Passionate Scholarship

Passion is an important ingredient in good scholarship. It motivates the scholar and keeps her burning the midnight oil. It inspires new thoughts, new perspectives. Passion should not be equated with self-interested scholarship that is politically or theologically biased for a self-serving cause. Scholarly passion is about caring, dedication, and investing all that one has in "getting it right" as best one can. Scholars must, of course, be aware of their passion and try to keep it focused on the goal of telling the story or interpreting the data fairly, but a scholar without passion is a tasteless non-entity.

Herb Swanson

Review of Edward W. Said. Orientalism. 1978 (here)