As the sociological steering currents of North American society continue to provoke varied analysis and projected forecasts and as Christian belief and conviction share less and less commonality with public piety, educational visionaries, faculties and governing boards face precarious challenges that often pit rival versions of the purpose and identity of Christian institutions against one another. Some look to the past and hold faithfulness to tradition as central, emphasising knowledge that preserves wisdom as the institutional mission. Others reshape curricula to honour the needs and experiences of students, making the central task immediate engagement with life in the present. Still others focus on fashioning new visions for the future, calling for the needs of society to set the agenda. Wolterstorff's essays on Christian higher education provide a rich historical, philosophical and visionary journey through this terrain, establishing shalom as an aim for Christian collegiate education in a post-modern culture.

Accessing his own educational journey, Wolterstorff outlines the historical development of four educational models and their attendant goals that have shaped Christian colleges. The Christian service model aims at training students to enter Christian service. The Christian humanist model aims to liberate from parochialisms and partiality by initiating students into the cultural heritage of meanings they will inhabit. The socialisation/maturation model emphasises discovery that emerges from encouraging a student's prompting impulse. The academic discipline model aims at developing the Christian mind via learning the associated theory that enables engagement with others in a particular field. Wolterstorff regards all of these models as deficient. Though they may fulfil the cultural mandate of creation they fail to fulfil the liberation mandate in responding to the wounds of humanity. Wolterstorff's call is for a more comprehensive model – a vision of shalom – incorporating the practice of justice and the delight of human flourishing where all of one's relationships are made right. In order to shape students with the disposition to act with such virtues, Wolterstorff advocates pedagogy focused on providing reasons, modelling, praxis-oriented learning and the development of empathy with those who suffer.

But how might one enact such a narrative in a world where alternative versions of God and the good compete? Wolterstoff's answer embroils him in a philosophical discussion of the changing nature of learning and of science. Beginning from the ancients’ view of science as discovering reality based on insight, through Locke's revision that regarded science as grounded in and governed by insight, Wolterstorff traces the arrival of the Enlightenment project. Christian thought during the Enlightenment heralded that belief was to be governed by reason and presupposed that any reasonable person considering science (natural revelation) and philosophical arguments entailing special revelation would naturally be led to Christianity. Implicit in the epistemology undergirding this view was the notion that learning is a generically human enterprise whereby the common equipping of rationality, gifted to all humans, when applied with the right methods, would naturally and convincingly lead to consensus if people would strip themselves of all particularities and heed the unbiased, objective discoveries of science.

Wolterstorff believes that this ‘regnant self-image’ of science has largely been shattered in the past quarter-century and that the enterprise of learning must now recognise that whatever reality is seen is always shaped a priori by belief-forming dispositions. Thus, the awareness of our subjectivity that emerges in specific socio-historical contexts forces an awareness that learning is inherently perspectival and necessarily pluralistic. Christianity wedded to an Enlightenment epistemology for its apologetic foundationalism thus has found itself threatened and put on the defensive by such tsunamic shifts. Wolterstorff then turns to Abraham Kuyper to navigate the needed rational reconstruction.

Relating, as one steeped in the Reformed, confessional tradition, Wolterstorff contends that humans are fundamentally hermeneutic creatures that harbour a basic need for interpretation. However, interpretation is always shaped by one's antecedent dispositions and control beliefs. Following the Kuyperian conviction that Christian regeneration and subsequent enlightenment via revelation originates outside of humanity and results in a distinct consciousness and a distinct kind of life, Wolterstorff traces Kuyper in arguing that there now exist two kinds of people and necessarily two kinds of science. The implications for Wolterstorff flow naturally: (a) science, as well as Christian scholarship, is an unceasing and ever-changing social practice that has a tradition that exists before we are inducted into it; (b) part of the educational task is raising awareness about habituated predispositions (e.g. individualism, contract as the basis for relationships, capitalism, etc.) that incline judgement about the social structuring of reality and the interlocking roles one is asked to play in that drama; (c) the ‘integration of faith and learning’ is a misguided goal if it simply entails adding faith as an addendum to science, if it eventuates into oversimplified compatabilism, or if it functions unidirectionally as a trump card; (d) Christians are entitled to enter the conversation as Christians claiming their perspective not as prejudicial bias but as ‘privileged cognitive access’; (e) although it is unrealistic to hope for emergent consensus in learning via communal interaction, faithful scholarship yet entails inter- and intra-dialogue with other narratives of understanding; (f) essential for faithful scholarship today is critical engagement and critical discernment.

Wolterstorff's essays provide rich philosophical signposts significantly helpful in establishing identity and purpose for Christian institutions in emerging society. He paints in broad brushstrokes that clearly establish parameters and directives and critiques essential for the task of Christian education that we neglect to our weakening and irrelevance. However, there are ambiguities in the outworkings of Wolterstorff's writings that leave one with unresolved questions. For example, as Wolterstorff's reformed theology maintains that depravity affects every aspect of humanity's reasonings, what exactly is different between science performed by a regenerate mind and science performed by one endowed with common grace, especially if either may be found to correct the other? If the former can be judged as entailing ‘privileged cognitive access’ what is to prevent it from claiming superiority and re-creating the hegemony or power claims it once propagated? If we do admit to perspectival learning and pluralism in the market place of ideologies, what is the telos sought in dialogue with those outside of the Christian faith? If it is to enact the Kuyperian vision of ‘claiming every inch of creation for the glory of God’, then how does one live this reality with the admission that in a world disrupted by the fall the hope of arriving at any consensus is a fated endeavour?

These unresolved ambiguities in no way signal a discounting of Wolterstorff's essays but rather call attention to the complexity of the task addressed in his writings – a task that left this reader immensely grateful for and informed by the undertaking.