Andy Goodliff has posted on The promise of a Christian university –
Christian University? You have got to wonder where he gets these ideas from. Andy posts a handy list of titles then, as these bloggers do, asks for more ideas.
Obviously his list includes Bristol’s finest, Gavin D’Costa Theology in the Public Square: Church, Academy and Nation
and the forthcoming Stanley Hauerwas The State of the University: Academic Knowledges and the Knowledge of God
Then what? Well, how about these?
Michael J. Buckley The Catholic University as Promise and Project
John C. Sommerville The Decline of the Secular University: Why the Academy Needs Religion
George M. Marsden The Soul of the American university and his earlier The outrageous idea of Christian Scholarship
Robert Benne Quality with Soul: How Six Premier Colleges and Universities Keep Faith with Their Religious Traditions. The six are Calvin, Wheaton, St. Olaf, Valparaiso, Baylor, and Notre Dame. Hum, not too many Catholic colleges there.
and of course the massive James T. Burtchaell The Dying of the Light: The Disengagement of Colleges and Universities from Their Christian Churches
Then the greatest analysis of the whole project of the university, Alasdair MacIntyre Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition
Then on the wider faith-and-public-square issue there is the recent Ratzinger-Habermas dialogue of course Joseph Ratzinger The Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason and Religion
But, wait a minute, the very first thing that should be on this list is the magisterial Ex Corde Ecclesia – the Apostolic Constitution of John Paul II on Catholic Universities
BORN FROM THE HEART of the Church, a Catholic University is located in that course of tradition which may be traced back to the very origin of the University as an institution. It has always been recognized as an incomparable centre of creativity and dissemination of knowledge for the good of humanity. By vocation, the Universitas magistrorum et scholarium is dedicated to research, to teaching and to the education of students who freely associate with their teachers in a common love of knowledge. With every other University it shares that gaudium de veritate, so precious to Saint Augustine, which is that joy of searching for, discovering and communicating truth in every field of knowledge. A Catholic University’s privileged task is “to unite existentially by intellectual effort two orders of reality that too frequently tend to be placed in opposition as though they were antithetical: the search for truth, and the certainty of already knowing the fount of truth”.
Ah, at last. In the long run, it is not just the Christian university, it is not just the Catholic university, it is the university that is born from the heart of the Church.
