I’m not a Mennonite, but I resonate with this:
It’s interesting being a Mennonite and an academic. Sometimes I find my Anabaptist-Mennonite sensibilities grating against the norms of academia: my “priesthood of all believers” mentality against intellectual elitism, my discipleship/faith-without-works-is-dead mentality against the divorcing of theory from practice, and especially, my appreciation for the “plain sense” and the poetry of Scripture (in the vernacular!) against the inaccessibility of academic language.
From Susan Guenther Louwen, a in a Mennonite World Review article, “Being a Mennonite Academic.”
HT: Devin Manzullo-Thomas
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One of my close “companions”/kindred spirits along the way and a theologian whom I deeply admire is Dorothee Soelle (1929-2003).
In her autobiography, Against the Wind: Memoir of a Radical Christian (Fortress, 1999), she spoke about her own theological writing this way:
“Perhaps the university had its difficulties with me because I took diverging paths, in search of a way of writing that was different from that of established scholarship. I did not want to overload my books with footnotes; I wanted to document my thought process, not my knowledge. The dominant pattern is to line up as many authorities as possible behind oneself instead of risking saying something new.”
The university has great problems with such folks until it becomes necessary or profitable to study them. So it always has been.