The Pietist Schoolman

I’m happy to announce that the Lilly Fellows Program has named The Pietist Vision of Christian Higher Education: Forming Whole and Holy Persons one of the finalists for its prestigious Book Award!

The LFP Book Award “honors an original and imaginative work from any academic discipline that best exemplifies the central ideas and principles animating the Lilly Fellows Program.  These include faith and learning in the Christian intellectual tradition, the vocation of teaching and scholarship, and the history, theory or practice of the university as the site of religious inquiry and culture.”

Congratulations to Karen Eifler and Tom Landy, whose Becoming Beholders: Cultivating Sacramental Imagination and Actions in College Classrooms was announced as the 2015 winner at the Lilly National Conference last night. It’s an honor to have been considered next to that book and the forty-some other nominees.

Just to be a finalist puts us in pretty good company:

• This year our fellow finalist is Wheaton literature professor Roger Lundin, author of Beginning with the Word: Modern Literature and the Question of Belief (and editor of Christ Across the Disciplines: Past, Present, and Future).
• In 2013, when Mark Noll took the prize for Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind, the finalists included Douglas Jacobsen and Rhonda Hustedt Jacobsen (No Longer Invisible: Religion in University Education), whose work helped inspire our project.
• And one of the 2011 finalists was Confessing History: Explorations in Christian Faith and the Historian’s Vocation, edited by my Conference on Faith and History colleagues John Fea, Jay Green, and Eric Miller and the subject of a brief series at this blog.

Thanks to the LFP committee for considering us! Especially in light of the recent troubles in the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities, I’m especially grateful to be associated with the Lilly Network, whose members range from Bethel to Boston College and, yes, Goshen to Union.

As theologian Caryn Riswold (a former Lilly postdoc and now Lilly board member) wrote of LFP yesterday:

[Christianity] is and has historically been a diverse religion lived out in multiple ways from its very inception, and the membership roll of the LFP demonstrates that. CCCU’s recent statements and actions reveal that it has a clear idea of what Christ-centered higher education looks like. The LFP brings together Catholic (of many kinds), Protestant (of many kinds), and evangelical (defined variously) colleges and universities with the goal of empowering them to define, strengthen, and live out their own mission and the academic vocation in relationship to the Christian tradition.

It does not presume to define that mission or that tradition for them.