CAN I SEE SOME I.D.? (via Tom Morin)

Baylor a beacon for intellectual Christians (ROD DREHER, 07/17/2003, The Dallas Morning News)

The mere mention of the f-word - fundamentalism - cues a certain kind of Texas Baptist to stop thinking and start firing. Extremism in the defense against Baptist fundamentalism is no vice, they might say. Which explains the smear job some Baylor partisans have done on university president Robert Sloan and his Baylor 2012 plan.

At the heart of the controversy is Dr. Sloan's intent to strengthen Baylor's identity as a Christian institution, even as he pushes to make it a nationally ranked research university. Some faculty and alumni have sounded the alarm that this is an attempt by religious fundamentalists - having been decisively defeated in the early 1990s, when Baylor changed its charter to prevent the possibility of a fundamentalist takeover - to conquer from within.

It's a groundless charge. Though described by this newspaper as a "Baptist preacher," as if he had dragged himself in from some piney-woods backwater, Dr. Sloan, an ordained minister, holds a doctorate in New Testament theology from Switzerland's University of Basel, which isn't quite the same thing as a Bible college. He scandalized some on the Baptist hard right by ending Baylor's prohibition on dancing, and, worse, Dr. Sloan has been hiring admitted Roman Catholics to teach at the Texas Baptist university. Some fundamentalist.

What Dr. Sloan actually is undertaking is an audacious and much-needed experiment in American higher education and religious life. The tide of 20th-century secularism washed away entirely the religious identities of historically Protestant universities like Harvard, Yale, Duke and Vanderbilt and dramatically eroded the distinct vision of Catholic colleges. That was likely to be Baylor's future, too. As Dr. Sloan told me, "If you're not intentional about your identity, you can't maintain it. I've never seen a
school slide into Christian orthodoxy."

Echoing a scholarly Christian conviction as old as St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, Dr. Sloan refuses to accept the dominant post-Enlightenment view that faith and reason are mutually exclusive. Baylor 2012 is his bold attempt to show how they are complementary and how a religious university can speak to the broader culture from an intellectually sound but morally distinct vantage point.

It's awfully hard to believe there's not a significant market--never mind need--for educational institutions that proceed from an "intellectually sound but morally distinct vantage point."


MORE:
-Showdown at Baylor: Baylor's president faces off against critics this week amid multiple controversies (Ted Olsen, 07/18/2003, Christianity Today: Weblog) Posted by Orrin Judd at July 19, 2003 7:28 AM