Ann, thank you for this informative and gracious follow-up post. As someone who teaches at a small evangelical university (I am a Lutheran, married to a Catholic, who is starting his 24th year teaching at a Wesleyan school... which makes me either very ecumenical or just confused), I know well that my evangelical students and their families feel ignored (or scorned) by the major centers of culture. (Not just publishing, of course.) But these students are serious, hungry to learn, and far more open-minded than the stereotypical image of evangelicals would lead one to suppose. Thanks for encouraging all of us to be generous-hearted in building broad and diverse networks of readers--a house with many rooms, not to mention plenty of corridors connecting them.
I am so glad that this post struck a chord with someone traveling between these worlds! It was just the thought that was pressing itself on me. My brother teaches philosophy and he once told me that it is his evangelical students who are the most responsive to wrestling with big ideas about ethics and metaphysics. That has always stuck with me.
I'm not terribly surprised by that. Much of postmodern thought, in its various guises, has attacked the concept of truth. As a result, many people have become reflexively relativist. Not deep down, I don't think--few people are really relativists deep down, as becomes clear when they believe they've been wronged. But at a surface level. And when you instinctively assume there's not really any truth to be had, or that your beliefs are more like preferences that can't really be rationally justified, what's the point of wrestling with the big ideas? But those evangelical students still believe that there really is a truth, and that it matters if we get it right.
Ann, thank you for this informative and gracious follow-up post. As someone who teaches at a small evangelical university (I am a Lutheran, married to a Catholic, who is starting his 24th year teaching at a Wesleyan school... which makes me either very ecumenical or just confused), I know well that my evangelical students and their families feel ignored (or scorned) by the major centers of culture. (Not just publishing, of course.) But these students are serious, hungry to learn, and far more open-minded than the stereotypical image of evangelicals would lead one to suppose. Thanks for encouraging all of us to be generous-hearted in building broad and diverse networks of readers--a house with many rooms, not to mention plenty of corridors connecting them.
I am so glad that this post struck a chord with someone traveling between these worlds! It was just the thought that was pressing itself on me. My brother teaches philosophy and he once told me that it is his evangelical students who are the most responsive to wrestling with big ideas about ethics and metaphysics. That has always stuck with me.
I'm not terribly surprised by that. Much of postmodern thought, in its various guises, has attacked the concept of truth. As a result, many people have become reflexively relativist. Not deep down, I don't think--few people are really relativists deep down, as becomes clear when they believe they've been wronged. But at a surface level. And when you instinctively assume there's not really any truth to be had, or that your beliefs are more like preferences that can't really be rationally justified, what's the point of wrestling with the big ideas? But those evangelical students still believe that there really is a truth, and that it matters if we get it right.