What does the modern university have to do with the church, and vice versa?  Quite a lot.  After all, the university is a Christian institution and invention, starting in the courts of Charlemagne, on to the first universities of Europe, on to the campuses we see on ESPN’s College Gameday every Saturday morning during football season.  The church, as well as the university, would do well to pay more attention to the other one, and one new book has that in mind. 

Christianity and the Soul of the University: Faith as a Foundation for Intellectual Community, edited by Douglas Henry and Michael Beaty, is a compendium of essays from a conference at Baylor University.

Aurelie Hagstrom, of Providence College in Rhode Island, has an essay, “Christian Hospitality in the Intellectual Community,” that perhaps best sums up the aims and hopes of the book. She begins by noting that “hospitality reflects a radically different and compelling alternative to tolerance.” Hospitality is the necessary virtue for academics insofar as it allows one to be welcoming of different ideas but simultaneously it “does not prohibit the judging, analyzing, and classification” of them. Hospitality, she says, does not “imply a type of unconditionality and openness without any distinctions whatsoever.” Hospitality is kenotic, or self-emptying, but not in an abased way. It empties to receive the other, and also to be able to more fully accept itself as equally worthy. Hospitality thus understood calls to mind Paul Evdokimov’s aphorism that “it is possible that the most ascetic act is not renunciation of self, but total self-acceptance.”

This idea seems to be a groundbreaking way to approach the modern cult of tolerance.  Christian ”hospitality” is not a new concept, but I’ve never seen it used to counter the modern concept of uber-tolerance.  I really, really like this idea.  It might just do the trick for Christians in the world – not just the university, but in the arts, in journalism, anywhere where ideas matter and Christianity is labelled as intolerant.