Autor: Marsden, Georg M.

Buch: The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship

Titel: The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship

Stichwort: Mythos der liberalen Neutralität

Kurzinhalt: Der selbsternannte Schiedsrichtiger als Meister der Verkleidung;

Textausschnitt: In a liberal society people would be free to hold to any tradition-bound beliefs they like, as long as they agree not to act on them in public. But if the modernist presumption of common reason that underlies this method is itself a constituent of a particular tradition - the western Enlightenment tradition - then the pretense to neutrality on the part of liberal tolerance begins to look more like a stratagem with a definite secular bias. The self-appointed referee turns out to be a contestant in disguise.
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Liberal capitalism creates a public interest in suppressing the authority of all traditions except liberalism itself. For our purposes, as we have seen in earlier chapters, the most relevant part of the liberal tradition is that it prefers secular accounts of reality. ... Whatever one's position in such debates, however, it is naive to think of the liberal polity as being ideologically neutral.

Autor: Marsden, Georg M.

Buch: The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship

Titel: The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship

Stichwort: Reduktionismus

Kurzinhalt: Beispiel: Gehirnforschung, Reklametafel

Textausschnitt: "The larger issue is reductionism. Once we have a convincing explanation at the level of empirically researched connections we are inclined to think we have a complete explanation. The late Donald M. MacKay, a specialist in brain physiology, has provided some helpful reflections on this problem from the perspective of one who is both a scientist and a Christian. The physiological story of how the brain operates is vastly different from the subjective experience of its operation. Each account is in a sense true and complete at its own level. In another sense, however, it would distort our account if we insisted that only the level that we are working from provides the true story.

Autor: Marsden, Georg M.

Buch: The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship

Titel: The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship

Stichwort: Literatur, Kritik, Verabsolutierung des Selbst, Kritiker als Erlöser

Kurzinhalt: Literatur im Horizont der Verabsolutierung des Selbst, Reinhold Niebuhr: Tugenden -> Laster (to turn our virtues into vices);

Textausschnitt: Roger Lundin in The Culture of Interpretation: Christian Faith and the Postmodern World provides some excellent examples of how contemporary debates in literary theory look different when Christian theological perspectives are allowed into the picture. In Lundin's view most of the discussion of art and literature during the past two centuries has been controlled by the absolutization of the human self. ... So throughout the twentieth century the manifestation of one's own creative vision has been used to justify almost any artistic expression. With the postmodern denial that we can have any access to a transcendent or to any metanarrative except its own (that humans are the only creators) some of the modern aura of the artist as redeemer was transferred to the critic as redeemer. The critic with the power to historicize and relativize every text (and all of life could be seen as a 'text') became a person freed from convention because he recognized that everything was convention.
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In the modern West, however, the elite champions of high culture have urged throwing off any authority external to human beings themselves.
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As we have already seen, with God out of the picture, humans loom as the ultimate creators of reality. The self, or perhaps the community or the nation, is inflated and absolutized. With consideration of the divine ruled out as unacademic or unprofessional, it has been widely assumed that humans can solve their own problems - as in the cult of psychotherapy, the cult of technological progress, ... In Reinhold Niebuhr's terms, this built-in flaw has a deeply ironic quality, in that we tend to turn our virtues into vices. We use our technological gifts to build horrible weapons of destruction.
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These human vices are impossible for us to eradicate because they are built on our best qualities: our abilities to create, to choose, to build, to bring order and justice. Even our ability to love turns into inordinate love for our own family, community, interest group, or nation. At the heart of all our vices is the original sin, described in Genesis - the belief that we can be 'as the gods,' the unlimited creators and rulers of our own destiny.

Autor: Marsden, Georg M.

Buch: The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship

Titel: The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship

Stichwort: Literatur, parallele Entwicklung im Bereich von Religion und Literatur

Kurzinhalt: Legitimation der Literatur by technical methodologies, often evidenced by esoteric terminology

Textausschnitt: During the 1960s and the 1970s the field of religion continued to grow, but in order to establish its academic credibility, it was increasingly marked by an emphasis on the scientific study of religion and decreasingly seen as a haven in the universities, or even in mainstream church-related colleges, for religious perspectives. The leaders in the field of religious studies now more often presented it as analogous to the social sciences rather than to the uplifting humanities, such as literature. The transformation in religious studies since the early 1960s had some parallels in the field of literature. Literature was no longer regarded first of all as uplifting, as it had been in the 1950s, but rather became a field whose academic status was legitimated by technical methodologies, often evidenced by esoteric terminology. Segments of religious studies followed similar paths, transforming themselves into cultural study and the comparative studies of the history of religions.