Renascentes Musae: Newman Redux

03 January, 2011

Newman Redux

In a response to an article by Roger Scruton, in which he employs Newman as a lens for examining the contemporary university, The Little Professor (Dr. Miriam Burstein) reminds her readers of how complicated the reception of Newman's ideas may be:

http://littleprofessor.typepad.com/the_little_professor/2010/09/the-ideal-of-a-university.html

Indeed, we can peg Newman as both a conservative and a radical. A lot of inside baseball? Perhaps. At the same time, Newman's problematical legacy provides much to consider for those who care about Lutheran higher education. In what ways is it beneficial for our institutions to embrace this paradox? How might we both conserve the past, challenge the present, and change the future? To what extent does an educational institution committed to confessional Lutheranism provide the perfect foundation from which to negotiate between these two extremes?

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How you say 'dat?

Renascentes Musae (reh-nah-SKEN-tays MOO-sigh). That's right. Reh-nah-SKEN-tays MOO-sigh. "The rebirth of the Muses," or, literally, "the Muses in the process of being re-born." That was Reformation-Era code for the kind of university reform that accompanied the Reformation, a revitalization of higher education that eschewed the scholasticism of the Late Medieval world for a bracing encounter with the classics, the literae humaniores, of both the pagan and Christian world, along with the intellectual tools needed for such study: the ancient languages (classical Greek, classical Latin, and Hebrew), rhetoric & dialectic. This blog is devoted to searching for and articulating a theologically faithful and intellectually responsible rationale for Lutheran higher education on the basis of Wittenberg Christian Humanism and to imagining what renascentes Musae might look like in 21st-century North American confessional Lutheranism. Need we mention it? Opinions expressed by an individual author are not necessarily those of all authors. Not only that--if we can't vouch for one another's opinion--it goes without saying that authors also speak on their own behalf and do not necessarily reflect the views of the institutions that employ them.