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The politicization of scholarship is usually regrettable and almost always damaging. But the impulse behind it at least reflects a desire to find integration and unity and moral significance in the world. The same can't be said of our professionalized disciplines, whose narrow and jargon-laden discourse sets out to divide the world into incommensurable pieces. No wonder even the best graduate professors sometimes feel a twinge of conscience about their role in perpetuating it all.

Here, I would argue, is a place that the Christian faith could make a real difference—if we are willing to do a little rethinking. There are those who believe that Christian scholarship will finally gain ground when Christian scholars strive, above all else, to be top-drawer players at the academy's game, playing entirely within the disciplinary rules and the bureaucratic system, targeting only the most prestigious institutions, journals, and venues.

But it may be that the more valuable and important opportunity presenting itself today is that of fostering spaces within the academy, and within our intellectual life, where the intellectual passions that draw our best young people into the intellectual vocation can be affirmed and sustained, rather than bureaucratically crushed. This journal is one such place, and there can be many more.

At the very least, Christian scholars who work within the strange regime of graduate education can be, and often are, signs of contradiction, a reminder that narrow, mechanistic, positivistic, and value-neutral modes of explanation cannot suffice. They will not be able to change the system any time soon. But they do well in encouraging their students, secular and religious alike, not to be conformed to it. Such encouragement will not go unnoticed.

Wilfred M. McClay is the SunTrust Chair of Humanities at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. His most recent book is Religion Returns to the Public Square: Faith and Policy in America (Woodrow Wilson Center/ Johns Hopkins University Press).

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Christianity Today sister publication Books & Culture presents Books & Culture Corner and Book of the Week Mondays at ChristianityToday.com.

Earlier editions of Books & Culture Corners and Book of the Week include:

The Difference Between Conservatives and Prolifers | William Saletan unspins, and respins, the abortion debate (Sept. 5, 2003)

A New View of Worldview | Some critics want to retire the concept. Not so fast, says David Naugle (Aug. 18, 2003)

'A Golden Age' of Religious Tolerance? | The Ornament of the World analyzes how the intellectual elites of medieval Spain eschewed fundamentalism and showed surprising sensitivity in reconciling competing truths. (Aug. 11, 2003)

Looking for the 'I' | What happens to the self when the brain is injured or malformed? (Aug. 4, 2003)

The Terror of the Therapeutic | Margaret Atwood's new novel considers the price we may pay for looking to technology to remedy our ills, personal and social. (July 28, 2003)

The Catholic Church's Regime Change | Would lay power really augur a new epoch of openness and honesty? (July 21, 2003)

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September (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47