How To Write A Faith Integration Paper: A Comprehensive Guide

WHAT IS A FAITH INTEGRATION PAPER?

A faith integration paper is a traditional research paper or essay in which a religious component is integrated. Typically, a faith integration paper will be a traditional essay or research paper that will make use of religious arguments as well as secular and scientific arguments to support a thesis. In other words, a faith integration paper is not a purely objective research paper. Rather, it is one in which you are encouraged to share your religious faith, or the religious faith of the university you are attending, so as to make the argument that supports the thesis that you are defending when writing your faith integration paper.

With this in mind, writing a faith integration paper requires that you simultaneously use objective scholarly evidence and sources from scripture so as to support your claim. In most cases, you will use scripture side-by-side with scholarly journal articles to show how your holy text supports your argument or how your argument is right because of your holy text. In rare cases, a separate paragraph near the end of the essay will be used for the faith integration. Either way, writing a faith integration paper requires that you use the intersection of science and faith to complete your assignment.

Some faith integration papers will ask you to make references to faith which reflect your university’s mission and core values when writing the paper. When this is the case, the paper’s faith integration is not likely to run throughout the entirety of the paper. Rather, it will be present near the end of the paper as discussed above. In such a case, you should be familiar with your university’s official values, for example piety, chastity or humility, and find scriptural resources that deal with both your topic and these values.

Ultimately, a faith integration paper is an essay or research paper that mixes scientific and religious evidence to support a claim. This is very different from a secular essay or research paper as you would lose an immense quantity of marks for using religious justification in a scholarly paper. Given that religious information cannot be falsified, it is not considered to be scientific in nature. As such, this use of faith integration is typically reserved for faith-based schools in which learning more about the university’s faith is a core objective of the curriculum and in which almost all assigned essays and research papers include faith integrations.

HOW TO WRITE A FAITH INTEGRATION PAPER

When you are writing a faith integration paper, you should approach it like a regular essay or research paper by first deciding on a topic and thesis. Once this has been done however, you should ensure that it will be possible to write your faith integration alongside this topic and thesis. Given that it would be difficult to write a faith integration paper supporting gay marriage from an evangelical Christian perspective, keep in mind that your faith integration paper should be written in a way that reflects the beliefs of the faith you are writing from. You should thus be very strategic in choosing the topic of your faith integration paper as you need to settle on and write about a thesis that can be realistically integrated with religious evidence. Failing to do so will lead you to lose marks when you write your faith integration paper or could even lead to an honor code violation if you depart too far from your school or university’s rules and official values.

As you are writing your faith integration paper, you should either place your faith integration at the end, near your conclusion, or make references to scripture and religion throughout the paper. The specific format that you will use depends on your university. Most faith-based universities prefer faith integration papers in which the faith integration is written into the body of the text alongside the actual empirical scientific evidence. This allows for you to write a faith integration paper in which both your thesis and the paper itself are both written on the basis of a combination of faith and science. Other faith-based universities however prefer that you simply include one paragraph in your paper about how it relates to your faith. Make sure you know which approach to writing faith integration is used by your university before you start writing your faith integration paper.

When you are writing your faith integration paper, your best bet is to use Google to search for biblical quotes by theme. Sites like biblestudytools.com, openbible.info and bible.knowing-jesus.com all provide a list of biblical quotes on any topic. Rather than looking through the Bible or another holy text to write your faith integration paper, you will save a lot of time by using one of these pre-organized and pre-sorted sites as they provide lists of bible quotes by themes that are frequently written on at faith-based colleges. These tools are invaluable for writing faith integration papers as they save you a lot of time in terms of scriptural integration. It is however important that you ensure that the piece of scripture you are quoting matches the preferred version of a holy text, for example the King James Version of the Bible, which is mandated for use in your school or university.

In the end and with faith integration papers being very common at faith-based universities running the gamut from St-Leo’s to Brigham Young University and all the way to Notre-Dame University, writing a faith integration paper can be challenging if you are attending one of these universities but are not a believer. Regardless, it is possible to overcome this obstacle by simply using critical thinking and reasoning skills to determine what type of faith integration your professor would best respond to. Professors tend to like Biblical quotes that support the point you are making through your secular review of the scholarly literature. Even if you are writing a faith integration paper as a non-religious person, you will be successful if you pick out Bible quotes and then write brief pieces of commentary about how they support the scientific evidence you are using to make your point or support your thesis.

HOW TO FORMAT A FAITH INTEGRATION PAPER

A faith integration paper is formatted in the exact same way as an essay or research paper. You should follow a thesis-driven model in which the body paragraphs or sections of your paper all support your thesis. The only difference between formatting a traditional research paper and formatting a faith integration paper is that you will be making frequent references to religious sources, typically the Bible, when you are writing a faith integration paper. This means that you must cite your scriptural references in line with the style guide that has been assigned to your by your professor. All scriptural references should be cited and the Bible or whatever holy text you have used should be present in the references or works cited section of your faith integration paper.

WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A RESEARCH PAPER AND A FAITH INTEGRATION PAPER?

The main difference between a research paper and a faith integration paper is that a faith integration paper will use unscientific religious evidence to support the thesis being supported by the paper. Given that most faith integration papers are assigned by religious or faith-based schools, writing a faith integration paper requires that you demonstrate an ability to supplement the secular worldview of science with your religion’s worldview when you are writing a faith integration paper. You will succeed in writing your faith integration paper if you are able to provide religious support or interpretation for the secular argument that you are advancing through your thesis when you are writing a faith integration paper. The fundamental difference between a faith integration paper and a traditional research paper is thus simply the presence of subjective religious elements in faith integration papers.