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Educating for Shalom: Essays on Christian Higher Education
In addition to his notable work as a premier Christian philosopher, Nicholas Wolterstorff has become a leading voice on faith-based higher education. This volume gathers the best of Wolterstorff's essays from the past twenty-five years dealing collectively with the purpose of Christian higher education and the nature of academic learning.
Integrated throughout by the biblical idea of shalom, these nineteen essays present a robust framework for thinking about education that combines a Reformed confessional perspective with a radical social conscience and an increasingly progressivist pedagogy. Wolterstorff develops his ideas in relation to an astonishing variety of thinkers ranging from Calvin, Kuyper, and Jellema to Augustine, Aquinas, and Kant to Weber, Habermas, and MacIntyre. In the process, he critiques various models of education, classic foundationalism, modernization theory, liberal arts, and academic freedom.
Integrated throughout by the biblical idea of shalom, these nineteen essays present a robust framework for thinking about education that combines a Reformed confessional perspective with a radical social conscience and an increasingly progressivist pedagogy. Wolterstorff develops his ideas in relation to an astonishing variety of thinkers ranging from Calvin, Kuyper, and Jellema to Augustine, Aquinas, and Kant to Weber, Habermas, and MacIntyre. In the process, he critiques various models of education, classic foundationalism, modernization theory, liberal arts, and academic freedom.
332 pages, Paperback
First published January 31, 2004
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About the author
Nicholas Wolterstorff
84 books107 followersWolterstorff is the Noah Porter Professor Emeritus of Philosophical Theology, and Fellow of Berkeley College at Yale University. A prolific writer with wide-ranging philosophical and theological interests, he has written books on metaphysics, aesthetics, political philosophy, epistemology and theology and philosophy of religion.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
January 24, 2012
This collection of speeches and essays is a mixed bag.
Any educator ought to be able to find that some portions of this book cause one to think differently about Christian education than one has before. We need more scholars like Wolterstorff, and we all need to be driven to engage much of what Wolterstorff posits with Christian peers. I have yet to see a school practice much of what he preaches.
Any educator ought to be able to find that some portions of this book cause one to think differently about Christian education than one has before. We need more scholars like Wolterstorff, and we all need to be driven to engage much of what Wolterstorff posits with Christian peers. I have yet to see a school practice much of what he preaches.
February 29, 2008
profound insights into the importance of higher education and its true purpose; brilliant, scholarly, biblical, great book, but not easy reading. the author is one of America's foremost contemporary philosophers.
November 5, 2021
Wolterstorff is clearly an amazing thinker, and in a number of these essays he does a tremendous job putting into inspiring words his vision for and belief in the power of Christian higher education. The notion of shalom and the way that Wolterstorff sees it working out in Christian colleges as a higher calling to justice and the recognition of the perspectivalism and power of education is a clear articulation of values that are sorely needing to be rejuvenated in the contemporary church and certainly within Christian settings of higher education. Throughout these varied essays this through line of thinking about justice and the intertwined nature of society from a Reformed perspective is clear and beautiful. However, some of the essays in the book (including some where the vision of shalom is most beautifully articulated) are also quite heady, sometimes detrimentally so. Perhaps I'm not reading them the right way, or not seeking to get out of them what Wolterstorff intended me to. But for the most part this collection was insightful, charming, and most of all challenging in the ways that texts intended for discipleship usually are. As an educator in a Christian institutional setting, this has given me a lot to think about, and I'm grateful for that at the very least.
April 28, 2020
I found this collection of essays focusing on Christian higher education to be easily transferable to my own context, elementary school. I would recommend this book to anyone that wants to think deeply about what Christian education ought to be.
Dr. Wolterstorff makes the persuasive claim that we ought to teach for justice, towards shalom. For the Bible makes clear, we ought to work for justice in our daily lives. Why would teaching be any different?
Dr. Wolterstorff makes the persuasive claim that we ought to teach for justice, towards shalom. For the Bible makes clear, we ought to work for justice in our daily lives. Why would teaching be any different?
December 9, 2020
This was a book read with colleagues at the university I work at. It is a combination of lectures he gave over a span of a few decades. Very interesting to read the evolution of the thoughts of the author through many years.
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December 27, 2021Astonishing. Wolterstorff is a gift. This is a collection of essays so naturally there are high points and low points. But there's such a weight of learning and reflection on the nature of education here.
April 7, 2015
Educating for Shalom, by Nicholas Wolterstorff, Grand Rapids: Wm. B Eerdmans, 2004.
Summary: This collection of essays and talks written or given over a 30 year period traces Nicholas Wolterstorff's journey of thinking about Christian higher education, the integration of faith and learning, and his growing concern that education result in the pursuit of justice and shalom.
Nicholas Wolterstorff is an emeritus professor of philosophical theology at Yale, having previously taught on the faculty at Calvin College, a Christian college in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The collection of essays and presentations that make up this collection were written or given over a 30 year period and chronicle how Wolterstorff's conception of the task of Christians in higher education to connect faith and learning has changed over this time period.
Several of the essays in this collection chronicle that journey, giving the broad strokes of Wolterstorff's emerging understanding. In essays like "Rethinking Christian Higher Education", "Teaching for Shalom: On the Goal of Christian Collegiate Education", "The Project of a Christian University in a Postmodern Culture", and "Autobiography: The Story of Two Decades of Thinking About Christian Higher Education" he traces this journey. He began with the conception of his mentor, William Harry Jellema, of a Christian humanism concerned with applying Christian thought to the high culture of Western art, literature, and philosophy. As he went on to pursue graduate studies, this shifted to an academic discipline perspective, that immersed itself first of all in doing good work tackling original problems in the discipline and trying to think Christianly about them. Perhaps the watershed moment in Wolterstorff's life was when he spent time in South Africa, and later among Palestinian Christians and became aware that education that does not eventuate in a concern for justice and human flourish--shalom is the best word to sum this up--is a sterile and barren enterprise.
Wolterstorff does not stop there. He also considers the question of what social practices contribute to the ethical formation of students who act for justice and shalom. He asks what moral dispositions incline students to act on intellectual convictions and how these moral virtues are developed through the educational process, a project James K.A. Smith has picked up in books like Desiring the Kingdom. Wolterstorff's essay on "Teaching for Justice: On Shaping How Students Are Disposed to Act" is the clearest exposition of his thinking.
The remainder of the essays in one way or another explore how a Christian world and life view inform academic inquiry. He has a couple essays on Christian engagement with psychology, which seem somewhat dated being concerned more with the Freudian, Jungian, and Skinnerian approaches of the 70's and 80's than today's cognitive and neuroscience based approaches. A couple essays explore the distinctive contribution of Abraham Kuyper to faith and learning. "The Point of Connection between Faith and Learning" explores the very different premises of the Christian who believes in regeneration and the materialist who believes only in empiricism. Yet both encounter the world through sensory data, the point of contact. In the other essay ("Abraham Kuyper on Christian Learning"), he contrasts Lockean rationalism, and its evangelical counterpart of evidentialism with Kuyper's emphasis on the relationship of subject and object in any science--an anticipation of postmodern criticism by one hundred years.
Several other essays are also worth noting. He explores the contentious issue of academic freedom in religiously based institutions of higher education, noting that academic freedom is very different from freedom of speech. He also notes that those at religious institutions are free to advance views that would not be permitted in the secular context and thus that religiously based institutions may religiously qualify academic freedom, and religious faculty may in fact enjoy greater academic freedom in such contexts. In "Should the Work of our Hands Have Standing in the Christian College" he argues that physical work and creation of things should not be considered inferior to ideas. The collection closes with Wolterstorff's fundamental agreement with Fides et Ratio and a call for Christian boldness in the world of ideas.
While Wolterstorff writes on Christian higher education, these essays are also of great worth for Christians working in higher education in the secular context. They are closely and well-reasoned works that demand careful attention and in return force one to think more deeply about what is meant by terms like "integration" or even "shalom" or "human flourishing", all of which are bandied about. Equally, Wolterstorff paints an expansive and rich vision of the academic calling at its best.
Summary: This collection of essays and talks written or given over a 30 year period traces Nicholas Wolterstorff's journey of thinking about Christian higher education, the integration of faith and learning, and his growing concern that education result in the pursuit of justice and shalom.
Nicholas Wolterstorff is an emeritus professor of philosophical theology at Yale, having previously taught on the faculty at Calvin College, a Christian college in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The collection of essays and presentations that make up this collection were written or given over a 30 year period and chronicle how Wolterstorff's conception of the task of Christians in higher education to connect faith and learning has changed over this time period.
Several of the essays in this collection chronicle that journey, giving the broad strokes of Wolterstorff's emerging understanding. In essays like "Rethinking Christian Higher Education", "Teaching for Shalom: On the Goal of Christian Collegiate Education", "The Project of a Christian University in a Postmodern Culture", and "Autobiography: The Story of Two Decades of Thinking About Christian Higher Education" he traces this journey. He began with the conception of his mentor, William Harry Jellema, of a Christian humanism concerned with applying Christian thought to the high culture of Western art, literature, and philosophy. As he went on to pursue graduate studies, this shifted to an academic discipline perspective, that immersed itself first of all in doing good work tackling original problems in the discipline and trying to think Christianly about them. Perhaps the watershed moment in Wolterstorff's life was when he spent time in South Africa, and later among Palestinian Christians and became aware that education that does not eventuate in a concern for justice and human flourish--shalom is the best word to sum this up--is a sterile and barren enterprise.
Wolterstorff does not stop there. He also considers the question of what social practices contribute to the ethical formation of students who act for justice and shalom. He asks what moral dispositions incline students to act on intellectual convictions and how these moral virtues are developed through the educational process, a project James K.A. Smith has picked up in books like Desiring the Kingdom. Wolterstorff's essay on "Teaching for Justice: On Shaping How Students Are Disposed to Act" is the clearest exposition of his thinking.
The remainder of the essays in one way or another explore how a Christian world and life view inform academic inquiry. He has a couple essays on Christian engagement with psychology, which seem somewhat dated being concerned more with the Freudian, Jungian, and Skinnerian approaches of the 70's and 80's than today's cognitive and neuroscience based approaches. A couple essays explore the distinctive contribution of Abraham Kuyper to faith and learning. "The Point of Connection between Faith and Learning" explores the very different premises of the Christian who believes in regeneration and the materialist who believes only in empiricism. Yet both encounter the world through sensory data, the point of contact. In the other essay ("Abraham Kuyper on Christian Learning"), he contrasts Lockean rationalism, and its evangelical counterpart of evidentialism with Kuyper's emphasis on the relationship of subject and object in any science--an anticipation of postmodern criticism by one hundred years.
Several other essays are also worth noting. He explores the contentious issue of academic freedom in religiously based institutions of higher education, noting that academic freedom is very different from freedom of speech. He also notes that those at religious institutions are free to advance views that would not be permitted in the secular context and thus that religiously based institutions may religiously qualify academic freedom, and religious faculty may in fact enjoy greater academic freedom in such contexts. In "Should the Work of our Hands Have Standing in the Christian College" he argues that physical work and creation of things should not be considered inferior to ideas. The collection closes with Wolterstorff's fundamental agreement with Fides et Ratio and a call for Christian boldness in the world of ideas.
While Wolterstorff writes on Christian higher education, these essays are also of great worth for Christians working in higher education in the secular context. They are closely and well-reasoned works that demand careful attention and in return force one to think more deeply about what is meant by terms like "integration" or even "shalom" or "human flourishing", all of which are bandied about. Equally, Wolterstorff paints an expansive and rich vision of the academic calling at its best.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews