Language Religion Knowledge: Past and Present

by James Turner

ISBN: 9780268033569

Published: 2003

Higher education and university-based research rank among the main forces shaping our world. Focusing on knowledge rather than institutions, Language, Religion, Knowledge offers penetrating insight into how higher learning took its present form and the direction in which it is headed. The first section of this remarkable collection probes the history of higher learning in the United States; the second analyzes problems in higher learning today. Renowned historian James Turner uncovers surprising blind spots in our knowledge of how higher learning has evolved by focusing on four themes: the influence of philology, historicism, disciplinary specialization, and the retreat of religion from the academy. Turner offers an especially interesting discussion of the powerful, yet often unrecognized, impact of the study of texts and languages on knowledge. These thought-provoking essays examine losses and gains for contemporary higher education resulting from the fading of religion. Turner...