Professing in the Postmodern Academy: Faculty and the Future of Church-Related Colleges

The Habit of Empathy: Postmodernity and the Future of the Church-Related College

The Habit of Empathy 33 The rapid perusal of any history of church-related academic institutions in America should easily persuade the reader that tensions between religious traditions and secular culture are ever-present.1 In a nation that has always been at one and the same time highly religious yet formally committed to the separation of church and state, such a situation is probably inevitable . The twentieth-century growth of secularization and the increasingly pluralistic cultural and religious landscape only help to intensify the tensions. The more voices in the dialogue, the greater the challenge to each particular voice both to be heard and, perhaps more importantly, to hear itself above the welter of competing voices. While there have always been tensions in the life of the church-related college, the kinds of tensions have varied with the times. Different times result in different tensions, which present particular challenges. What then, of the specific situation of the church-related college in our times? To offer at least part of an answer to this question, it will be necessary to describe the lineaments of our “postmodern” moment in history. This will lead to the identification of three challenges that our particular historical situation presents to the church-related institution as college, as church and as church-related college. I The Habit of Empathy: Postmodernity and the Future of the Church-Related College PAUL LAKELAND 34 PAUL LAKELAND shall suggest that cultivating what I shall call “the habit of empathy” may be a way of addressing the situation that emerges from the very character of our present-day world. It will be my contention that the parallels between the impulses of postmodern culture on the one hand, and contemporary approaches to academic and religious life on the other, make this a particularly important and hopeful moment for the church-related college. VARIETIES OF “POSTMODERNISM” The times in which we now live have come to be called “postmodern,” for better or worse. There is no particular value to this label, perhaps even no particular content to it, but as a label it has stuck, and so we will use it. Semantically, of course, it merely suggests that we live after modernity, and in itself this too is neither particularly perceptive nor conceptually rich. But it offers us a way to make some initial clarifications, since “modernity,” unlike postmodernity, is a relatively well-catalogued phenomenon. What postmodernity means, then, will be a matter of determining the content of the “post” in postmodern. To take the more pedestrian issue first, “modernity” is normally understood to be that historical epoch in the Western world that stretched from the time of the European Enlightenment to some point in the mid-twentieth century. The Enlightenment itself, while a historical watershed, did not occur out of nowhere, but was in many ways presaged by late-medieval nominalism and early mercantile capitalism.2 Nevertheless, the two principal motifs of the Enlightenment serve to denote the modern world that followed, namely, the trust in the powers of human reason and the attendant rise in science and technology . Faced with such a secularly empowered culture, postEnlightenment religion lost confidence in its capacity to address and challenge the everyday “real” world. Three typical forms of modern religion emerged; a deism that kept God out of the world-picture, a privatistic pietism that coexisted somewhat schizophrenically with an attention to the world of mundane affairs, and a ghettoized defensiveness. In each case the reli- The Habit of Empathy 35 gious dimension of life became seriously impoverished, and the world in which it existed played by its own newly fashioned rules. Precisely because of the post-Enlightenment bifurcation of reason and religion, state and church, world and God, profane and sacred, the church-related college in recent centuries has always been something of a hybrid. While in the age of the socalled “medieval synthesis” learning was sacred and theology was the queen of the sciences, the religious institution of higher learning in the age of modernity would always seem to be trying to meet two incompatible ends: to be faithful to the scripture principle or to the authority of the Church on the one hand, and to pursue the human drive for knowledge of the world in complete freedom on the other. The problems of the churchrelated college, even in some respects to the present day, all stem from this one dilemma...