GroshLink

A grad student wrapping up their first year in Applied Linguistics asked for some book recommendations on contemporary worldviews in academia, with reference to postmodernism, critical studies, Marxism, etc. Below is an edited version of what I sent her, please post others that come to mind.

When asked, one CMU faculty passed along: Nancey Murphey, "Anglo-American Postmodernity" (Westview, 1997). I have not read this piece, but I borrowed it and will look it over. I'll ask around some faculty/students at CMU. If I had to pick one book, I'd recommend Jim Sire's Naming the Elephant (IVP, 2004). You've probably already come across his The Universe Next Door (updated in 2004). Naming the Elephant touches on a lot of other helpful pieces that you might choose to explore later, such as David Naugle's Worldview: The History of a Concept (Eerdmans, 2002), Middleton & Walsh's Truth is Stranger Than it Used to Be (IVP, 1995)

Here is a long list of suggestions that come to mind (I'd recommend you crawl around on-line to pick and choose what might be helpful).

1. Higher Education

-The Idea of the University: A Reexamination (Jaroslav Pelikan, Yale University Press, 1992) explores the crisis of education, in particular the inseparability of research and teaching, the crisis of confidence in higher education today, and the preservation of knowledge through university libraries, galleries, and museums.

-George Marsden's The Soul of the American University (Oxford, 1994) explores the history of the university and his Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship (Oxford, 1997) attempts to go the next step

-Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman's The Social Construction of Reality (Anchor, 1967) is often referred to w/regard to the sociology of knowledge, but I have not read it. Berger also wrote The Sacred Canopy: Elements of Sociological Theory of Religion (Doubleday/Anchor, 1967)

-The Church on the World's Turf (Paul Bramadat, Oxford, 2000), the first ethnography of a religious group on a secular campus. It makes powerful contributions to our understanding of both the ways minority groups survive in pluralistic settings, and more specifically, the conservative Christian struggle to carve out an identity in the contemporary world. Note: Case study of IVCF at McMaster University

2. Pluralism/Postmodernism in a more general form

-A Primer on Postmodernism (Stanley Grenz, Eerdmans, 1996) introduces a lot of the academic characters involved in the conversation. May be a little dated, its been awhile since I've looked at it.

-Leslie Newbigin's thought prokoving work emerged from returning to Britian after being a missionary in India. I think that The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (Eerdmans) is the best summary of his thoughts. But Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel in Western Culture (Eerdmans, 1986) is shorter and focused on the intellectual train of thought.

-Vinoth Ramachandra's The Recovery of Mission: Beyond the Pluralist Paradigm (Eerdmans, 1996) explores how the Gospel needs to be communicated in a multifaith world. He has a critique of Newbigin. FYI: Ramachandra is compelling in person. I've heard him at various IVCF conferences as he serves as the South Asian regional secretary of IFES.

-Mapping Postmodernism: A Survey of Christian Options (Robert Greer, IVP, 2003) looks helpful for your situation as it critiques 4 responses to Postmodernism (Schaeffer, Barth, Hick, and Lindbeck), but I haven't had the opportunity to read it.

3. Worldview

-Jim Sire's The Universe Next Door (updated last year) coupled w/his new piece Naming the Elephant (IVP, 2004), which touches on a lot of other helpful pieces that you might choose to explore later, such as David Naugle's Worldview: The History of a Concept (Eerdmans, 2002), Middleton & Walsh's Truth is Stranger Than it Used to Be (IVP, 1995)

-Albert Wolter's Creation Regained: Biblical Basics for a Reformational Worldview (Eerdmans, 1985) is also a helpful, classic piece.

-I have not read Stained Glass: Worldviews and Social Sciences (edited by Paul Marshall, Sander Griffeon, and Richard Mouw, University Press of America, 1989) but it might be applicable to your field.

4. Knowing: Knowing w/the Heart: Religious Experience & Belief in God (Roy Clouser, IVP, 1999) is to some degree a distillation of ideas he explored in The Myth of Religious Neutrality: An Essay on the Hidden Role of Religious Belief in Theories (University of Notre Dame Press, 1991). C.S. Lewis' The Abolition of Man and Jim Sire's Habits of the Mind (IVP, 2000) also come to mind.

5. Devotional: I've found Roy Clements' Faithful Living in a Faithless World (IVP, 1997) encouraging. He applies Ezekiel and Daniel to the exile of our time. Also, Walsh and Keesmaat's Colossians Remixed (IVP, 2004) is hard to place in a category. I found it quite good as an 'applied commentary' which interacts w/postmodern ways of thinking, but others have strongly disagreed w/me.

6. Considering your area of interest, you might find David Lyle Jeffries' "Masterplot and Mean in Biblical Narrative" in Houses of Interpretation: Reading Scripture, Reading Culture (Balyor U Press, 2003) or Kevin Vanhoozer's Is There Meaning in This Text? (Zondervan, 1998) of interest.

Is there a meaning in the Bible, or is meaning rather a matter of who is reading or of how one reads? Does Christian doctrine have anything to contribute to debates about interpretation, literary theory, and postmodernity? These are questions of crucial importance for contemporary biblical studies and theology alike.

Kevin Vanhoozer contends that the postmodern crisis in hermeneutics—“incredulity towards meaning,” a deep-set skepticism concerning the possibility of correct interpretation—is fundamentally a crisis in theology provoked by an inadequate view of God and by the announcement of God’s “death."

A few related pieces I've worked on can be found under menu > links > papers/reviews.