Questions We Share

For my Victorian literature course of autumn 2022, I set myself a goal of not privileging either the secularisation thesis or a potential sacramentalisation thesis, but of helping students see that serious writers almost always address the same set of foundational questions—even as, given their individuality and context, they respond to them differently, as we all do. In the Reformed Christian tradition, such foundational questions are understood to inform all academic inquiry, making all teaching and research neither religiously neutral nor radically relative. Within this context, I consider with my students the question ‘what foundational questions does the religious impulse at the heart of humankind ask?’ through a renewed reading of Genesis 1–3.