Stout on academic theology

While I wait for my copy of Charles Taylor's book The Secular Age to arrive, I have been dipping in to Stout's book Ethics After Babel. He some very perceptive comments to make about the disconnection between seminary professors and their students (on the American scene anyhow). The problem for the seminary prof is that constituency in the classroom (ie, the fee-paying students) are on the whole embarassingly pietistic and dogmatic (from Stout's perspective). And yet they long for academic credibility - so they have distance themselves from their own students. Stout continues:

...secular intellectuals have largely stopped paying attention. They don't need to be told, by theologians, that Genesis is mythical, that nobody knows much about the historical Jesus, that it's morally imperative to side with the oppressed, or that birth control is morally permissible. The explanation for the eclipse of religious ethics in recent secular moral philosophy may therefore be rather more straightforward than I have suggested so far. It may be that academic theologians have increasingly given the impression of saying nothing atheistis don't already know.