Intellectual Humility and the Difficult Knowledge of Theology

• In Event: Millennium Hotel Roundtable Session 1
  In Roundtable Session: Curriculum Theory-Making: Tensions and Possibilities

Abstract

We seek, in this analytical essay, to propose “intellectual humility” as a mode for moving toward new avenues of knowledge production in the academy, particularly as an epistemic stance against the kinds of “intellectual arrogance” that have made certain avenues of knowledge, especially in the social sciences, mostly verboten in the last half century. Drawing on the conceptual frames of difficult knowledge and weak theology, we turn to our own stories of faith and inquiry as ways in to thinking humility, and through which we draw broader conclusions about what humility may offer that’s especially useful in this particular moment in the academy and beyond.

Authors

• Scott Jarvie, Michigan State University

• Kevin J Burke, University of Georgia - Athens