For readers of this journal outside North America, the very concept of “honors education” may be confusing (since the word honours features in British and Commonwealth degree titles) or obscure (bringing to mind associations with aristocratic privilege or elitist competition). But in the United States the development of honors programs in colleges, and later honors colleges within universities, has been an important and growing trend of the last fifty years. Intended to recruit students of high intellectual aptitude, to serve their special needs, and to raise the academic profile of the host institution, honors programs have proliferated from a handful in the 1940s to more than 600, as catalogued in the most recent edition of Peterson’s Guide to Honors Programs and Colleges (Digby, 2005). Even though the phrase “honors education” may have a peculiarly North American ring, the issues raised for those who teach highly talented university students are the same for Christian educators around the world, and very little has been published on the topic. With these essays we aim to identify some of the issues that are particularly relevant to Christian higher education for “honors” students, to explore how different theological traditions offer different pedagogical resources for teaching the gifted, and to describe some successful paradigms for cultivating hearts and minds toward service in the kingdom of God.

In many jurisdictions, schools operate under legal mandates to provide nondiscriminatory services that will encourage maximum individual growth in students regardless of race, gender, ability, ethnicity, primary language, or religion. Educators, including Christian educators, take seriously the moral charge to provide for those with less cultural capital or with fewer academic resources. Both public and independent school teachers attend to cultural differences and give time and energy to develop inclusive environments. Their efforts to leave no student behind, while admirable, often leave one group of exceptional students without adequate support: the talented and gifted.

I thought the Baptists had finally given up and become Methodist. We Methodists are heart people. Baptists have no hearts at all. Instead Baptists have the Bible which they use as a club to beat one another into submission. In this respect, I am on the side of the Baptists. . . . Hopefully Baptists are just too mean (and I mean that as a compliment) to make the mistakes the Methodists have made. (Hauerwas, 2007, pp. 110–111)

At the beginning of each school year, our faculty, excited to meet the incoming students who are about to become members of our honors learning community, make a point during our first gathering with new students to ask what they thought “honors” meant when they were in high school. Year after year the answers show the same trend: to incoming college students, “honors” has no set meaning and instead seems to mean an array of things. For some students, taking honors classes means that teachers present the same materials, but the class moves faster or encourages more creative and critical thinking. For others, honors education is simply a more difficult course of study as a result of more homework and more difficult tests. Honors can be associated with more tangible rewards like scholarships, college credit, and weighted grade point averages. A few new freshmen tell us that in high school honors courses are unique because they make it all the way to the end of the textbook. Some think honors classes are better because the students are smarter.

Several years ago the English department at King College (a liberal arts college in Bristol, Tennessee, with affiliation to the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. and the Evangelical Presbyterian Church) experimented with a course in which fourth-year students, to fulfill a capstone requirement, were placed with first-year composition students. At the beginning of the term, the senior students were to lead small groups in discussions on presentations by faculty members who visited the class. Later, the fourth-year students were responsible for sharing their own research. One of those presentations I recall most vividly. A student majoring both in performing arts and in physics treated the class to a scholarly and enthusiastic report on fractals in painting. After class, I overheard an awe-struck first-year student remark, “I hope I’m that smart when I’m a senior.”

What is most important about this collection is that it is a beginning, a first step on the road to a more robust scholarship in collegiate faith-based honors education. As Ken Bratt notes in his introduction, Christian colleges have entered the conversation around honors comparatively late, so the efforts here, which help us to connect research in elementary and secondary gifted/talented programs with university-level initiatives, which suggest ways to examine the undergirding provided by theological traditions, and which demonstrate programmatic approaches to embodying Christian virtues like community and humility, are a most welcome start. As higher education in the United States is increasingly characterized by the language of “crises” (the crisis surrounding humanities disciplines and the teaching of the liberal arts generally, the crisis of contingent labor and the shrinking numbers of the full time professoriate, and, of course, the economic crisis that is forcing colleges and universities to rethink their budgets and their identities), it seems more important than ever to articulate what honors education means in a Christian context. That is, how does an honors program fit into the larger educational/theological mission of the institution? Without richly nuanced answers to that question, honors programs—in these days of the bottom line—are too apt to otherwise be reduced to just one more marketing tool of the admissions department, existing to prove only that Christian colleges have smart students too. We need to do better than that.