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An approach to Christian scholarship called “the integration of faith and learning” has been popular for several decades within evangelical Protestant academic circles. Originally developed by Arthur Holmes and Nicholas Wolterstorff, it has recently been championed in the larger academy by people like George Marsden. With roots in Reformed theology, it stresses the importance of articulating a Christian “worldview.” This approach has many strengths, but it is not the only way of defining Christian scholarship and other models need to be developed.

This chapter begins with various authors concerned to raise a distinctively Christian voice within secular higher education, arguing that Christians can participate in distinctive ways in the ordinary practices of secular academic reason. It moves on to authors such as Stanley Hauerwas, for whom the ordinary practices of secular academic reason themselves come into the theological spotlight, and who raise serious questions about the supposed neutrality of these practices. It finishes with the work of a selection of Anglican theologians who have, in different ways, suggested that the ordinary practices of secular academic reason are already shaped towards God’s purposes, and might be opened to them more deeply.

Evangelicalism became the political and cultural baseline for measuring the status of religion in American public life. The dissemination of two influential metaphors—Richard John Neuhaus's “naked public square” and James Davison Hunter's “culture wars”—demonstrated how evangelicalism was woven into key interpretations of the times. Many who shaped those symbols—not least a group of “thoughtful evangelicals,” such as historians Mark Noll and George Marsden, who received support from the Lilly Endowment and the Pew Charitable Trusts—were themselves believers or fellow-travelers. Late twentieth-century evangelicalism was paradigmatic in ways both obvious and subtle. Ralph Reed's ambitious Christian Coalition and other born-again banes of President Bill Clinton turned the impeachment scandal into a kind of evangelical drama. Whether the setting was Colorado Springs or Willow Creek Community Church, or a Habitat for Humanity worksite or a Promise Keepers rally, evangelical civil society proliferated.

Since the 1990s, partisans of religiously affiliated liberal arts institutions have wrestled with the charge that, by adopting the ideals of the secular research university, they have abandoned their mission to create thoughtful and empathetic citizens. Armed with a Lilly Program for the Theological Foundation for Vocation grant, thirteen scholars at St. Olaf College set out to enter this debate through the lens of vocation. The result is a diverse collection of chapters that are by turns theoretical, personal, and practical in nature, that describe both individual journeys as well as an institutional one, and that wrestle with the term “vocation” as a way of revealing the best of what religious liberal arts institutions have to offer.