For some time now, humanities professors have bemoaned the declining interest in their courses, and enrollment statistics back up their complaints. An exception can be found in a small number of Christian colleges, where interest in the humanities seems to be alive and well. Christopher Noble, a literature professor at Azusa Pacific University, writes of his own experience:
When my mostly Protestant students read Dante (or Darwin) in the woods, they are not primarily “appreciating a classic,” “learning to respect otherness,” “gaining a marketable skill,” “cultivating the life of the mind,” or living out some bizarre Thoreauvian fantasy. Any of those things may happen by accident, but their measurable learning outcomes are explicitly religious: (1) I expect them to master basic skills of literary interpretation and rhetorical organization as a prerequisite for biblical and ecumenical dialectics; (2) I expect them to clarify and refine their own theological perspectives by practicing textual confrontation with the past—a practice significant only in communities that affirm that identity emanates from the past. Those two learning outcomes represent competencies that students cannot develop anywhere else, for their churches stopped teaching them long ago.
Read more on Chronicle of Higher Education: http://chronicle.com/article/Sanctuary-for-the-Humanities/149273/