Integrating Faith With Learning in a Postmodem Age

Abstract

Modern educational traditions have used empirical parameters that presume faith and learning are incommensurate. Consequently, faith commitments and academic learning must be integrated after the fact. The postmodem critique challenges all educators to interrogate these dichotomies and offers a way for educators with faith in science or religion to initiate a project to construct ways of knowing that envision quantitative knowledge as part of a larger qualitative enterprise. This essay suggests that Mennonite communitarianism, Roman Catholic sacramentalism, and Jesus' parables provide opportunities for just such a project. They offer correctives to modernistic Reformation models and authenticate ways in which certainty, ambiguity, the social construction of knowledge, and the central role of ethics in epistemology are meaningfully represented both qualitatively and quantitatively. Educators within communities of faith have a unique opportunity to draw upon postmodern insights in ways that might prove foundational to such a more broadly conceived higher education.