens back to an era that really is past.  There are going to be at least 5 or 6 cogent, sensible, reasonable responses to this book:  "It’s brilliant, but it’s not sociology;" "it’s probably true, but I’m in no position to make that judgment;" "we need some kind of religious opinion on this," but there’s massive disagreement on whether the theology is good; or "even though we can’t understand the last 2 chapters, it’s sufficiently good to give tenure in sociology because the first 6 are so good in eliminating other hypotheses".  Again, his point was to suggest that things are not quite as tidy as we think.
 Hollinger thought that once all of these various voices had their say, the center of gravity in the review process would be to hold that the parts of this work that invoke radical evil & that try to explain Littleton on what we might loosely call supernatural grounds would be accepted as a part of a general feeling that these are mysterious things & people are allowed to speculate a bit, especially within the discipline of sociology.  But the positive evaluation would not be based very much on that part of the work, David suggested.  That’s not to say that one takes that part of the work, the religious aspect, & treats it entirely as if one proposition is as good as another.  David upheld Mark’s suggestion that the academy has an obligation in dealing with that part of the work to respect some kind of evidence & reasoning, & that the representations of what Augustine said & how he had been interpreted ought to be right.  He thinks there is a place for that to come into the process.  But still, the line that David wanted to defend would be the academy’s decision not to make very much of that part of the explanation which was based on radical evil.
 Bernstein thought that what sounded so inadequate about Hollinger’s response, even though he was basically sympathetic, was that is simply didn’t take into consideration the real fact of sheer prejudice.  It isn’t that our distinguished colleagues say that this is irrelevant or we’re not going to consider a certain part of it, Dick explained.  Rather, a lot of people would say, if a guy does a thing like this, he doesn’t know the first thing about the discipline.  David’s answer seemed to Dick to be a little bit too ideal.  The hard thing is when you really see that entrenched prejudice is getting in the way of any kind of fair evaluation of something that deviates from well-accepted norms.  Dick concluded that his difference with Hollinger on this issue was that he sees a lot more "radical evil" in the academy than David does!

 Mark Noll addressed Hollinger’s analysis of the present power & persuasiveness of academic epistemic communities.  He thought that David quite properly singled out Darwin as the key to the intellectual questions that many people felt the Christian tradition in Britain & America simply didn’t answer.  Mark agreed with David that if we do some kind of distant construct of why de Christianization occurred & omit the fact that many bright people simply thought the old answers failed, then our narrative is inadequate.  Nonetheless, if we look back at the end of the 20th century to what happened in the mid- to late-19th century, we know that it wasn’t strictly or maybe even primarily the intrinsic intellectual values of Darwin’s arguments that won the day.  Why did the Darwinian view win in the academic world?  Referring to a number of works written by people in the room, Noll listed a wide range of reasons that underlay this victory.  So, said Mark, at the end of the 20th century we look back on an era in which people thought that it was the intrinsic weight of intellectual power creating an epistemic community, & it’s clear that that’s only part of the story.  It’s not ruled out, but it’s only part of the story.  In this light, at the end of the 20th century, is it justifiable to have any better opinion of the prevailing epistemic community than historians now take of the prevailing epistemic community in the university at the end of the 19th century?  Obviously Noll thought not, but he wanted to hear what David had to say.  If Mark is correct that the prevailing epistemic community in the academy does not deserve exalted (but rather moderate) respect, then the appeal for people who think like he does that Christian, theistic or traditional argumentation needs more place is not to appeal to democracy or rights but to appeal to greater faithfulness to the character of Christianity by people in the academic community.  It’s to appeal for a broader kind of scholarship that accepts the prevailing academic episteme to the extent possible, but also self-consciously as a believer interrogates that episteme.  What struck him as inadequate about David’s account of the modern scene was a kind of authoritarianism that he ascribed to the modern epistemic community that doesn’t seem to Mark, as a historian, justifiable.
 In response David pointed out that there are a number of other episodes in the history of thought where we can also find that intellectual transformations come about not in some kind of vacuum where a great mind sees something clearly & then proclaims it to the world & all fair-minded individuals have no choice but to agree.  We know that that’s not the way things generally happen.  In these short-hand discussions about epistemes, David thinks it’s easy for someone like himself to be misunderstood as falling into that kind of cognitive & whiggish idealism.  That’s not what he was trying to say.  Also, on the matter of exalting the contemporary episteme, he doesn’t propose to take an uncritical view of it but rather to view it in more classically Peircian terms.  The point is not that it’s right about everything, but that it does a better job answering the questions that we have than other tools that are presently available.  As Mark knows, said David, he is very much in the Kuhnian & Rortian mode on these issues & far from seeing the world as a set of permanent truth structures that are there, if only we can pull away the scales of illusion created by Christians & others through time.  That’s not his view at all.  But if you understand that we’re all in a kind of struggle to tease out of the phenomena the most warrantable possible claims, then it’s not so much that you’re exalting the current thing but rather you’re defending its relative adequacy against a series of rivals, many of which are rooted in practices & claims that have gradually been overcome through the course of the Scientific Revolution & the Enlightenment.
 The lacuna in what David just said, Dick Bernstein thought, is not doing justice to what in Dick’s view sometimes looks likes the chaos of competing positions & perspectives.  He felt that in some way David has to come to grips with this.  Dick referred to the idea that the whole notion of academic warrant is a myth itself; there are different kinds of warrants & different types of discourse.  The picture Hollinger had presented failed to do justice to the conflicts that are taking place, even leaving out the religious element.  But,  David responded, the religious element is the crucial factor in what he’s talking about.  He attempted to clarify by suggesting that in all those conflicts to which Dick alluded most of the people engaged in the conflicts would agree on the exclusion of the traditional religious warrant.  In other words, asked David, aren’t they disagreeing about other things?  Dick assented, but he thought his critique was applicable to the structure of David’s argument because it’s ingenuous to believe that there is a consensus about standard academic warrants in the academy.  And if people are questioning these notions, then using this as an argument itself calls the question.  Dick noted that many people in the academy simply do not accept David’s own standards, Peircian kinds of beliefs in terms of a norm & a sub-corrective, etc.  Therefore, using these as an instrument to criticize a certain form of discourse seems problematic.
 Hollinger conceded Dick’s point but said that he sees the peer review system as actually restoring a considerable amount of consensus.  He sees a considerable diminution of what Dick is calling the "chaos".   There might have been a time when those points that Bernstein is making were even more salient than they are right now.  David’s  sense is that a lot of younger people, particularly  those coming into these disciplines, display much more consensus about what shall count as warrant, what it means to relate evidence to argument, than was the case 10 or 15 years ago.

 As he listened to the papers & ensuing discussion, Clarke Cochran noted that "academia" seemed to mean "the disciplines".  He wondered what difference it would make in the institutional structure of higher education if we think of the university or the college.  This had been partly raised by Serene Jones & Frank Turner with regard to the role of professional schools.  But if we agreed with Jim Turner’s argument, would we organize public or private or secular or religious colleges differently or not?  If we agreed that there was an epistemic community, how would that affect the structure of higher education?  If we disagreed, i.e. if we thought it was all up for grabs & that there are only competing epistemic communities, would that lead us to structure institutions of higher education differently or not?  Jim Heft pointed out that a number of institutions are dealing with the need to break out of the disciplines in a way that could be responsive to some needs is to create "centers".  The difficulty is how one evaluates what a center does because it is responding to a whole set of issues that are not simply located in one discipline.  Yet there is usually a lot of energy around whoever the leader of the center is.  A lot of people are interested in it, & it creates a lot of life, and so on.  However, Clarke noted, people can’t get tenure in centers but only in disciplines.  Heft agreed.  He added that he doesn’t see the same sort of thing happening to the same degree in professional schools.
 Hollinger’s take on this was that it’s a good thing that we have these centers, but it’s an even better thing that we still have the disciplines.  He thinks that the interaction works fairly well.  The disciplines still seem to him to be the proper center of our discussion.  It is in the disciplines where most of these projects get defined.  As Dick was saying a while ago, hortatory appeals don’t get us very far, but specific completed projects do get us far.  And most of those projects find a home in one or another of the disciplines, or the disciplines can stretch a little bit to take account of something that’s done under more of a "center" aegis & then gets translated back into a slightly reconfigured discipline.  So David thinks that the disciplines still have an awful lot to give us.  And as he looks at the stuff that’s written nowadays in the academy as a whole, he’s increasingly skeptical about what is put forth under the sign "public intellectual".  Some of it is great, but a lot of it is again an effort to avoid standards of evidence & reasoning.

 George Marsden first stated his agreement with an observation that Jim Turner had made earlier which George didn’t think should get lost.  David had talked about discovery, motivation, justification & warrant, and said that if Christianity doesn’t have to do with the last then it isn’t going to amount to much.  But the fact of the matter is that that leaves out interpretation, which, e.g., in history, has a great deal to do with the way we tell the story & what stories we tell; and that, in turn, is closely related to evaluation.
 On the question of warrant, it seemed to Marsden that in the field of psychology you can get a good example of a major problem in agreeing on what the warrant is.  Paul Vitz has written a book called Psychology as Religion, which George described as a bit exaggerated but which makes some valid points in critiquing modern developmental psychology.  One of the points he makes is that the premises of modern developmental psychology are not scientific premises at all but rather philosophical premises that are then backed up by certain kinds of quasi-scientific arguments.  Basically most of these theories of developmental psychology are variations on the notion that self-development is the pre-eminent idea that the individual should aim for; that you want self-fulfillment & to be your own person, basically rejecting ideas that are just inherited.  Vitz raises the question, why not have a view of the normative self as the person who is self-disciplined, who is taught in a tradition or is oriented in a tradition of virtues?  That might be the normative kind of self.  How you decide which of those is going to be normative can’t be settled on any scientific kinds of grounds.  It has to do with other kinds of loyalties.  Among them might be religious loyalties.  George described an interesting recent article by John McGreevy called "Thinking on Your Own", which looks at anti-Catholic prejudice in the 1950s.  People said Catholics didn’t accomplish much in academia & so forth because, among other things, they had child-rearing practices that inhibited the development of the self.  E.g., Catholics didn’t put their infants in walkers but rather in playpens, they didn’t encourage them to make decisions on their own, & so forth.  This illustrates the point that even in the field of history one operates with normative ideas of what the proper self should be, what we take as normal or what we take as having to be explained.  The fact that McGreevy is a Catholic made him notice that this attitude toward the self was something that needed to be explained, where most historians haven’t noticed.  Of course, being a Catholic isn’t a necessary condition of noticing that.  Nonetheless there are major philosophical differences that people bring with them in creating what they consider to be the warrants for the norms that they use.  Marsden didn’t see any way to get around that.
 Out of great respect for David, Alan Wolfe said that when he thinks of the dangers that faith might play in the academy he thinks of David’s faith in the academic disciplines.  He then said that he was going to say something in support of Marsden, with whom he has had many disagreements.  He went back to Schwehn’s illustration of the sociology book & noted that there was one possibility that was not a scenario at all.  Alan described a real case he knew about where when a book was presented for a merit review, salary increase was denied based on the fact that it was a book.  In his department we do not write books.  Knowledge is not contained in books; knowledge is contained in scholarly articles.  In fact, a book is a demerit.  This was in a prestigious university in a department of political science.   He does not know that the notion that knowledge is contained in articles relative to books is inscribed anywhere.  So, Alan thought George was right.  There are different kinds of knowledge, Alan affirmed, and he gave other personal examples from his academic work to support his point that completely arbitrary standards have been established.  He ended by saying that he wished he had David’s faith.
 Far from being an uncritical defender of the status quo, Hollinger said he sees himself as deeply engaged all the time in struggling against some of the things about the academy that Wolfe doesn’t like.  It seemed to David that most of the academy is quite enthusiastic about books, so he wondered whether this wasn’t an idiosyncratic & misleading example.  A lot of people might agree strongly with Alan that this was really silly without it raising any of the questions that seem to him to be at issue here.  David went on to explain some of his root uncertainty & skepticism.  He questioned to what extent the things that Alan, Dick & himself might agree are really problematic about the mainstream academy could be improved in ways that the three of them might be enthusiastic about by changing what rules there are so that religious traditions are given more warranting authority than they now have.  If that’s the issue, then he is still doubtful.
 Alan returned to another issue connected with something that Frank Turner had said.  Frank had talked about the fact that we’re a very narrow band, the old time agnostics & the old time religious people, & out there in the culture it’s the spiritual stuff that dominates.  Wolfe asked Jim Turner, what would happen if we opened the academy more to the kinds of things he talked about & that Alan thinks many people here would support, & instead of the kind of Catholic tradition that Jim talked about or the kind of tradition that Mark was talking about rushing into the academy what rushed in was the vaguest kind of "spiritual stuff".  Would Jim join Alan in trying to get it out as fast as possible?  Jim said he thought he would, in large part because David & he would agree on there being contested, fluid, historically-contingent but nonetheless extant epistemic standards by which one could judge that stuff as pernicious intellectually or cognitively speaking.

 Frank Oakley turned the conversation to a different point that Frank Turner had made when he talked about the exclusions that prevail in what we do in the academy.  The other side of that is the privileging of certain fields, to which we could all testify.  In his own field of intellectual history, he thinks that there’s a marginalizing or downplaying of internalist approaches at the moment, which Frank considers unfortunate.  But he was trying to understand the worries we’d been ventilating about the exclusion or marginalizing either of religious subjects or religious interpretive perspectives.  He saw that as a subset of this much larger issue, and not unique.  Deprivileging or exclusion is clearly generating questioning, upset, hurt, irritation, even resentment.  Coming from that seems to be 2 possibilities.  Mark Noll referred to one, namely the wisdom or desirability of interrogating the prevailing academic episteme.  That seemed good & healthy to Frank.  The harder line, he thinks, if it indeed exists, is a claim to epistemic privilege or at least appeal for the loosening of epistemic warrant.  This last is what worries him, if indeed that claim is really being made.  When it seems to be made & is challenged, there tends to be a backing off from it.  But if the claim is being made, it seems to be a sort of epistemic resentment, and Frank thinks it’s unfortunate & unhealthy.
 Nancy asked for clarification of what Frank meant by epistemic resentment.  He described it as an interrogation of prevailing epistemic standards that seems to be grounded in resentment--resentment at exclusion, resentment at marginalization or the deprivileging of positions or interpretive perspectives.  That’s the feel of it, Oakley explained.

 Once again Denis Donoghue commented on a problem of vocabulary.  A phrase that David Hollinger had used earlier stuck in his mind, that is, the phrase "intersubjective testability".  Denis adverted to all the activities within the university to which this value or criterion is totally irrelevant.  He was thinking of such activities as art, literature, specifically literary criticism, musicology, and so on.  E.g., in literary criticism it would have no bearing whatsoever in enabling us to distinguish between good literary criticism & bad literary criticism.  It wouldn’t help in the least.  Denis thinks this raises an issue which he tried to articulate yesterday in relation to Dick Bernstein.   It seems that in such disciplines many people in the university have devised a different rhetoric, that is, to say of something that it’s either interesting or it isn’t.  We cannot say of a work of literary criticism that it’s good.  That’s not a valid consideration.  All you can say about it is whether in certain contexts & for certain occasions it is interesting or somehow productive.
 Denis also said that he thinks we’ve devised another technique, which is perhaps in totalitarian abeyance at the moment, and that is the technique of certifiability within the profession.  E.g., the major consideration in regard to a PhD dissertation is not whether it makes an invaluable contribution to knowledge.  In most cases the real question is whether it exhibits such a degree of competence in this person that we can indeed honorably welcome him or her into the profession.  It has far more to do with certification than it has to do with the production of knowledge.  He’s not saying whether that’s a good or a bad thing, but Denis thinks that one of our problems at the moment in the profession is an insistence on precisely the kind of point that Mark Schwehn was raising.  We don’t see people who are willing to ask, is this work demonstrably competent such that this person is entitled to membership in the profession.  We, or at least many of our colleagues, are not willing any longer to do that.  They’re applying a kind of McCarthyite test of particular positions taken, e.g., within a dissertation.  It seemed to Denis that David’s notion of "intersubjective testability" is still to some extent almost bedeviling  us.  It has a kind of totalitarian force in its application.
 In response, Hollinger said that one of his concerns is that what might be described as the "mush" words (e.g., productive, interesting, competent)--which Denis correctly & lucidly pointed out constitute the new rhetoric of evaluation in much of humanistic studies--are based on an unacknowledged intellectual capital that they inherit from what David is calling, perhaps infelicitously, intersubjective testability.  It seemed to David that when scholars in departments of English & comparative literature, French, German & so on offer testimony that such & such a book or article is a really productive, interesting, competent work of literary criticism, that they are alluding to standards that are intersubjective.  The phrase "intersubjective testability" may not be the best, and David wasn’t trying to defend it.  But what he was still eager to defend is the notion that there is a community of inquiry, of interpretation & of judgment that is not idiosyncratic & entirely individual; and that when these groups of scholars make exactly the judgments that Denis was talking about in the language that he was using, it still bespeaks some sense of what shall count as success & what shall not that is defensible.
 All he was trying to say, Denis clarified, was that the criterion of intersubjective testability is itself an Enlightenment standard which not everybody accepts.  It has proved of strategic value, but not everybody accepts it, & in Denis’s view, quite rightly so.  But there is an immense range of other values.  David asked how Denis would describe the values that he could most defend in the evaluation of literary scholarship.  Denis gave an example of a particular book in relation to which it would be meaningless, utterly without point, to invoke the notion of intersubjective testability.  In response to a question of David’s about which term was problematic, Denis said that the real problem was "testability" because it implies a kind of scientistic or Enlightenment value.  He re-emphasized his point that there are & that there should be different values operative.  It seemed to him that David was somehow trying to privilege one value, inevitably at the expense of other values.  David explained that what he would be looking for would be a language for the evaluation of works in the arts (since that seemed to be the direction in which Denis was really going).

 Diane Winston found the conversation curiously myopic & unhelpfully abstruse.  It’s a conversation mostly between tenured white men about what their scholarship is, where it’s going, & how they relate to the world of academics, she commented.  Diane thought about her students & how she could effectuate some of the issues we’d been discussing.  How does she make religion a concern for their scholarship as graduate students & their scholarship as professors?  She thinks the problem goes back to a whole system of education, beginning in primary school & secondary school, in which religion has been totally eviscerated from the curriculum.  Until religion becomes part of the public discourse again, we’re never going to be able to think of the next generation of scholars warranting or claiming or justifying or whatever because no one even has the basic tools to think about it.  If you wonder why spirituality as opposed to religion is rampant in popular culture, it’s precisely for this reason.  It’s because schools don’t teach religion--whether it’s your school or your church, & whether you approach it as an intellectual subject or a religious one.  (Diane also thinks that churches do as bad a job in theological formation as public & private school do in religious instruction.)  She realized that we’re supposed to be academics discussing this from an academic perspective.  But until we take a larger view of what we can do, until we move the conversation beyond ourselves to the future generation, this is just a conversation among tenured academics & not a discussion about what we can do in the future to improve scholarship.  She was finding it to be a rarefied discussion of the academy.  Nancy Ammerman suggested that we put the academy in its cultural context.  What’s talked about in the academy has to be understood in the context of who’s coming through the doors & what the culture is.
 Bernstein agreed that there had been a peculiarity about this conversation.  Most of it has had nothing to do with religion.  We’ve been voicing various discontents about the academy, standards, criteria, disciplinary matrices--issues that are very real--but there has been a disjuncture.  What does this whole set of issues have to do specifically with religion? he asked.  That’s been Hollinger’s perplexity, Dick noted, & David agreed.  David added that he was eager to initiate such a conversation with the second part of his remarks, where he asked about the significance of the division between academics of religious conviction & non-religious academics.  However, we chose not to explore that question but rather to talk about motivation & warrant.
 
 

SESSION III - SATURDAY AFTERNOON

 The final session focused on 3 papers in which presenters were asked to describe how a particular piece of their scholarly work was inflected by religious beliefs, traditions and/or practices.
 

Presentation #1:  Serene Jones, The Divinity School, Yale University

 Serene Jones explained that she was presently finishing a book on the relationship between feminist political theory, literary theory & classical Christian theology.  At the March Lilly conference she had presented an overview of the whole book.  For the present meeting she wanted to talk in more detail about one of its sections where she lays out a feminist theological account of the self, which is grounded in the reformed doctrines of justification & sanctification but which also draws on recent work in post-structuralist feminist theory & psychoanalytic trauma theory.   Her purpose was to provide one example of how she addresses present-day feminist concerns about the nature of the self by using seemingly strange, old-fashioned terms like "justification" & "sanctification"
 Following some introductory comment about how she understands her work as a theologian, Jones  introduced 2 central themes in feminist theory with respect to the self that she uses in her work on justification & sanctification.  First, like most feminist theorists working in the academy today, Serene has been strongly influenced by post-structuralist, feminist accounts of identity.  These accounts attempt to lay bare the gender assumptions that shape western understandings of the self.  She has been especially convinced by de Beauvoir’s famous statement that one is not born a woman, one becomes one; and that biology is not destiny.  She even likes the much maligned argument of Judith Butler that gender is a cultural code which functions like a kind of dramatic script which we perform & which also performs us.  As a feminist, she has found the dismantling of gender essentialisms liberating.  Not only does it reveal how deeply sexist cultural patterns cut into our understanding of male & female, masculine & feminine.  It also reminds us that changing these patterns is an arduous process because in most cases they appear to us as natural truths.  For these reasons Serene applauds feminist post structuralists’ "de-centering of the subject," a so-called fracturing of the self.  Moreover, as a theologian she thinks this insight is loaded with theological significance.
 On the second theme, Serene explained that her appreciation for this deconstructive form of feminism is tempered by another set of feminist insights.  As with most feminists, she began her sojourn into the territory of feminism through a series of very practical political engagements.  In college she began working with women who were survivors of domestic violence, sexual abuse, rape & incest.  Unfortunately, this is not a small group of people.  She can hardly teach a course on feminism at Yale without a number of women coming forward to name their experience of these kinds of harms.  As a theologian she believes that if the gospel is to be heard in the present day, it must surely speak to these women.  Serene’s understanding of the psychic dimension of this reality has been expanded in recent years by a growing body of literature dealing with trauma.  This literature has taken as its subject 3 groups of trauma survivors.  It describes in painful detail how violence has the capacity to strip the self of the basic mental mechanisms that hold it together.  It describes how, when a person is traumatized, their structures of meaning shatter as their nervous system quite literally inverts its synaptic patterns.  When this happens the self is undone in such a way that not only ordered speech but memory itself dissolves.  Violence has the power to quite literally destabilize the subject by traumatically fracturing the self.  What is needed for healing in this context, the trauma-theory literature suggests, is not a further fracturing but rather narrative gestures that can serve to knit the self back together: gestures of embrace & closure, gestures that author agency anew.
 Placing this literature on trauma next to the deconstructive accounts of gender essentialism she described, it’s not hard to see that they stand in basic conflict.  What is considered by post structuralists to be a deconstructive act that liberates the self is considered by trauma theorists to be the very act that re-performs the violence that it seeks to the resist.  Put in other terms, on one side there is a group of theorists who imagine that de-centering the subject is the way out of the gender prison while on the other side is a group of theorists who describe that de-centering as itself the prison which we need to escape.  In this context the question becomes, what does one do with the seeming conflict between these 2 equally important feminist insights into the nature of the self?
 Against the backdrop of these comments on the nature of the self, Serene turned to the field of theology.  She first gave some autobiographical details.  She was raised in a mainstream Reformed Protestant denomination, and she is the daughter of a theologian & a psychotherapist who for most of their lives have been both political activists & rather traditional Christians.  In this context having faith meant not only holding particular kinds of beliefs about God & the world.  It also meant engaging in a series of practices which formed a way of life:  e.g., hymn-singing, extending hospitality to the poor & the stranger, taking seriously a day of sabbath rest, celebrating & honoring the beauty of the human body, caring for the sick & being present to the dying.  In this rich mix of beliefs & practices, Serene developed an understanding of the self that she believes intuitively drew her both to the post structuralist literature & to trauma-theory, for both resounded deeply with the practical wisdom of faith.
 Her recent work in the field of Reformed Christian theology has confirmed for Serene that there are also deep resonances between this material & the actual doctrines that comprise the core of this Protestant tradition.  In particular she has found embedded in the doctrinal logic of justification & sanctification sources for thinking about the relationship between feminist post-structuralism & trauma theory.  She explained that at the heart of the Reformed account of the Christian religion is the claim that faith, which is the central moment for talking about identity or the self, is a gift bestowed by God upon the believer.  Identity is gifted.  As such, faith is considered to be radically contingent upon divine initiative, divine grace.  Since the days of Calvin, Reformed theologians have devoted themselves to delineating exactly how this grace comes to rest upon us; and out of this conversation have arisen 2 classical accounts of the economy of grace, justification & sanctification.   Only when justification & sanctification occur, it is claimed, does the full self emerge from its bondage to sin & begin to flourish.  As such, justification & sanctification are considered person-constituting moments.  They define the space within which the self, in a sense, comes into being.  The self is born & then unfolds into covenant history.
 These two economies of grace are quite different, Serene affirmed, and she went on to give a detailed exposition of the outworking of these two doctrines.  After presenting a vivid account of the courtroom drama of justification, Serene concluded that in God’s act of justifying forgiveness the self is undone or deconstructed by a grace which on the one hand judges the false strictures used for self definition while on the other hand giving back to the self  a reborn sense of its own agency.  Thus, according to the logic of justification, to become a self, a person of faith, requires being radically deconstructed in order to be broken free from sin & thereby opened to life with God.  But this drama of justifying grace alone is not enough.  John Calvin developed a hearty doctrine of sanctification because he felt that Luther’s account of justification left this side too severely underdeveloped.  Calvin describes sanctification, or what he calls regeneration, as a process through which the believer is transformed in a kind of ongoing way, & not as the result of a momentary decision by God, as in justification.  In the drama of sanctification grace is described as forming us, as creating, defining, enveloping, structuring the life of the believer.  (And for Calvin this process happens in community.)  So, whereas in justification the grace of forgiveness remains forever alien to us, something that is put upon us, the grace of sanctification quite literally takes up its home in our bodies, our actions, & materially transforms the conditions of our existence.
 For Serene this account of sanctifying grace, as it envelops & holds us, speaks powerfully to the situation of women who, by virtue of the sin of the world around them, have been stripped of psychic form.  For the person who is formless & scattered this grace rests upon her not as a deconstructive gesture but as an enclosing gesture.  Serene particularly likes the image of grace in this second form as a divine love which adorns women by placing on them garments of righteousness wherein they are permitted to flourish.  She added that once these garments of righteousness, these sanctifying garments, work their healing power, the self of faith will again be deconstructed by justifying grace; but this time the deconstructive force of the undoing has as its aim freedom & the authoring of agency, both of which remain constitutive elements of who the self becomes in faith.
 Serene concluded with 3 brief comments.  First, this drama of grace in its dual unfolding, its undoing & its remaking of us, is beautifully captured by a poetic image used by the theorist Luce Irigaray.  She describes how women have for centuries worn the psychic clothes designed according to man’s desire.  What she needs now in order to truly flourish, Irigaray contends, are clothes of her own choosing, to be adorned in garments that flow with the grace which reveals her individuality & particularity.  To this image of envelopment Irigaray also adds the reminder that the purpose of an envelope is to allow its contents to travel toward the other.  It is envelopment for the sake of agency, for the sake of ethics.  Second, another issue is the status of someone who is not a person of faith in this account of identity.  How is this undoing & enveloping grace operative in relation to them?  Perhaps we can talk about that, Serene suggested.  Third, she began her theological comments with the statement that Christian doctrine, but also Christian practices, have influenced her thinking about these topics.  So central is her appreciation for these practices that Serene believes she could easily write this same paper not using the doctrinal formulations of justification & sanctification as her starting point but rather using Christian practices which embody these 2 forms of grace.
 

Presentation #2:  Clarke Cochran, Texas Tech University

 Clarke Cochran began by explaining that he has been working in some sense on religion & politics his whole professional career, which has been for the most part at Texas Tech University, a secular public institution.  Even though in many different ways his research has always been grounded in his Catholic faith & its intellectual traditions, until recently he hasn’t really focused on specifically Catholic issues.  This year at the Erasmus Institute he is working on Catholic principles & Catholic institutions.  In particular Clarke is working on is an understanding of the church as sacrament & the kinds of sacramental language & sacramental perspective that is deeply & intimately part of the Catholic tradition.  This research is both scholarship grounded in religion & scholarship that concerns religion, to use phrases from the March Lilly conference.  But, as with all of his research, Clarke is aiming to discover & to communicate truths that might come to form part of the political science mainstream or one of the streams of political science.
 The argument he is trying to develop has 3 large steps.  The first step shows that Catholics almost inevitably build institutions; but at the same time there is an institutional identity crisis in the Catholic church, one that is very familiar in higher education & in parish life.  Cochran is particularly interested in the way this is found quite analogously in health care institutions & to a lesser degree in social service institutions like Catholic charities.  These institutions are undergoing a tremendous identity crisis rooted in all the familiar challenges to the Catholic church in the modern world.  But the crises are also related to particular things that are going on in health care & in social services,  e.g., a very changing clientele.  The kinds of people who are now served in Catholic hospitals, nursing homes or clinics are different from the kind of people who would have come 30, 40 or 50 years ago when these institutions were founded.  Also, these institutions are now highly professionalized & secularized, imbued with the norms, the procedures & the rules of the medical or the social work profession & analogous professions.  The other thing that’s happening is that government policies towards health care & social service institutions have changed very dramatically in the last 20 or 30 years, & these institutions are having to struggle with how to respond to those policies while maintaining a Catholic identity.  So, the first of the three steps is to try to think about the meaning of institutions & the challenges that health care & social service institutions face.
 The second step is to look at the tradition of Catholic social teaching, particularly as it has evolved over the last 100 years or so in categories that are fairly familiar:  notions of the common good, notions of stewardship, subsidiarity, the dignity of the human person, and so forth.  What Cochran wants to argue here is that as valuable as that tradition has been, its categories are not sufficient to understand the challenges that health care & social service institutions are undergoing, nor are they sufficient to navigate politically the essential tensions that exist on the border between Catholic institutions & political & public life.  So, we have an institutional crisis, & we have a tradition of social thought which has a certain richness but which Clarke thinks is inadequate in important ways.
 His third claim, then, is that the sacramental perspective in the Catholic tradition facilitates understanding the dynamics on this uneasy border between institutions & public life & can facilitate addressing these problems.  By the sacramental tradition he means the notion that the grace of God & the transforming encounter with God happen, or are mediated, in signs, symbols & rituals.  Sacraments are privileged moments of encounter with God, & they transform the self.  This is certainly true of the classic 7 sacraments, but Clarke thinks this notion of sacramentality pervades Catholic thinking beyond baptism, eucharist, etc.  He wants to argue that this sacramental perspective can issue a call to Catholic health care institutions better to represent Christ to the sick, but also better to represent Christ to the culture at large.  The sacramental perspective can also help the church to see the face of Christ in the sick & the injured & especially to see the face of Christ in those who are lost as the market & government busily rearrange the furniture of the health care & social service system.
 From these 3 points Cochran hopes to derive a theoretical argument about the political significance of sacramental theology.  He also wants to derive some practical institutional & political advocacy recommendations for Catholic health care & ultimately, he hopes, for Catholic social service.  So far what he has said might be thought of as perhaps interesting, but really part of the internal business of the Catholic tradition, that is, as merely perspectival.  But Clarke thinks it’s more than that.  As he has worked through these ideas within the framework of thinking as a political scientist, they’ve suggested to him that there are certain fundamental limitations of his own discipline & that thinking about institutions in this way can make a contribution to the discipline itself.  Most obvious is the way in which political science has been largely unaware of the role that Catholic institutions play in political & public life.  Everybody thinks about schools & controversies about the funding of private elementary & secondary education, but nobody thinks very much about the billions of government dollars that flow into Catholic hospitals, nursing homes, charities & agencies every year.  Clarke thinks it’s important to bring this to the surface, to ask what’s going on here & what the implications are of this relationship that happens in both financial & policy terms on a daily basis in health care & social services.
 Beyond this obvious point, however, there is a more significant theoretical point to be made.  It now seems to Cochran that the representational life of institutions, the way institutions mediate meaning, has been neglected in political science generally.  He thinks that institutions are important in their own right & that their internal life has a meaning.  Yet political science tends to treat institutions simply as convenient collections of individuals which transmit desires or interests to the political system.  We don’t attend to the meaning of the institution itself, he pointed out.  But institutions are more than simply utilitarian, more than simply a means to achieve ends set by autonomous individuals or by powerful groups or classes, though obviously sometimes institutions do have utilitarian purposes.  Clarke thinks that all institutions of any depth, not just Catholic health care or religious institutions, are icons or sacramental witnesses of something more fundamental.  They’re witnesses to systems of ideas, beliefs, relationships & loyalties which institutions sustain in the people that belong to them & into which they initiate new members.  Moreover, institutions create realities that stem from these fundamental commitments, beliefs & meanings.  Institutions communicate & shape cultural, political & religious meaning.  They are places of transformational encounter.  Disney Land is more than just a means of entertaining children.  A Catholic, Jewish or Baptist hospital is more than just a location where modern medicine is practiced; or if that’s all it is, it ought to get out of the business because it has no distinctive reason for existence if all it is a place where another culture, i.e. the culture of medicine, is the system of meaning.
 If the argument he has just sketched out is true in some sense, Cochran suggested that there are 2 implications.  One set of implications is for the Catholic faith itself.  He hopes to persuade Catholic social theorists that there are important gaps in their theory & that these gaps are reparable with materials from the larger tradition itself.  Second, Clarke wants to try to persuade political science & political theory that there is an important place for this kind of understanding of institutions.  So, this sense of trying to be both universal, in the sense of speaking to the larger discipline, and at the same time particular, i.e. rooted & grounded in the Catholic tradition, suggests to him that that dichotomy itself is inadequate & flawed.  One has to be both universal & perspectival.  In terms of the morning discussion, Clarke said that he is inclined towards Michael Polanyi’s concept of personal knowledge, in which all knowing--whether scientific or moral knowing or, presumably, religious knowing--depends upon an indwelling.  In what Polanyi calls "tacit knowing" we attend from something to which we are committed (e.g., a methodology or a set of theories) in order to attend to something else (a particular problem within the discipline or a particular feature of the world).  Analogously, Clarke added, it seems we might attend from a religious tradition, in his case Catholic sacramentality, in order to attend to a more general theoretical problem in social life, in this case, the political meaning of institutions.  This attending from in order to attend to is done with the intent of discovering & warranting knowledge.  In conclusion, Cochran thought that looking at health care & social services in this Catholic way can open up neglected institutional dimensions of topics important to political science, but also open up the sacramental dimension within Catholicism itself & apply it in ways that can enrich the tradition of Catholic social theory.
 

Presentation #3:  George Marsden, University of Notre Dame

 In keeping with Jim Turner’s request that he talk about the influence of Christianity upon something that he’s written, George Marsden discussed his work The Soul of the American University.  He began by expressing his puzzlement when people say that they don’t think that his Christianity has all that much obvious influence on his scholarship.  It seemed to George almost self-evident that if you have strong commitments they shape your narrative, what you talk about, what you emphasize, who your heroes & heroines are, who the villains are, & the like.  He supposes the critics are looking for something more.  Some of them must be looking for direct theological claims, something like the Holy Spirit caused the Great Awakening & the devil caused its excesses.  Since George doesn’t make this kind of claim, they don’t see Christianity influencing his history because it’s conventional in form.  But George thinks more about perspectives.  He posed an obvious example:  If a Mennonite is writing about current U.S. policy in Yugoslavia, that narrative is going to be influence by his or her Mennonite commitments.  That seems to him to be very obvious.
 Marsden sees each of us as shaped by a number of commitments to various communities to which we belong.  We’re all products of multiple traditions.  Among the traditions that shape George’s scholarship are aspects of American political liberalism, aspects of the culture of modern science, & his Reformed Christianity, just to name three.  But in his work as a historian he is also shaped very much by his commitment to & participation in a craft.  So, like other historians who have been trained & shaped in that professional craft, he looks at natural causes of human behavior & operates on widely accepted rules of evidence & argument.  This is the kind of thing that David Hollinger was talking about this morning, George explained.  He shares some of those kinds of commitments because he is a practitioner of the craft, and he believes the craft has some standards.  What puzzles him is when people seem to think that if you do the craft reasonably well you must be suspending your religious belief when you’re doing it.  He thinks that one necessarily brings into the craft commitments shaped by the other traditions that are shaping you, & particularly in the areas of interpretation or evaluation.
 George reflected on how his religious commitments & traditions shape the evaluative dimensions of doing the craft of history.  He noted at least 5 ways that these show up in Soul of the American University by briefly describing 5 types of questions he raised:  1) What is important to study?  George is interested in religion in the university because of his religious commitments.  2) What questions does he ask about it?  His religious commitments have a lot to do with seeing what he sees as problematic about the history.  3) What currently fashionable interpretive strategies are compatible with his religious outlook?  E.g., George is not a post-modernist because he doesn’t think this fits with his religious outlook.  4) How does he implicitly or explicitly evaluate developments as positive, negative or as something in between?  5) How do these evaluations shape the narrative?  George gives a certain spin to the way he tells his stories that imply some sorts of evaluation, & those are shaped by religious commitment.
 Marsden also made a few qualifications which he thought were necessary to address some of the objections, some of the reasons why people don’t see his religion as being very significant in his scholarship.  First, there is the obvious point that religious perspectives change some things, but they don’t change everything.  E.g., his religious perspective doesn’t change his calculation of the date when Thomas Huxley spoke at Johns Hopkins University, but his religious perspective does affect the amount of emphasis & the spin he gives to this detail.  So, the fact that one’s religious perspective doesn’t change a whole number of factors doesn’t mean that it’s not significant at some crucial points in the narrative & interpretation.  Another elementary but often confused point, said George, is that the fact that other people will agree with religious people on some particular point doesn’t negate the fact that religion is a factor shaping their view.  Again, regarding the Mennonite’s evaluation of the war in the Balkans, the fact that a secularist might have the same dim view of American policy doesn’t mean that the Mennonite’s view of it is not shaped by his or her Mennonite outlook.  Third, and very important for what he is going to say, there is clearly no one Christian perspective but rather multiple Christian perspectives.  So, George is not talking just from a Christian point of view but from particular Christian traditions that shape his ways of evaluating & framing the narrative.  For George those particular Christian traditions are at least the following three:  Augustinian traditions, Kuyperian traditions & some of the Niebuhrian tradition, though, he acknowledged, his understandings of these are no doubt somewhat imperfect.
 The first 2 of these traditions, the Augustinian & the Kuyperian, both emphasize creation & regeneration.  So Marsden’s epistemology tends to be a chastened realism, as Mark Noll & others have put it.  Because we are beings created by a benevolent creator, he thinks we can communicate with people from other traditions & engage in things like historical study with some degree of objectivity.  George also thinks our traditions & faith commitments influence the way we see things.  Hence, many of the questions that shape the narrative in The Soul of the American University are questions such as, Why didn’t American educators in the 17th & 18th centuries do better at integrating their Christian faith with what they were teaching in the classroom?  At the height of the Protestant establishment, he commented, they were doing a lousy job of relating faith & learning. This question is shaped very much by a Kuyperian ideal of integration of faith & learning.  If you’re not a Kuyperian, you probably wouldn’t even think of that question.  But that question shapes a lot of George’s narrative for the 17th & 18th centuries.
 Another theological perspective that deeply influences the structure of the book is a version of the Augustinian principle of the 2 cities.  In the version with which George identifies, Christians are at their best when they live in constructive tension with the dominant culture & at their worst when they’re an establishment.  So, in his tradition, Roger Williams is much more of a hero than is John Winthrop.  Marsden explained that he tried to make sure that nobody would miss this point so he deliberately added to The Soul of the American University the subtitle "From Protestant Establishment to Established Non-belief."  He thought it would be obvious from that subtitle that his evaluative stance was that either sort of exclusivist establishment was a bad thing.  Nonetheless, he was astonished at how many reviewers persisted in assuming their own master narrative of what Christians must really have in mind.  So, they said Marsden is really looking back to a lost golden age, & he must want Christians to "take over" the academy, to reclaim the power that they’ve lost.  In fact, however, one of the central narrative themes in the book is built around the dangers of informal Christian establishments.  Throughout American history many Christians, especially educated Protestants, have had a lamentable difficulty distinguishing their own views & allegiances from those of the dominant public culture.  That theme recurs & shapes the narrative, & it is very directly related to George’s version of the 2 cities.  At the same time his tradition of Kuyperian Christianity also teaches that Christians should try to promote just & pluralistic societies, even though the cities of the world are not their first allegiances.  So he repeatedly makes the point that the irony of the Protestant establishment was that in the name of building a Christian society it excluded Jews, Catholics & others.  Recognition of the discriminatory dimension built into mainstream Protestant higher education was one of the major factors enforcing final disestablishment.  He sees this disestablishment as a good development overall, with ironic consequences.  It over-corrected for a real problem & left us with what he calls "established non-belief".
 Another Christian tradition that shapes Marsden’s evaluations is some combination of the Niebuhrian & Calvinist view of human nature.  George explained that he sees humans as deeply flawed, often in ironic ways, & Christians as by no means immune from this defect.  With Niebuhr he believes that the greatest injustices are often done in the name of good causes.  So, his interpretation of the history of the demise of the Protestant educational establishment is built around that ironic theme.  The stories he tells are often of well-intentioned decisions that have good short-term rationales but unintended or unperceived long-term results.  Also, when Christianity is tied to power, as it was in the establishment of higher education, it tends often to be used as a means to further self-interest, and that is always a deplorable defect of success, built into human nature.
 Marsden thought it should be evident from these examples that although he practices the techniques of the craft of history much the same way that other practitioners do, his narratives are shaped by very particular theological traditions.  These have a pervasive influence on the way he tells the story.  To underscore this point, George noted that if you compare his narrative in the book to the master narrative that is usually used to tell the story, you can see the difference this makes.  Prior to his work, the usual way that the story of religion & higher education was narrated was according to what historians call the Whig version of history.  In this version the story is told by the winners.  It’s a story of the laudable triumph of liberalism, scientific naturalism & right thinking.  In the best earlier treatment of the history of American universities, a wonderful book by Lawrence Vesey, while the religious views of 19th-century university leaders are recognized, they are regarded as vestigial inheritances of an earlier era doomed to a deserved extinction as they encountered the inexorable forces of modernity; therefore they’re not worthy of serious attention.  Marsden recognized that the story could be told exceedingly well with that narrative as well.  For now, his only point was that that narrative is different from his, & it is different from his because he is shaped by the Christian traditions he described, & the people who tell the story in this other way are not.
 

Discussion of Presentations

 Once again Seminar members voted to remain in plenary session rather than moving into smaller groups for discussion of the 3 presentations.
 Alan Wolfe offered a number of reflections in an attempt to answer a question that David Hollinger posed, which was:  What would the introduction or reintroduction or greater recognition of religious themes in the academy do?  Alan thought that a partial answer to this question, & maybe some of its limits, had been posed by the 3 papers we just heard.  He suggested that one of the things that greater attention to religious themes in American scholarship could do would be to add the variant dimension of realism to academic discussions, which he often finds to be generally loose & disconnected.  This grows out of a sense that we’re all nice people, & conflict is something we often want to avoid.  So a sense of the irreconcilable, a sense of the inherent tragic choices that have to be made, is sometimes missing in academic discourse.  Alan thought that if there were one really strong & positive benefit from paying greater attention to religious themes it would be that we would thereby welcome into the academy people who come from such a grounding & such a conviction that they would introduce into academic discourse more flinty material, more sharpness to the debate.  Unlike many other academics they would have a very, very strong stake in one particular version of reality or of the truth which might anchor them.  It doesn’t mean that other people would agree with them, but it would at least bring some greater tension to academic life than exists at present.
 To Serene Alan pointed out that the very same project that she described was addressed by another thinker very recently, & that thinker is Martha Nussbaum.  She contrasted the writings of Judith Butler, the postmodernist version, with the writings of trauma victims.  In her case the trauma victims were very poor women in India that she’s written about.  Nussbaum finds Judith Butler’s perspective completely irrelevant & a form of escapism from what she wants feminists to do, which is to think about real world conditions like poverty & hunger.  So she sets up very much the same kind of tension that Serene did, but she then takes sides.  She says one perspective is wrong & the other is right, which, Alan thought, is exactly what Serene didn’t do.  Serene wanted to find some value in both.  Alan wondered whether in her research she had contemplated, as Nussbaum does, the possibility that as she learns more about trauma & the effects of trauma she might conclude that the postmodernist feminists who want to de-center the self are simply absurd.  One could easily argue that the experience of trauma teaches us that holding on to a centered self is so vital, so crucial to what it means to be human, that those people who want to de-center the self are simply "out to lunch," as Alan thinks Nussbaum says quite rightly.  He wondered whether Serene had entertained this idea as a hypothesis.
 Wolfe posed a similar question to Clark Cochran.  Cochran talked about how much he admired a perspective that was being developed which says that on the one hand we need perspectivalism & on the other hand we need a kind of universalism.  Again, why not choose between them?  Why not say that one of them is wildly off base, Alan asked.  So, if bringing a certain tension & flinty material is what Wolfe would like to see religious scholarship bring to the academy, he’s not sure it’s going to happen.
 Cochran responded first.  If there is any "flint" in his work it is to take sacramentality seriously, to recognize that institutions are iconic & carriers of meaning & have to be understood & appreciated in a deeper way, certainly by the political science establishment.  The other flint is the challenge to the institutions themselves.  It seemed to Clark that he was going to come up with some fairly challenging recommendations a) to Catholic institutions, & b) to public policy.  He’s not sure there’s much flint in the concluding point.  That point does seem to him to be true, that is, as we think & research & write with universal intent we’re standing somewhere when we do it.   But he wouldn’t characterize it as a flinty contribution.
 Serene Jones replied to Wolfe by saying that Nussbaum is setting out similar contradictions & resolving them in a different way.  Jones said she sees companionable wisdom where Nussbaum sees tensions.  First, her grounding in the Christian traditions suggests that  implicit to the whole construction of the self is the need for that self to be continually undone by the other.  Her whole understanding of human nature is such that she will not let go of taking seriously the importance of this kind of post-structuralist de-centering of the self.  Second, unlike  Nussbaum, Serene thinks that there is a very pragmatic, positive communal use to be put to post-structuralist fragmenting of identity.  In her own work she has seen this in the context of a group of women she works with.  Getting underneath gender essentialisms & blasting open claims about what is natural has been extremely liberating at very practical levels.  So, Serene would disagree with Nussbaum on both of those grounds, & they both can’t be reduced to, but stem from, her theological commitment.

 Wolterstorff said that one of the things that interested him very much in these presentations was the many ways in which religion shapes scholarship.  Nick understood what George was up to very well as it comes out of his tradition, and he does the same kind of battling with narratives of philosophy.  But he didn’t fully understand what Serene & Clark were up to.  It looked to Nick as though they were taking a theological model & using it metaphorically to illuminate some other domain of human affairs.  He asked for clarification.
 To some extent what Nick described is probably what she is doing, Serene responded. What she actually understands herself to be doing, however, is standing in a tradition & in a sense pulling feminist theory into it & seeing how feminist theory both illumines that tradition but is transformed by that tradition in its illumining process.  Serene noted that she doesn’t have as her primary audience feminist theorists but rather people with a theological ear, although she takes seriously the kind of standards that feminist theory would apply to the legitimacy of the task that she undertaking.  She also explained that one popular model for thinking about the relationship between feminism & theology is that you have something called "women’s experience," and women’s experience gives you certain kinds of insights that you then take into the theological tradition.  Serene acknowledged that that dynamic takes place, but she has also discovered that it is her grounding in the theological tradition that created the conditions of the experience in the first place.  So the theological moment is only a kind of secondary "aha, here’s the truth of it" moment.  It is also creating the very grounds of the experience itself.

 Cochran said that he didn’t think he recognized Serene’s account either.  He explained that what he is trying to do is to figure out some puzzles.  One puzzle is why political science, when it talks about church & state, religion & politics & so forth, is simply blind to a whole area of intersection of religion & politics.  Even in the health care policy literature there is blindness.  The second puzzle is the crisis in American Catholic health care institutions, the continual grinding at our identity, the repetition of certain principles out of the tradition, the very repetition of which suggests that they don’t have any traction.  Clarke is trying to figure out what can make sense of these two things.  It seemed to him as he thought & read about this that there was in the Catholic tradition a sacramental principle that could, first of all, help Catholic institutions get a better handle on their identity & whether they’re doing what they ought to be doing.  Second, it occurred to him that the notion of what an institution is from the perspective of the sacramental tradition sheds some light on the dilemma in political science of not knowing exactly what to do with the life of institutions & the way institutions create, generate & transmit meaning.
 Wolterstorff’s query, following up on Cochran’s explanation, was what the concept of sacrament was doing there for him.  Nick assumed that Clarke didn’t think that a hospital is a sacrament.  This is always the difficulty in Catholic sacramental theology, Clarke replied, because certainly neither he nor the Catholic tradition wants to say that the hospital is the eighth sacrament & the nursing home is the ninth, etc.  At the same time, he thinks there is in the Catholic tradition a sense that hospitals can be, are called to be, sacramental; that is, that what goes on in them ought to be a mediation of divine grace.  He is still trying to work out how to express this in the best way, but if a hospital is only a doctor’s workshop, then it doesn’t need to be Catholic.  If a hospital is only a manifestation of justice in delivery of care to the poor, it’s important, but it’s not distinctively Catholic.  What would make a hospital or nursing home or clinic distinctively Catholic?  What are the implications for Catholic thinking about institutions generally & health care institutions specifically?  Then, what are the implications for politics, for public policy & for political science?  That’s the way that Clarke has thought about it, and he wasn’t sure that a language of models, which Nick proposed, helps him.
 Richard Hughes also commented on the issue of sacramentality.  He explained that when he & others were working on the book Models of Christian Higher Education, one of the writers from one of the Protestant colleges said that he thought they really needed to attend to the issue of secularization, that is, the tendency of all of these schools to go down the "slippery slope" toward secularization.  At this point one of the Catholic writers said that that made no sense to her whatever, and she began to talk about the notion of sacramentality.  Richard said he heard Clarke use the language of secularization 2 or 3 times in his presentation, & he was wondering how one could use the language of sacramentality & the language of secularization at one & the same time.  Clarke responded that he doesn’t like to use the language of secularization precisely because it is fraught with a lot of problems, & he thinks it tends to be a kind of mantra.  He explained that he was using the term "secular" in a purely descriptive sense, i.e. when he refers to a secular university he simply means that it’s not a religious school but a public university.
 Oakley was very taken by Cochran’s talk about sacramentality & institutional meaning & simply wanted to add an appendix.  As president of an old long-established institution he found himself very struck by the sheer fragility of institutions, no matter how solid they seemed.  There were moments that he felt that all they were involved in was a sort of tissue of intentions, hopes, aspirations up against the hostility of time.  That led Frank to think a lot about institutional meaning, & it led him to conclude that perhaps the greatest challenge for a college president was indeed the identification, shaping, re shaping & articulation of the meaning of the institution.  More recently he has been reading a bit trying to make sense of what was a very fulfilling but very demanding & intense period of his life.  In some of the broader leadership literature, which Frank assumed is inspired by cultural anthropology, he has found a deep preoccupation with institutional meaning.  If the political scientists say nothing, the people writing about leadership do talk about institutions.  He had in mind a particular article entitled "The Management of Meaning."  Frank thinks this is very important & challenging, and if it’s not done well, all the managerial expertise comes to nothing in terms of the destiny in the institution.  Lastly, Oakley noted that he could remember himself using the language of sacrament about the institution, probably to universal confusion.  So he thought Clarke’s instincts to want to probe these issues are very good, but he couldn’t quite put them together fully with sacramental theology, although Clarke had led him to wonder a bit why he had himself at least at one time thought in that way.

 After a break, David Hollinger re-opened the discussion on a somewhat different theme.  He affirmed that the idea that one’s scholarly contributions are somehow informed by one’s orientation toward religious issues is obviously right.  To David, however, the question seemed to be different from simply confirming or denying that.  The issue is the extent to which this religious matrix or this matrix of orientations toward religious issues becomes detachable from the contribution made.  He thinks a good example for exploring this would be the critique of the political science discipline that Clarke developed as part of his remarks.  We might ask whether this critique of the political science discipline is one that is simply available to Clarke personally because he happens to be Catholic.  We might also ask whether this is a critique of political science that could only be made by Catholics, or is it a critique of political science that also might be made by non-Catholics.  David posed a number of other questions in this vein exploring the extent to which this was an essentially Catholic critique of the political science discipline.
 In principle, Clarke responded, if what he was saying is true about institutions, then that is accessible to anybody who is willing to go along with him; and that going along with him depends upon how well he can do it in terms of the craft of political science.  He affirmed that it does not depend upon his Catholicism, though somebody might have to make some translations.  Is Catholicism, then, simply in a facilitative & auxiliary role, Hollinger asked.   Clarke answered that he wanted to say something stronger than that, & that, David said, was what interested him.

 Rich Mouw addressed a question to Serene with regard to the issue that Alan Wolfe had posed to her.  Rich agreed with Serene, first of all, that both Martha Nussbaum & Judith Butler are on to something, that one does not have to simply choose between them.  He was a little worried, however, about just how thick her theological understanding was with regard to justification & sanctification.  There’s so much there that people have to buy into, he commented, & he tried to pose a simpler way of viewing it.  Mouw would say "de-centering" is not a neutral term.  There’s a real possibility that there are 2 kinds of de-centering.  Pointing to several passages in the Psalms, Rich showed how the psalmist portrayed God as the healthiest, most centered self in the universe; & if you want to get centered properly, you’ve got to relate to God somehow.  Getting centered involved a de-centering of that with which you started, a reconfiguring & a dismantling of pretensions & also definitions that others want to impose upon you.  That’s a good kind of de-centering.  It’s a de-centering in which before the gaze of God one calls into question all previously accepted essences.  But there’s another kind of de-centering we see, e.g.,  in the Gospels with the demoniac.  There’s a fragmenting, destroying of a center that without God’s gift of integrity or integration you’re never going to get back.  There’s a power of evil in the world that fragments self, & that’s a bad kind of de-centering.  So we have 2 different notions of de-centering.  What Judith Butler is talking about comports well with the portrayal in the Psalms, & what Nussbaum is talking about in terms of trauma victims comports well with the picture of de centering that destroys, that makes it very hard to recover any kind of center.  We can simply lay those out there side by side, said Mouw, and he hasn’t said anything about justification or sanctification but that the Bible presents us with two very different notions of selfhood--a healthy selfhood & a destroyed, fragmented selfhood.
 Furthermore, Mouw said that he could use these as metaphors; he could offer this to Hollinger as a kind of picture, & David could buy the picture without buying into the theological terms.  For Rich the grounding of those models is in revealed truth, but he can still offer them to other people to at least help to organize various understandings of different tendencies that are at work in the world.  In short, going into a doctrine of justification & imputed righteousness & sanctification & the like seemed to Mouw to be thicker than we needed.  Isn’t there just a simpler way, he asked, using biblical models as he had proposed?  Serene agreed that there were 2 pictures of de-centering.  She went on to explain, however, that one of the reasons she liked working with doctrine is because it makes explicit some of the things in Scripture that are ambiguous.  She illustrated this point with reference to Luther’s doctrine of justification.

 Dick Bernstein still felt there was a certain line that Jones was trying to walk that he wanted to try to push.  He proposed that we be generous for the moment & admit that there was really something to what Judith Butler is trying to say.  Serene presented herself as a 2-way dialectic, Dick explained, i.e. that there was something that she could inform, namely her own theological understanding in terms of recent discussions of these 2 areas, and that there was something to contribute.  Dick thought that she effectively showed that there is a way that we can take discourse, like the discourse of de-centering or the discourse of trauma, & in a very interesting way relate these to theological issues, particularly to justification & sanctification.  But he also thought there was a little bit of bite to Nick’s point about a model & also to what Rich Mouw had just said.  In fact, it seemed to him that Serene almost deconstructed herself at the end when she said that she could give this whole talk without referring to justification & sanctification by talking about the practices.  What Dick did not yet see was how her particular theological discourse contributes to the other side.  He is quite familiar with the testimony literature, the trauma literature, etc., & most of this literature, as Serene well knows, has no reference at all to theological concerns, certainly not overtly.  Yet the way Serene was talking about sanctification there would have to at least be the commitment to some kind of belief in divine grace.  If one doesn’t hold such a belief, it’s hard to see what this really contributes to that kind of discourse.  It seemed to Dick that Serene’s project demands a 2-way dialectic.  Otherwise she is going to fall into the charge that this is a way in which one can translate post-structuralist feminist issues into a theological discourse, but it doesn’t show that it’s necessary or that it further illuminates the kinds of issues that are being raised on the other side.
 Serene explained that she is teaching a course on doctrine at a divinity school, & the starting point is the doctrinal framework.  The challenge in that context is to get the conversation going with this other discourse.  So, unlike other places in the university, you can assume the theological starting point, which is an unusual thing.  But Serene thought the very dialectical character of what she is doing is itself grounded in a theological set of claims that weren’t articulated, but that she does articulate in other places.  In this particular paper, she asked, could it be that the possibility of seeing these two discourses as companionable wisdoms is itself a theological insight that feminist theory has not been able to bring to the table?
 But how would Serene answer "the Hollinger objection," Dick rejoined.  Can we not translate what is valued or important in the critique?  How necessary in all this is the theological element?  To the extent that she is criticizing or illuminating or enhancing, he continued, can’t that be detached from the theological, or, where is the argument that it can’t be detached?  It clearly can be detached, Serene thought, and people will detach it & move with it in certain directions.  But that doesn’t mean that in her own theological reflection it’s detachable.  For her it’s not detachable from a doctrine of divine grace.  Hollinger noted that that was a subjective statement on her part.  In other words, Serene was not asking a larger community to accept that.  Serene responded that she was working within a divinity school where those claims were accepted as normative.  But she also was trying to show that there were insights that could come out of this that can be worthwhile for the university in terms of feminist theory.  It was this latter point on which they were pressing her, said Hollinger.
 Marsden asked whether it was David’s view that if it is detachable then it’s origin in a theological framework is somehow insignificant.  If Paul Ramsey comes up with just war theory & then secularists pick that up during the Vietnam era & say it’s good stuff, does that make the Christian dimension of it somehow less relevant?  If nobody had ever picked it up would it then have been more Christian?  Hollinger replied that he thinks it’s great if somebody comes up with a good idea in any context.  He would say that the idea is good for the uses to which it was put.  George wasn’t claiming that being Christian makes an idea better; sometimes Christian ideas are worse.  But he was puzzled by the repeated objection that if somebody else agrees with a Christian view, then somehow it’s not important that it’s Christian.  David explained that he was trying to distinguish between a sense in which its Christianity would be an albatross that might prevent it from flying around the world & doing a lot of good things; and the sense in which it would in fact weight it down in ways that would diminish its utility for a wider public.

 Cochran offered another way of expressing the issue.  Let’s say, he proposed, that one of these insights is regarded as important.  Political science or feminist theory can learn from it.  It has come out of a standpoint.  We could say that the standpoint has produced a fruit that then others may take & run with, but we might also want to say that if it has done well with one issue maybe we could go back to it for some other fruitful ideas.  Exactly, Hollinger affirmed.  That’s what the game is.  You have a series of artifacts that are accepted as valuable within a particular community, & then the struggle is over possession of those artifacts.  Once you get away from the issue of whether it is useful to us & whether we can we detach it from Christianity, & you bring it back to talking about the wonderful Christian origins of these things, then it becomes an argument over who gets credit for things that are recognized in a wider community.
 Mark Noll wanted to take up "the Hollinger objection" by suggesting that some believers, not all believers, but some believers at some time should go for the punt & say if you don’t have a believing framework, you will not have a fully satisfying result to the intellectual problem.  There are many good reasons why we don’t say that.  We don’t say that, first of all, because of the long history of the abuses of Christendom, where social & political hegemony is running ahead of intellectual hegemony.   And increasingly we don’t say that because we realize that there are many other legitimate ways of being religious in a plural intellectual culture.  But Mark thinks there is a place for some quite pretentious palingenesis claims, if they can be made in a non-coercive form that does not replicate the problems of Christendom.
 From Dick Bernstein’s point of view the position Mark just stated made perfect sense.  He might not agree with him, but he understood it clearly.  He returned to the interchange about political science & and questioned Cochran on the issue of the detachability of his critique.  Clarke responded that he wanted to make fairly modest claims, that the Catholic tradition can generate truths that can be appropriated by political science & give insight into things that, for whatever reasons, political science (at least recently) hasn’t had an insight into, specifically institutions.  He would say that if the Catholic tradition is fruitful enough to generate this insight about institutions & their representative quality, & if political scientists who are not Catholic or not religious find it persuasive & appropriate it, then they can detach it.  What are the implications of that detachment? Clarke asked.  One is that from his perspective they will have lost something, but that may not be so damaging in political science on that particular issue.  It may be a net gain that they’ve got the idea of representation even though they’ve lost the specifically religious context of it.  There may be other ideas that if detached are harmful.
 Hollinger referred to a book published recently on Nazi positions on smoking & drinking.  The argument is that the Nazis were right about tobacco, liquor & breast cancer.  They established a series of programs that were in many ways very progressive.  So what we would see from a post-1960s U.S. perspective is a contribution that was made by the Nazis.  Now one might use the same logic that Cochran is using about Catholicism.  If the Nazis were so right about cancer, tobacco & alcohol, maybe they have something to tell us about other things.  But we don’t want to make that turn.  And that’s why David is arguing that we want to justify the critique that Clarke has made of political science, which seemed to David to be eminently sound, in a number of different contexts.  If he got to it through being a Catholic, great; David is not quarreling with that in the least.  But it seemed to him that the power of Clarke’s critique derives not from the sources of its origin but from its logic, its power & its utility.
 Jim Turner asked whether Hollinger would have made that same argument in 1975 or ‘80 about ideas derived from Marxism.  Would he have said, okay, this particular idea derived from Marxism is helpful, but we’re going to forget or have a kind of amnesia about where it came from & not pay any attention to Marxism systematically to see whether it has other helpful ideas.  David said he wouldn’t go that far.  He isn’t saying that we systematically pay no attention to it.  He’s saying that what is useful about it was not simply the fact that it was Marxist.  As a historian he is obviously not suggesting that we ought to forget about the sources of our ideas.  Jim then re-explained Cochran’s approach & questioned why David seemed to be resisting it.  David said he was resisting it because he thinks we need to go about this critically.  Clarke agreed, adding that he would also want to say that any tradition, whether religious or otherwise, needs to bear the good & bad weight of its past.  Therefore, it seemed to Clarke that one ought to look at the Catholic traditions as a whole & ask what fruit have they born.

 Alan Wolfe noted that he reads a lot of political philosophy for his own work & has a lot of problems with it, & he knows that he’s going to turn to Catholic writers for why he has problems with it.  He knows that the Catholic tradition is an alternative tradition that’s going to give him a richer understanding that he’s going to find important.  But so what?  It’s also very interesting to know that Kant’s Protestantism had a lot to do with his moral philosophy; & it’s interesting to know that almost all the contemporary critics of it, the people we generally call communitarians, are either Jewish or Catholic, & not Protestant.  These are interesting historical footnotes.  They belong to the biography of ideas.  So even if we go back to them a second or a third time, Alan repeated, so what?

  It seemed to Frank Turner that we were asking the question, what does scholarship grounded in religion do?  Frank reflected on 2 of his teachers in graduate school, one who was a deeply religious non-believer & one who was a deeply religious believer--Frank Baumer & Sid Ahlstrom.  One of the things that they both did was keep alive certain kinds of questions.  Unlike David, Frank believes that the academy is a very repressive place, that it puts questions down.  He spoke of a colleague, now retired, who did Russian history.  His entire career people looked down on him wondering why would anyone want to study such things.  He was studying nationality in the Soviet Union!  Frank believes that there is not free thought in the academy in any sense that John Stuart Mill would recognize.  And he thinks that scholars who are engaged in somehow taking seriously issues of religion, whether from a personal existential commitment or because they believe these questions have been important, keep alive space & opportunity for research which otherwise would not exist.  In a sense they do the same thing for religion that feminist scholars have done for women, that black scholars have done for blacks, etc.  One of the wonderful things about Sid Ahlstrom in American religious history, Frank remarked, was that he loved all the "out" groups.  E.g., he loved the Mormons, he loved the black church; and he was doing all this work in the ‘60s when almost no one was interested in it.  He kept those questions alive & allowed & encouraged graduate students to look at them by legitimizing the importance of those subjects.  Frank thinks that one of the things that happens in the academy is a legitimization & deligitimization of subjects that has nothing to do with epistemes but has to do with the inner prejudices that we all have.  One of the things he thinks scholars of religious commitment actually keep alive is the counter-instinctual, the counter-instinctual to the way the academy will define it.  And if they ever win the day then there will need to be a new secular counter-instinctual, but he suspects it’s going to be a long time before they win the day.  In any case, this is one of the things that keeps the dialogue going.   Just by the nature of groups, they will extinguish questions--for the purpose of placing graduate students, for their own agendas, for whatever reasons.  So, Frank concluded, to have such scholars within the academy, especially within institutions that are not religiously affiliated, is important in actually keeping intellectual space & even intellectual liberty.
 Bernstein didn’t think that anyone in the present group would disagree with Turner in this regard, that is, about the necessity of a healthy academy in terms of the questions which are unfashionable, e.g., nationalism when it’s not an issue.  But that doesn’t necessarily privilege the religious.  It simply makes the point that at this particular stage in time that is one of the main areas where we can keep other kinds of questions alive.  Frank said that he doesn’t desire to privilege religion, but he does desire to see pluralism within the academy.  He thinks that to have in the academy people of commitment in terms of faith communities (he’s more interested in faith communities than in epistemes) legitimizes & allows students to legitimize questions which they may instinctively believe are important.  But if they only see a fairly narrow professional definition, they will veer away from them.

 Jim Turner asked a question of George aimed at clarifying the role of religious perspectives in the academy.  George had started his paper with a story about friends at Cal Tech 33 years ago who had developed an informal missions statement for the Cal Tech history department which was to persuade all the engineers & physicists to vote democratic.  He gave this as an example of how everyone’s perspectives in scholarship are shaped by the baggage they bring to their scholarship.  Presumably Marsden would draw a line at some point as to which perspectives can have scholarly validity & how far it’s legitimate to push one’s perspective.  In other words, Jim asked, to what extent should the baggage determine the scholarship?  How far can one push one’s views & still be doing legitimate scholarship?  George replied that there are certainly limits, but there are a lot of major disagreements within those limits.  He referred to the example of work on the family.  How do you look at the family if you’re writing a history of the family?  Is the family a God-ordained kind of entity or is it an artificial construction & on the whole a bad thing that warps people? You could take either of those widely different views, Marsden pointed out, and have scholars writing equally good histories on the subject but with opposite reads on what is important & what’s not important.  But Jim wanted to know whether there is a systematic principle that allows one to distinguish between acceptable perspectives that are allowed to be determinative & open scholarly questions like this where the evidence doesn’t decide it one way or another & perspectives that are not allowed to play that role.
 On the same topic Richard Hughes said that he keeps wondering how, when using any kind of a religious foundation for one’s work, one avoids triumphalism.  He returned in this regard to what he thought Serene was doing & suggested that it is very important to employ some kind of a dialectical or paradoxical framework that keeps the movement going even though you may be grounding your work in some kind of a normative base.  As long as it’s lacking in a dialectical framework, it seemed to Richard that the risk of some kind of triumphalism is ever present.  Marsden affirmed the importance of dialectical thinking, but he added that you’re also drawing on some normative aspects of your tradition to play the one half of the dialectic.

 Alan Wolfe said he was more interested in the contribution that religious scholarship could make in the non-normative area, that is, in the scientific area when it concerns the study of human beings.  David had asked Clarke at one point whether a Catholic could be a rational choice theorist, & Clarke said he didn’t feel prepared to answer but his probable answer was no. Alan thinks this is the correct answer because the whole rational choice theory in political science is about a conception of people & what motivates them that he thinks would be hard for any religious person to accept as an adequate description of what a human being is.  He went on to explain how posing a religious description of what a human being is, in necessary contradistinction to rational choice theory, could be a really positive contribution to scholarship because it could enrich the social sciences.
 Bernstein felt that what Wolfe was proposing simply wouldn’t wash.  He was sure that if we did an empirical analysis we would find lots of people who have religious affiliations who do rational choice theory.  Bernstein thought that Wolfe was looking for religion as an ally to fight his battles.  But it’s not going to happen, Dick said, because of the complexity of what’s going on even with people who profess to be religious believers.  He could find as many people in a field who support the things that Alan is against as people who would support his views.  Alan acknowledged that Dick was absolutely right, that he was looking for an ally.  He’s not himself a religious believer, but he has a gripe against the academy & he’s looking for allies. He thought he’d made that clear for 3 years now.  Hollinger feared that if Alan found a Catholic who was a rational choice theorist he would tell that person that he wasn’t a real Catholic.  Alan denied this.  He said that in certain theological contexts he hears discussions about human beings that strike him as a richer understanding of what human beings are because at least there is a sense that humans have some kind of capacity to make meaning out of the world.
 Wolterstorff commented that most of us who are religious in one way or another want some kind of intellectual wholeness in our lives.  E.g., the driving question for him is what makes it all hang together.  He has a profound abhorrence of things just sitting in little pieces, of theology here & philosophy there, and so forth.  So, speaking to Dick’s question, of course one can find lots of Catholics & Calvinists & you name it who are rational choice theorists, just as 30 years ago you could find packs of them who were logical positivists.  These waves of fashion come, & Christians support them.  But Nick emphasized the issue of integrity.   In fact, he affirmed, Christianity is incompatible with logical positivism, & it was just misguided thoughtlessness on the part of people for awhile to have thought that logical postivism was the subtle truth.  Moreover, Nick would be inclined to say the same thing for rational choice theory.  It’s mindless Catholicism or Calvinism if you think it’s compatible with Catholicism.  Nick said he would want to know how such a person is putting all the pieces together.

 Returning to Serene’s project, Denis Donoghue found her invocation of post-modernist theory to be problematic.  She invoked it as if it carried with it fairly considerable authority.  One of the attributes of postmodern theory in regard to the dissemination of the self, however, is that it goes along with an ardent insistence that that self will never be reassembled.  It seemed to Denis that Serene contradicted or undermined the authority she invoked when she invoked the much more strictly religious paradigm, one of the dissemination of the self followed by its recuperation, followed by its dissemination, according to what seemed to him a far more profound process of the undoing & the doing.  Denis thought there was a distance between the 2 idioms Serene was using, & that somewhat opportunistically she was using post-modernism for one purpose which seemed to him quite out of keeping with the far more profound rhythm that she was invoking by way of justification & sanctification.  What bothered him was that she was somehow trying to bring together & avail herself of the diverse authorities of these particular vocabularies in a way he didn’t really find helpful.  Denis wondered why Serene made recourse to post-modernism at all for her particular talk this afternoon.  What does she get out of it?  What is the advantage of doing this, considering that she’s perfectly capable of describing that process of undoing in her own terms.
 Serene noted first that she tried to be careful in her talk not to be making a huge claim about some area called postmodernism, which she thinks is too broad a category.  She was interested in one particular form that it has taken in feminist post-structuralism.  She explained further that in doing theology she uses the sources that are out there in the university in a very ad hoc matter.  As a theologian Serene didn’t think that if she used one piece of post-structuralism to make an illustrated point that may have repercussions for her own understanding that she has to accept everything about postmodernism.  Denis asked, however, whether it would not bother Serene that she is using a fragment of post-structuralist theory, strategically ignoring another part of it, namely that there is no rhythm of recuperation allowed for or hoped for, and that she then makes a strategic move to a different vocabulary, which has utterly different & indeed dissonant implications & consequences.  Serene didn’t think it was true that in all post-structuralism there is no recuperation of the self implied.  But she also described theology as a parasitic discourse.  It’s in a tradition, but its very language is always going to be wandering around in the culture using resources from it.  It’s an opportunistic enterprise.  Denis said that that bothered him in somewhat the same way that he was bothered by David Hollinger’s use of "intersubjective testability".  We all make recourse to authority in certain ways, but Denis found troublesome the opportunistic exercise involved in simply reaching for a vocabulary because it’s there, especially since it by now carries a certain authority with it.  The very phrase "post-structuralism" is not any longer a neutrally descriptive term.  It’s a term of force.  It carries with it implicit authority because it implies that if  you don’t go along with this particular ideology you’re really not with it at all.  And that’s what would trouble Denis about Serene’s particular use of it.
 Supporting Serene’s usage, Dick Bernstein commented that it wasn’t simply an appeal to the authority because it’s postmodern, but it was in a formal discourse which on a very important issue, as Serene sees it, has been particularly effective.  Whatever it’s effectiveness, Denis rejoined, he would claim that it is incompatible with the other discourse.  He didn’t think they were arguing about that one specific issue but rather about what Serene has already acknowledged is opportunism.  Nancy Ammerman connected this discussion with the earlier discussion about whether one had to accept Catholicism if one accepted a certain insight about the nature of sacrament from Catholicism.  There’s a sense in which part of what the academy allows us to do, she thought, is to see certain "truths" that come to us from a variety of places & to argue over those & to recombine them in new ways.
 Denis also commented generally on the intensity of the claims that had been made in the course of the past few days.  He thought that especially in the presentations this afternoon the claims had been made quite strongly, and in turn mobilized correspondingly trenchant arguments against them.  E.g.,
he noticed that David’s & Dick’s arguments became more pointed & more trenchant as the afternoon progressed.  It is in the nature of rhetoric, Denis suggested, that one’s arguments tend to be correspondingly strong in response to the apparent strength of the claim that is made.  So it might be the case that the way in which to put forward a particular claim is to put it forward so minimally that it’s almost silent.  In fact, you just do it, & it is seen to be interesting, or good, or valid, or constructive.  This goes back to something that Dick was saying this morning, Donoghue added.  Important things happens when someone does them.  Perhaps the moral of the story is that we should all be going out & doing valid & important things without, as it were, blowing our particular trumpets.  At this Hollinger & some others in the group voiced strong affirmation.

 On a similar note, Mark Schwehn concluded the discussion by asking whether any of the Christians in the group thought as he did in the following sense.  Sometimes the worry over marginalization or alleged marginalization &, on the other side, fears that there may be some among us who want to alter appreciably the character of the warrants produced by certain academic communities, are themes that are troublesome on Christian grounds.  Christians ought to be worried about oppressive structures of all kinds on behalf of all sorts of people, but probably least of all on behalf of themselves.  If women are being excluded, if minorities are being excluded, if Frisians are being excluded, etc., this ought to outrage & concern us.   But as to whether our own work is going to be appreciated, well received, etc., we’d be better advised to rest our hope in the ultimate emergence of truth elsewhere than in the character of a contingent epistemic community.  So, on Christian grounds, to be overwrought about how our work is going to be received by a given epistemic community to the point that we worry more about that community not receiving it as opposed to doing the best we can--there’s something almost un-Christian about that kind of concern.  It’s not un-Christian if it’s directed toward the general character of epistemic & all communities to be oppressive & exclusive & seeks to combat that at every turn.  But insofar as we worry overly much about the alleged marginal character of certain forms of Christian discourse, even the best forms of Christian discourse, because it’s affecting our own standing, there’s something troublesome about this.
 
 

INTERRELATED RECURRING THEMES
 

1. The nature of the academic community & academic culture.  Descriptions of the academic community in our discussions ranged from "the cocktail party" at which commonalities were discovered and/or created to high & low energy physicists who don’t talk to each other.   The  possibility & goals of discourse within such a community were debated.  Some felt that meaningful discourse was non-existant, even within academic departments; others felt that there was hope of arriving at some agreement within the academic community; and still others emphasized the importance of keeping the conversation going.

2. Epistemic warrant &warranting rules.  A significant amount of discussion was generated by Hollinger’s comments (largely in critique of Warren Nord’s book) about scientific or epistemic warrant for truth claims.  Questions arose about whether religious warrant for scholarly work could be justified &, if so, what it might look like.  Again, opinions varied considerbly, from the denial of any legitimacy to traditional religious warrant to the denial of the very notion that an academic or epistemic warrant exists amidst the chaos of competing views.  In between these more extreme positions were suggestions that the academic conversation might possibly include multiple warranting rules and that a sharply drawn dichotomy between motivation and warranting rules is problematic.

3. The nature & the advisability of faith-informed scholarship.  There was some discussion about the continued need to clarify what we actually mean by scholarship "grounded in religion".  The Saturday afternoon presentations provided three different models of what such scholarhip might look like. Nonetheless, there was considerable debate about what the three presenters were actually doing.  Jim Turner’s presentation ended with a series of questions about whether scholarship grounded in religion was already being done to a significant degree, or whether there is any need for or potential benefit in reappropriating monotheistic intellectual traditions in specific disciplines.  A number of Seminar members seemed to think that at least in some fields such work is being pursued already relatively unencumbered.

4. The detachability of the religious matrix from the contribution to a given academic discipline, alias "the Hollinger objection".  From different angles a number of Seminar members raised the issue of whether a particular religiously-informed critique or contribution to a discipline could be detached from the religious or theological framework out of which it arose.  This was the focal point of the discussion of the papers of Clarke Cochran & Serene Jones.  While some felt that the detachability of the religious dimension rendered the contribution potentially more useful or more valuable to the broader academic community, others questioned whether something valuable would be lost if the origins of a good idea or insight were separated from its content.  Still others thought that such an approach was opportunistic in a negative sense, whether it concerned religious scholars using bits & pieces of larger theories in an ad hoc fashion or non-religious scholars detaching the religious framework from a religiously-based idea.

5. Criteria of evaluation.  There seemed to be agreement among most participants about a point made fairly early in the meeting by Denis Donoghue to the effect that there are other values or categories to be considered in evaluating scholarly work than simply "getting at the truth of the matter" or "intersubjective testability."  Factors like significance & interest were invoked in this regard.  What role religious criteria could or should play in evaluation & interpretation of ideas was also discussed.

        Respectfully submitted,
        Andrea Sterk
        September, 1999