Earlier this year, an article by the well-known Christian sociologist Christian Smith made the rounds. Entitled “Why I’m Done with Notre Dame,” Smith chronicled his frustration with the University of Notre Dame’s priorities and administrators’ lack of effort in promoting its Catholic mission. I found his description of what happens at the University of Notre Dame consistent with what I have observed at my own and other Christian universities: “Sustained engagement with the Catholic [or Christian] intellectual tradition happens in pockets, but leaders avoid the institutional efforts that would make this engagement consistent and integrated.”
One of those areas where engagement is lacking, Smith claimed, involved the religion or theology faculty. Smith shared one of his experiences:
For some time, with the support of my dean, I made efforts to encourage my friends in the department of theology to leave their disciplinary cocoons and interact intellectually with colleagues in other departments. I wrote and circulated a paper about how Pope John Paul II’s Ex Corde Ecclesiae (1990) obliges theology faculty at faithful Catholic universities to engage colleagues in all disciplines. This initiative culminated in a meeting with most of the Notre Dame theology faculty, whose fundamental posture, I was astonished to find, was a willfully suspicious, self-protective isolationism.
If accurate, this posture is quite different than the ethos that characterized the early medieval universities. As Marcia Colish observed of these early Catholic universities, “The fact that scientists and philosophers studied in faculties adjacent to theologians trained to raise questions about ultimate values, and that theologians interacted with colleagues in fields not informed by religious criteria, forced all involved to take account of the perspectives and ground rules of other disciplines as well as the disagreements within their own. The scholastics who created this heady educational environment rapidly outpaced monastic scholars as speculative thinkers.”1
Unfortunately, Smith claimed that was no longer his experience: “Today, we don’t know what conversations about the implications of Catholic beliefs for psychology or physics or film studies (and vice versa) might look like, in part because most of Notre Dame’s theology faculty stay in their disciplinary shell.” Again, I do not know enough about UND’s sixty(!) theology faculty to know whether Smith’s claim is accurate. Based on my own experience in studying Christian higher education, it would not surprise me if it were. This isolationism, I have observed, is usually built on fear of losing power and resources, a lack of disciplinary confidence, and a concern for control, instead of a faith in the God of the universe who gives us the confidence and ability to explore the universe together. What could change this situation, not just at Notre Dame, but at any Christian university?
DEI and Theology: A Comparison
Although one should always pray and hope for repentance from theology faculty, I also believe the problem needs an administrative solution. Administrators need to change the problematic incentive system that rewards isolationism. I think we could learn from another area where administrators have encouraged significant cross-disciplinary work. Numerous Christian administrators have made efforts to make sure DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) efforts are sustained across the university. In fact, around the same number of Protestant universities have Vice Presidents for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (or something similar) as have a Vice President for Christian Mission on the presidential leadership team (even though chief diversity officers have no impact on diverse faculty hiring).
At my own institution, we have someone in the President’s Council who leads DEI efforts, but we do not have a Vice President for Mission or someone at that level specifically tasked with encouraging theological conversations among and between the disciplines. We do have an Institute for Faith and Learning that does a fantastic job in this area, but its leadership is not tasked with creating or redeeming Baylor’s incentive structures.
As a result, other university administrators openly discourage theologically-informed interdisciplinary work. I have a colleague in another department who was told by his chair that only publications in his discipline’s journals count when considering annual reviews. I know of other religion and liberal arts administrators and professors who have resisted cross-disciplinary majors that they view as impinging on their territory. These faculty could use upper administrators who encourage and reward theologically-informed interdisciplinary work. But, as Smith said, the effort is often not there.
Perhaps this problem stems from a failure to think creatively. For instance, I read numerous complaints from humanities professors about the inordinate role that professional schools now play in liberal arts colleges or universities. Instead of complaining, it would help theologians, philosophers, and historians, as well as deans, provosts, and presidential leadership teams, to consider how they might encourage and incentivize dual-appointment roles to place humanities professors in the professions. They could also think about interdisciplinary majors, such as the new philosophy, politics, economics, and law major at the University of Florida that boasted 146 majors in its first year. We could use more lawyers who understand philosophy and economics. We could use more engineers and computer scientists who know about the history of their discipline or think theologically about AI. We could place theologians technically and physically in partnership with these departments. We could use theologians and Christian ethicists in Business or Health Science schools or departments.
Unfortunately, I sometimes hear from religious studies faculty that other faculty should leave advanced matters of faith, ethics, and learning to the professionals in their department. Although their professional pride is understandable, reflecting on a medical analogy in this instance is helpful. We all cannot be medical doctors, but we are all called to steward the health of our God-gifted bodies as best we can. At times, of course, we do need the services of a medical professional who should ideally be there to serve the patient. Similarly, every faculty member must engage in the worship of God in the practice of his or her discipline, but at times, they need the service of those with expertise in delving into the primary study of God. What other disciplines outside of theology need are more theologians who can think creatively with other academic specialists to relate theology to other areas of academic specialization.
A second way that the medical analogy helps is that it reminds us of the limits of professional theologians. The patient knows his or her body the best. Indeed, each specific body should be the medical doctor’s field of study. The ideal doctors are not simply bringing their knowledge to this body; they are also learning from the patient’s body. For example, here is a tragic story of a medical student whose brain cancer symptoms were dismissed by incurious doctors fifty times. Theologians must acknowledge that those who study God’s creation, whether human or divine, provide them with additional insight into the Creator. Theologians cannot truly be theologians unless they are learning from the entire body of faculty in the university. After all, the theologian’s realm of study should be God and God’s creations.
A Set of Practical Proposals
In a previous work, Restoring the Soul of the University, some co-authors and I offered a few practical proposals that I still think could help overcome the problem Smith described (pp. 233-35). These include the following:
- First, Christian universities should allow biblical scholars, theologians, and Christian ethicists to choose the degree to which they may be judged by their academic publications for the professional societies, by their interdisciplinary work with other academic departments, or by their popular publications meant to serve the church.
- Second, they could hire a separate biblical scholar, theologian, or ethicist who would work in partnership with each of the four general areas—sciences, social sciences, humanities, and professions. At the very least, we would suggest that Christian universities should hire at least one, if not more, faculty members trained in theology whose job…would be to recognize that theology must also learn from other fields in order to know more about God. In other words, their job would be to serve and learn from the university. They would likely publish with scholarly Christian presses, and their focus would be on stimulating the conversation among their fellow academics about issues related to Christ-animated learning….
- Third, we would propose that Christian universities need more doctoral programs that combine theology and other academic disciplines in a way that would not only allow theology Ph.D. students to find jobs in a shrinking job market, but that might also take their theological training into another academic sphere of the university. These dual-trained academics would model a form of defragmentation to those in other disciplines while also helping those outside theology.
- Finally, we contend that at a Christian university, general education should not simply place a couple of Bible or theology courses into the curricular mix as if that actually helps students obtain a coherent understanding of how the rest of the curriculum fits into God’s story. Unfortunately, few required theology or Bible courses help students make sense of the whole university or life as a whole outside the disciplinary concerns of those in religious studies departments…. We need faculty and students to learn how to speak theologically about the university [and all its disciplines] as a whole, as well as their particular discipline, and how what they learn might fit into the good life as a whole. Theologians can help.
Unfortunately, as Smith found, they may not. We need administrators, as well as faculty in theology, religion, or Christian studies, willing to change this situation. Administrators in particular need the courage to create incentives and structures to foster that change.
