the rehabilitation of the evangelical mind?

If you've been keeping up at all with the perceived state of the evangelical mind as expressed in her literature around this subject in the last 7 years or so, you've probably run across at least one quotation of the first line of Mark Noll's The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind:

"The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind."

(Noll is Wheaton College's McManis Professor of Christian Thought.)

It's my understanding that Books & Culture was started in response to Noll's 1995 jeremiad.

Tonight I read a marvelously informative piece that provides deep background on what many are viewing what could be called a rehabilitation of the evangelical mind.

Hamilton and Yngvason's article was reminscent of Noll's January 2001 First Things footnote to his earlier book. There Noll paid homage to Alan Wolfe's far more expansive October 2000 Atlantic Journal article "The Opening of the Evangelical Mind" in which he details some of the activity in this particular thoughtspace.

(Alan Wolfe is the Boston College's Director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life).

It will be interesting to see if this trend will continue and far, far more interesting to see how and if this scholarship translates itself into a church that more passionately and effectively loves God and others in our emerging culture.

Those interested in pursuing this further can check out two faithmaps sections of linked articles that treat the current state of evangelicalism and her recent history and another section that deals with evangelicalism and postmodernism.