Language, Religion, Knowledge: Past and Present

by James Turner

ISBN: 9780268033576

Published: 2003

"James Turner's diptych of interrelated essays--which link carefully wrought episodes in the nineteenth-century past of American higher education with future prospects for the role of religiously rooted inquiry in academic research--shed considerable and often unexpected light on the historically contingent disciplinary distinctions, epistemological assumptions, and research practices of university life today. Turner is not simply a first-rate intellectual historian, but a first-rate intellectual." --Brad Gregory, Stanford University "Ever since Cardinal Newman wrote The Idea of a University and George Bernard Shaw quipped that a Catholic university is a contradiction in terms, scholars have quarreled about the relation between knowledge and belief. In Language, Religion, Knowledge one of the most erudite of American historians explores topics ranging from the intricate connections between philology and historicism to the ironic consequences of secularization for higher education....