Doug Sweeney:
[W]e should practice scholarship as ministry, a form of priestly service intended to bless the larger world. Rather than holding back for fear that other scholars will reject us, it is time for us to reach out and face the consequences of faith, hope, and love within the academy.
It is time to shower attention on those who have no power over us, meeting the needs of junior colleagues before we tend to our CVs, and looking for ways to treat others—especially “the least” of those among us—as though they were better, more important, than ourselves. It is time to tell the truth—the whole truth—about our materials, “outing” ourselves as Christians when the occasion calls for it. We need not drive away our colleagues with annoying, artificial attempts to make a Christian difference, substituting spiritual chatter or religious moralism for painstaking scholarship. But we do need to resist the many professional enticements, institutional incentives, and pecuniary tugs to live as scholarly Nicodemites, practicing Christian faith by night but afraid to show ourselves, or be ourselves, by day. . . .
I think that we can do a better job within the guild of Christian historians to fortify and exemplify the priesthood of believers. We can encourage a deeper faith in God’s vocation on our lives, strengthen one another in our common, priestly service and—precisely in so doing—help each other become much better Christian scholars. Crede, ut intelligas, say the Augustinians. Let us help each other believe in order that we may understand.
—Douglas A. Sweeney, “On the Vocation of Historians to the Priesthood of Believers: A Plea to Christians in the Academy” in Confessing History: Explorations in Christian Faith and the Historian’s Vocation, ed. John Fea, Jay Green, and Eric Miller (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), 309, 310.
