Introduction
How can we engage with critical theory in our academic work? This new series looks at different perspectives Christians have on critical theory and how we can engage well with discipline-specific issues in that area.
At the 2022 Forming A Christian Mind Autumn conference, Chris Watkin launched his near 700-page book, Biblical Critical Theory. Chris sketched out how he believed Christians can effectively and winsomely engage with culture, writ-large, through and with the Bible. He outlined how he was seeking to do something akin to Augustine in his City of God.
This reading and discussion guide is designed to help you (and your group) explore how you might engage well with the issue of critical theory in academia today. The first two parts of this guide look at two perspectives on critical theory and cultural engagement more generally, which are then followed by case studies providing exploring how Christian academics engage well with culture in the natural sciences, humanities, and social sciences.
As with other guides, each part will include a few articles you can read either on your own or together with your group, and a few questions you can use for personal reflection or as the basis for discussion when you meet with your group.
Preview
Part 1 is publicly accessible; the other parts are for members only.
- Part 1: Introduction: Dr Chris Watkin’s Biblical Critical Theory and Augustine’s City of God On Watkin’s concept of ‘diagonalisation’ and how he seeks to engage with culture after the example of Augustine in his City of God.
- Part 2: A Second Perspective: A Critique of Critical Theory Dr Brad Green’s intellectual genealogy of critical theory and the way he believes critical theories can function as a pseudo-religion. Members only.
- Part 3: Cultural engagement – Case Study in the Natural Sciences: On the imago dei and dehumanising visions of human life
- Part 4: Cultural Engagement – Case Study in the Humanities: How Should We View the Past? Carl Trueman and John Coffey on reckoning with the past in an anti-historical age, and debates about statues and historic injustice.
- Part 5: Cultural Engagement – Case Study in the Social Sciences: Sin, Neutrality, and the Self Turned Inward: Prof Simeon Zahl on how the doctrine of sin helps us diagonalise Issues in the social sciences, Paul Miller on the challenging the presumptions of neutrality and Luther (and Augustine) on sin as ‘the self turned inward’.
- Part 6: A Final Perspective on Critical Theory and Cultural Engagement On three ways of viewing critical theory (as method, meta-narrative or mood) and the problems that arise when the masters of suspicion are not suspicious enough of themselves.