Andrea Sterk – författare

Religion, Scholarship, and Higher Education explores foundational issues surrounding the interaction of religion and the academy in the twenty-first century. Featuring the work of eighteen scholars from diverse institutional, disciplinary, and religious backgrounds, this outstanding collection of essays issues from a three-year Lilly Seminar on Religion and Higher Education. Reflecting the diversity of the seminar participants, this insightful volume presents a wide variety of viewpoints on the role of religion in higher education and different approaches to religiously informed scholarship and teaching.Religion, Scholarship, and Higher Education is distinct in its orientation toward the personal and the practical. Contributors use personal examples to demonstrate how individual religious beliefs and backgrounds shape the way an educator approaches research and teaching.The first part of the book addresses foundational issues, offering a range of perspectives on the current state of affairs and future prospects for the interrelation of religion and academic endeavor. Part II treats specific academic disciplines as they relate to religion and research and provides several models of scholarship grounded in or informed by religious traditions. The final section of the volume presents five different approaches to teaching. Contributors reflect on how religious perspectives or commitments influence the way in which they understand their role as university or college teachers and carry out their responsibilities in the classroom.Sure to capture the interest of scholars, teachers, and administrators alike, this volume features essays from Nicholas Wolterstorff, James Turner, Alan Wolfe, David A. Hollinger, Mark R. Schwehn, John McGreevy, Nancy T. Ammerman, Roger Lundin, Brian E.Daley, S.J., Clarke E. Cochran, Serene Jones, Richard J. Bernstein, Mark A. Noll, Denis Donoghue, Robert Wuthnow, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Susan Handelman, and Francis Oakley.

Religion, Scholarship, and Higher Education explores foundational issues surrounding the interaction of religion and the academy in the twenty-first century. Featuring the work of eighteen scholars from diverse institutional, disciplinary, and religious backgrounds, this outstanding collection of essays issues from a three-year Lilly Seminar on Religion and Higher Education. Reflecting the diversity of the seminar participants, this insightful volume presents a wide variety of viewpoints on the role of religion in higher education and different approaches to religiously informed scholarship and teaching.Religion, Scholarship, and Higher Education is distinct in its orientation toward the personal and the practical. Contributors use personal examples to demonstrate how individual religious beliefs and backgrounds shape the way an educator approaches research and teaching.The first part of the book addresses foundational issues, offering a range of perspectives on the current state of affairs and future prospects for the interrelation of religion and academic endeavor. Part II treats specific academic disciplines as they relate to religion and research and provides several models of scholarship grounded in or informed by religious traditions. The final section of the volume presents five different approaches to teaching. Contributors reflect on how religious perspectives or commitments influence the way in which they understand their role as university or college teachers and carry out their responsibilities in the classroom.Sure to capture the interest of scholars, teachers, and administrators alike, this volume features essays from Nicholas Wolterstorff, James Turner, Alan Wolfe, David A. Hollinger, Mark R. Schwehn, John McGreevy, Nancy T. Ammerman, Roger Lundin, Brian E.Daley, S.J., Clarke E. Cochran, Serene Jones, Richard J. Bernstein, Mark A. Noll, Denis Donoghue, Robert Wuthnow, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Susan Handelman, and Francis Oakley.

Although an ascetic ideal of leadership had both classical and biblical roots, it found particularly fertile soil in the monastic fervor of the fourth through sixth centuries. Church officials were increasingly recruited from monastic communities, and the monk-bishop became the dominant model of ecclesiastical leadership in the Eastern Roman Empire and Byzantium. In an interesting paradox, Andrea Sterk explains that "from the world-rejecting monasteries and desert hermitages of the east came many of the most powerful leaders in the church and civil society as a whole."Sterk explores the social, political, intellectual, and theological grounding for this development. Focusing on four foundational figures--Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Nazianzus, and John Chrysostom--she traces the emergence of a new ideal of ecclesiastical leadership: the merging of ascetic and episcopal authority embodied in the monk-bishop. She also studies church histories, legislation, and popular ascetic and hagiographical literature to show how the ideal spread and why it eventually triumphed. The image of a monastic bishop became the convention in the Christian east.Renouncing the World Yet Leading the Church brings new understanding of asceticism, leadership, and the church in late antiquity.

Historians of religion face complex interpretive issues when examining religious texts, practices, and experiences. Faithful Narratives presents the work of twelve eminent scholars whose research has exemplified compelling strategies for negotiating the difficulties inherent in this increasingly important area of historical inquiry. The chapters range chronologically from Late Antiquity to modern America and thematically from the spirituality of near eastern monks to women's agency in religion, considering familiar religious communities alongside those on the margins and bringing a range of spiritual and religious practices into historical focus.Focusing on Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the essays address matters central to the study of religion in history, in particular texts and traditions of authority, interreligious discourse, and religious practice and experience. Some examine mainstream communities and traditions, others explore individuals who crossed religious or confessional boundaries, and still others study the peripheries of what is considered orthodox religious tradition. Encompassing a wide geographical as well as chronological scope, Faithful Narratives illustrates the persistence of central themes and common analytical challenges for historians working in all periods.

Historians of religion face complex interpretive issues when examining religious texts, practices, and experiences. Faithful Narratives presents the work of twelve eminent scholars whose research has exemplified compelling strategies for negotiating the difficulties inherent in this increasingly important area of historical inquiry. The chapters range chronologically from Late Antiquity to modern America and thematically from the spirituality of near eastern monks to women's agency in religion, considering familiar religious communities alongside those on the margins and bringing a range of spiritual and religious practices into historical focus.Focusing on Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the essays address matters central to the study of religion in history, in particular texts and traditions of authority, interreligious discourse, and religious practice and experience. Some examine mainstream communities and traditions, others explore individuals who crossed religious or confessional boundaries, and still others study the peripheries of what is considered orthodox religious tradition. Encompassing a wide geographical as well as chronological scope, Faithful Narratives illustrates the persistence of central themes and common analytical challenges for historians working in all periods.