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.