Pursuing Social Goods and Responding to Buffered & Disenchanted Learners: The Role of Community-Based Approaches in Christian Higher Education

We discuss why Christian higher education is marginalized by way of Charles Taylor’s claims that a modern secular conception of selfhood presumes a buffered (isolated, atomized) mind disengaged and disidentified from broader community and experientially transcendent sources of meaning. We show how community-engaged education combined with community-based research in the context of Christian education reorients students and enables them to encounter the Other, which challenges buffered and disengaged selfhood. The paper then presents the links between this approach to Christian education and historic theological themes that help Christian education realize a Christian social imaginary that contributes to the social good.