Digital Logos Edition
Evangelicals and Roman Catholics have been responsible for the establishment of many colleges and universities in America, but they have historically taken markedly different approaches to education and viewed one another's efforts with some suspicion. Recent years, however, have seen the development of a more cooperative tone. In this volume, Mark Noll and James Turner offer candid reassessments of the strengths and weaknesses of each tradition.
Taking two distinct but complementary approaches to the subject, Noll and Turner provide enlightening essays that reconsider the present state of Christian learning, what the two most influential sections of American Christianity have to offer one another, and how they might learn from each other. The two authors then respond to one another's essays. The insightful dialogue of these two influential scholars will be of great interest to anyone involved in higher education or concerned with the role of Christian faith in the modern university.
Professors Mark Noll and James Turner offer in this small book an illuminating dialogue on the nature of Christian education as well as what and how evangelicals and Catholics may learn from each other. The editor, Thomas Albert Howard, provides an outstanding review of the issues at stake and the importance of the Noll-Turner dialogue. The authors suggest a bold and ambitious vision, one that embodies what should be an uncontroversial premise: scholarship and teaching at a Christian institution of higher learning ought to take seriously the philosophical tapestry of ideas, principles, and beliefs on which the Christian faith rests and from which it offers an account of what is good, true, and beautiful.
—Francis J. Beckwith, Baylor University
This volume is a sign of hope in the changing landscape of Catholic and evangelical relationships. And the dialogue it records is a model for many others that need to take place both in the academy and among the churches—candid, insightful, drawing on the wisdom of the past but looking to the future, marked by respect yet filled with hope.
—Timothy George, Beeson Divinity School, Samford University
Mark A. Noll is the Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame.
James Turner is the Rev. John J. Cavanaugh, CSC Professor of the Humanities at the University of Notre Dame.
Thomas Albert Howard is associate professor of history at Gordon College and the author of Religion and the Rise of Historicism.