Christianity and Intellectual Inquiry

America has entered a new intellectual era in which personal identity has become a major factor in how individuals reflect on reality. Christianity and Intellectual Inquiry describes this changed intellectual landscape and focuses especially (but not exclusively) on ways that Christian thinkers are negotiating the contemporary terrain.

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The first half of the book summarizes the complex history of Christian intellectual efforts and describes how Christians have reacted to changes in the American intellectual ethos over the past century. The second half of the book shifts from history to contemporary analysis, proposing the idea of thinking as pilgrimage as a new intellectual stance that would benefit all Americans today.

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In contrast to the aggressively self-defensive fortress thinking that now characterizes so much public discourse on both the Right and Left, pilgrim thinkers are open to conversations with everyone and willing to rethink their views when reality surprises them. The book describes four common pathways of pilgrimage thinking — attentiveness, contemplation, proclamation, and compassion — that enable Americans of all religious and secular perspectives to engage each other respectfully and constructively in the never-ending quest to understand themselves and the world around them.