More on Baylor
January 25, 2005
Terry Mattingly has weighed in on the 2012/Sloan debacle for GetReligion.org. He is right that the journalistic coverage of the issue has been very poor, and he links to a piece in The Christian Century that is, like his own commentary, quite a step up, though still clearly pro-2012. (Quite partisan perspectives from Baylor’s “loyal opposition” are represented at the Fahrenheit 2012 site and Committee to Restore Integrity at Baylor. The flurry of opinions continues to rage at BaylorFans as well.) Yet as some readers have begun discussing with Mattingly via publicly posted comments, there is still a lot being left out, much of which was thoughtfully considered in Andy Black’s article here.
Future in-depth commentary on the “Struggle for Baylor” will appear soon in my “Swarming the Public Square” column in tNP, where I will hash out the real questions that have heretofore been ignored: regardless of what a given community believes and wants, however wrong it may seem, should that community be made to “do the right thing,” to “improve” and “develop” itself according to the standards and theories of substantial outsiders? Why does the “evangelical scholar” establishment duck this question? Why are they playing the role they have assumed? And what relevance to the issue has Mark Noll’s recent claim that the idea is laughable–“a romantic fantasy”–that classical Protestant traditions could, on their own, produce “well-constructed academic institutions and well-balanced Christian cultural instincts … and thereby regain intellectual depth, gravity, and authority”? (Yes, I know Baptistry is not classical “Protestantism,” and frankly their idea of “soul competency” gives this rugged old penitential papist the willies.)
This is More on Baylor in The Japery, a part of The New Pantagruel. Previously: Caelum et Terra | Next: “Attractive Worship” | TrackBack (1) | Comments (0)
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» Baylor’s Iconoclast from The Japery
A Baylor multi-student blog reports that a serious, intellectually sound underground student newspaper has appeared on campus, and it warns “we [Baylor] have allowed ourselves to become less and less distinctively Christian, Protestant, Evangelical, or… [Read More]
Tracked on February 21, 2006 03:10 AM