Uncovers what Christian seminaries taught about Islam in their formative years Throughout the nineteenth century, Islam appeared regularly in the curricula of American Protestant seminaries. Islam was not only the focus of Christian missions, but was studied as part of the history of the Church as well as in the new field of comparative religions. Moreover, Arabic was taught as a cognate biblical language to help students better understand biblical Hebrew. Passages from the Qur’an were sometimes read as part of language instruction. Christian seminaries were themselves new institutions in the nineteenth century. Though Islam had already been present in the Americas since the beginning of the slave trade, it was only in the nineteenth century that the American public became more aware of Islam and had increasing contact with Muslims. It was during this period that extensive trade with the Ottoman empire emerged and more feasible travel opportunities to the Middle East became available due to the development of the steamship. Providing an in-depth look at the information about Islam that was available in seminaries throughout the nineteenth century, Muhammad in the Seminary examines what Protestant seminaries were teaching about this tradition in the formative years of pastoral education. In charting how American Christian leaders’ ideas about Islam were shaped by their seminary experiences, this volume offers new insight into American religious history and the study of Christian-Muslim relations.

Broken Knowledge explores the impacts of the scientific and scholarly ideal of the modern university on theological education at Union Theological Seminary from 1887-1926. During this period, the marks of the modern university --specialization, the elective system, professionalization, and the empirical research orientation-- were incorporated into theological education. While vigorously implanting the new university's structural and functional patterns into theological education, the seminary and its theologians strove to bring theological discussions into the arena of secularized academia, to achieve independence from church dogmatism, to expand the scope of theological outlook in social domains, and to bind science and religion together. Without doubt, these efforts deserve due recognition. However, it is also undeniable that the current problems in theological education --the fragmentation of the theological curriculum and the loss of a holistic search for religious truth -- have to do with the seminary's adaptation to the new university ideal such as uncritical specialization and narrow modern epistemology at the turn of the century. This book explores how the decline of theology or the sacred in our modern world is connected with the dominance of modern scientific ways of knowing in our search for truth and the lack of holistic approaches to the issue of faith and knowledge. This book searches for the recovery of wholeness in theological education and higher learning in general.