Abstract

Social science research on the academic profession and sociological studies of work has largely ignored religious experience and religious culture as a potentially enlightening variable. A narrative methodology is employed in this study to explore the professional identity of young scholars in the context of their commitments to a culture of religious belief and experience. This study explores how five Christian scholars constructed their identity at the intersection of professional and religious cultures with emphasis on the tensions they negotiated at the beginning of their academic careers. Recognizing that each aspect of professional practice---ethos and identity---informs the other, this study describes how these particular individuals find meaning as scholars, how they envision the purposes toward which they order their lives as academic professionals, and how their professional and religious commitments are transformed into vocations. This study also asks how religious commitments inform the idea of the academic profession as a calling. Do religious convictions or commitments give rise to tensions in one's professional life? If so, how do academic professionals negotiate their identities through the tensions they encounter at the intersection of their faith lives and professional lives? This study informs an understanding of academic culture and professional identity that is broader and more complex than either sociological studies that focus on role in the academic profession or studies of professional ethics that focus on processes of problem solving and decision-making. This study describes how the intelligibility of human identity---in this case one's identity as a Christian and a scholar---is inseparable from that of a moral identity, in the sense that a self-identity requires an orientation in some moral or ethical space