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This happens when you over-intellectualise anything. Art, literature, architecture, religion, computer science. We lost a lot when these became university subjects instead of crafts.
(It’s still useful to have some deep intellectualisers of these things around, because they know more and shake things up, but in my opinion they work better when you put them in a team of different backgrounds. I’ve found that if you have too many computer scientists on a project then you get lots of arguments and something very complex that doesn’t quite fit requirements.)
Religion is literally the original university subject. You seem to be objecting to the academy in general, for all time, rather than over-intellectualization (something for which religion has a history stretching back 1500 beyond the origin of universities).
I have spent a considerable time in the academy. My point - perhaps poorly phrased - were that it’s easy to to try and go deep into a subject and end up going straight through. It’s also the case that academia rewards originality and in many areas academics used up all the reasonable analyses long ago and now compete to champion unreasonable ones. They also just plain get bored.
I’ve met few academic theologians but I liked the ones I met. I would still be more inclined to expect wacky stuff from the academy than a village church. Perhaps I’m wrong.
This is a more reasonable criticism. It's less over-intellectualization and more over-professionalization.
But the profession is intellectual so they go together rather :P I don’t think it’s linked inherently to professionalism, though, since you get the same dynamics without money in, say, the Bloomsbury set. If you spend too much time thinking about something then it’s natural for boredom with the usual to set in and status to start accumulating to wild or novel takes.
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