The publisher and editors of the Christian Scholar’s Review are pleased to announce the recipient of its annual award for best article. The winner of the Charles J. Miller Christian Scholar’s Award for volume 43 is Kevin
D. Miller, professor of Communication, Huntington University, Huntington, Indiana. His article, “Reframing the Faith-Learning Relationship: Bonhoeffer and an Incarnational Alternative to the Integration Model” (Winter 2014) pages 131-138, was selected by a panel of jurors who carefully and thoughtfully read each article published in volume 43; in their estimation “Reframing the Faith-Learning Relationship: Bonhoeffer and an Incarnational Alternative to the Integration Model” best achieved the goals of Christian scholarship set by CSR.
Kevin D. Miller (Ph.D. in Communication at University of Kentucky, M.A. in Journalism at The Ohio State University, B.A. in English at Eastern Mennonite University) is professor of communication at Huntington University. Before teaching, he was associate editor at Christianity Today magazine. He has published articles and reviews in a variety of scholarly journals and magazines, including Christianity Today, Christian Scholar’s Review, Christian Reflections (Baylor University ethics journal), Leadership Journal, The Mennonite, and Princeton Theological Review. His research interests center on whiteness studies and discourse analysis of race talk in everyday conversations.
In his award winning essay Mr. Miller notes that the faith-integration model, with its working assumption that “All truth is God’s truth,” has become the standard approach for many scholars at evangelical colleges and universities as they seek to understand the relationship between faith and learning. He then proposes that this integration model harbors an imperialistic impulse and proposes instead an incarnational model of scholarship that draws analogically from the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s ideas about a “religionless Christianity.” As conceived, incarnational scholarship rejects the faith-integration model’s goal of thinking “Christianly” and instead aims to think humanly. In offering an evaluation of Miller’s essay one juror writes that it “is a lucid essay with a bold thesis that deserves to be read and discussed widely.” A second juror notes that the essay “is clearly written, easily accessible to people from a variety of fields, and engages directly with an issue that is essential to all Christian scholars, namely, the relationship between their faith and their work. Beyond that, and most commendable, is that he offers a novel thesis in that discussion, one that will certainly spark debate on campus (I know it did on mine) and get people talking about how faith ought to shape our scholarly output. Shifting the discussion away from thinking ‘Christianly’ to thinking ‘humanly’ provides a new way to account for what we do, one that works equally well within and outside Christian circles, and so is also of use to Christian scholars working in secular communities.”
We commend Mr. Miller for an article that is a model of insightful, interdisciplinary Christian scholarship. CSR thanks this year’s jurors, Darin Davis (Baylor University), Neal De Roo (Dordt College), and Rick Kennedy (Point Loma Nazarene University).
