UniversitiesAndChurches
ThoughtStorms Wiki
Cute essay on what they have in common :
Commonalities :
- more in the direction of GiftCultures,
- generous impulses towards the poor
- focused on the analysis and interpretation of texts
What they can learn from each other
- churches could learn more critical thinking from universities
- universities could learn more humility from churches
- it's particularly interesting what he means by humility in the context of churches :
- Evangelicals like "testimonies"; it's common for talks to Christian groups to begin with a little autobiography, as the speaker describes the path he has traveled on his road to faith. Somewhere in the course of that testimony, the speaker always talks about what a mess he is: how many things he has gotten wrong, why the people sitting in the chairs should really be teaching him, not the other way around. This isn't a pose; the evangelicals I know really do believe that they – we (I'm in this camp too) – are half-blind fools, stumbling our way toward truth, regularly falling off the right path and, by God's grace, picking ourselves up and trying to get back on. But while humility is more a virtue than a tactic, it turns out to be a pretty good tactic. Ideas and arguments go down a lot easier when accompanied by the admission that the speaker might, after all, be wrong.
The other thing that's interesting, of course, is where this is. TechCentralStation is a bastion of TechnoLibertarian thinking. And, of course, this article is actually is confirming something which the TechnoLibertarian probably always suspects : that both conservative Christians and LiberalAcademics are alike due to their support for repressive, top-down hierarchical ways of organizing, as opposed to the network / market way. So is this a subtle way to push that message.
And the continuation :
This is an interesting coda. But even stranger for TCS. A good set of ideas which will confuse everyone's prejudices.
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