Building a faith-infused worldview 3 - The Christian Mind

Last year, the Students’ Society of McGill University voted in favour of joining the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, but the vote was overturned in an online vote. [F]ollowing the BDS debate, some Jewish students experienced harassment on campus. The student newspaper the McGill Daily has an editorial policy of not publishing articles that “promote a Zionist worldview.” (National Post, February 9, 2017)

It's emotional for artists who are women and people of color to have less value placed on our worldview. (Ava DuVernay)

Science is only truly consistent with an atheistic worldview with regards to the claimed miracles of the gods of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. (Lawrence M. Krauss)

I am totally convinced the Christian faith is the most coherent worldview around. (Ravi Zacharias)

Take a look at the quotes I have recorded above. They all have to do with the term 'worldview'--a heavyweight concept indeed. In just my four examples of its use, we see related to its meaning issues of human worth, race/ethnicity, politics, faith or lack thereof, organizing principles, and actions that flow out of beliefs. 

Yet for most people the term is probably virtually unknown, or certainly quite undefined. That is not to say that the topic has been totally untouched by writers and speakers. A number of excellent authors have addressed the concept of worldview (although not necessarily using that term for it). Here are some examples taken from a useful article by Charles Dunahoo (http://www.pcacdm.org/the-christian-mind-how-should-a-christian-think/):

1. The Christian Mind, by Harry Blamires. Blamires, an English scholar whom I met back in the mid-1980s in Vancouver, argues that there is no longer a Christian mind and that the modern mind is a secular one. [Blamires was a student of C.S. Lewis.]
2. The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, by Mark Noll. Noll was a
   
   professor at the seminary I attended. He concluded that there is no evangelical mind. His contention is that "...evangelicals are not exemplary for their thinking, and have not been for several generations. It has a popular but not serious intellectual life. Evangelicals sponsor dozens of theological seminaries, scores of colleges, hundreds of radio stations, and thousands of parachurch agencies, but not a single research university or a single periodical devoted to in-depth interaction with modern culture."
3. The Closing of the American Mind, by Allan Bloom. Bloom, an American philosopher, simply argued that the western mind cannot be seen as a thinking mind. His critique of higher education was particularly blunt: "Higher education has failed democracy and impoverished the souls of today's students."

Obviously the subject of a faith-infused worldview or, as it is also called, a Christian mind, is an important one. In my next post, I hope to define what a worldview is and what it isn't.