God on Campus

From high school to seminary, matters of faith advance to the head of the class

By Jana Reiss -- Publishers Weekly, 11/12/2001

In 1994, Oxford University Press published a foundational book by George Marsden, a history professor at the University of Notre Dame. In The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief, Marsden argued that America's premier colleges and universities, once tied to Christian ideals and institutions, had lost their bearings in the middle of the 20th century and severed their denominational affiliations. Universities had, in effect, lost their religion. According to Marsden, religious perspectives had become almost the only views not welcomed in the hallowed halls of the academy.

Education is all about healthy debate, and Marsden's book has prompted some very pointed rejoinders of late. The season's largest launch of a religion and education title was set in motion by the University of North Carolina Press for Religion on Campus: What Religion Really Means to Today's Undergraduates. Authors Conrad Cherry, Betty DeBerg and Amanda Porterfield conceived of the project "to test the kind of secularization thesis that Marsden presents," says Elaine Maisner, acquisitions editor at UNC Press. Marsden worked with documents, but Cherry, DeBerg and Porterfield worked directly with college students, using a generous Lilly grant to fund their ethnographic research. They spent significant amounts of time on four different campuses, interviewing students and attending classes, home games and chapel services.

In contrast to Marsden's gloom-and-doom depiction, they discovered that religion was alive and well on campus, albeit in a changed state. True, they say, students are no longer concerned with Protestant denominational ties or even with organized religion per se, but they consider themselves to be deeply "spiritual" and practice a much wider variety of world religions than their institutions' founders probably ever imagined. America's colleges and universities, according to the authors, enjoy "a religious pluralism that reflects U.S. society at large," and students' religious commitments may be as authentically played out in their volunteer work or support groups as in the chapel attendance that was mandatory only a generation ago.

The book was officially released on September 10, but the attacks of September 11 delayed its full launch. In October, UNC Press did a 21,000-piece direct mailing and sent review copies and press kits to major media, targeting the editors and religion writers at the nation's top 100 newspapers.

The debate is also being played out in another pair of books--this duo coming from the same publisher. James Tunstead Burtchaell's The Dying of the Light: The Disengagement of Colleges & Universities from Their Christian Churches, published by Eerdmans in 1998, took a similar tack as Marsden's groundbreaking book. Burtchaell (also supported by a Lilly grant) profiled 17 colleges and universities from a wide range of Christian denominations, finding that as more emphasis was placed on higher learning, these institutions lost their founders' sense of the importance of uniting knowledge with piety.

Burtchaell's book has been a strong backlist title for Eerdmans and has contributed much to the debate about the vitality of religion in higher education. In March, the house released a book that was "written in response to" The Dying of the Light, with a "very deliberate difference in tone," according to Eerdmans publicist Kathryn VanderMolen. Robert Benne's Quality with Soul: How Six Premier Colleges and Universities Keep Faith with Their Religious Traditions challenged Marsden and Burtchaell by noting that institutions such as Calvin, Wheaton, St. Olaf, Valparaiso, Baylor and Notre Dame have managed to maintain the highest standards of learning while holding fast to their religious underpinnings.

Members of the Society of Jesus, or Jesuits, have been leaders in Christian education for centuries. In Passionate Uncertainty: Inside the American Jesuits (Univ. of California, Mar. 2002), Peter McDonough and Eugene Bianchi explore the contemporary order, which has lost half its members since the turbulent 1960s. The authors note that Jesuit higher education "has alarmed the Vatican" and that academic freedom has been a serious issue. Academic freedom has been discussed at length in other recent titles: retired Calvin College president Anthony Diekema addressed it in Academic Freedom and Christian Scholarship, which Eerdmans released last year, and Bryan Waterman and Brian Kagel criticized the erosion of academic freedom at Brigham Young University in 1998's The Lord's University: Freedom and Authority at BYU (Signature Books).

The role of spirituality in higher education is a concern that transcends the Christian community. In the late 1990s, Templeton Foundation Press, heeding the wisdom of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. when he admonished that "intelligence plus character... is the goal of a true education," decided to create a college reference book that would focus on character formation. "Although many college guides contain information about tuition, requirements and special programs, there was none that focused on colleges with character education programs, such as service programs, substance abuse prevention, spiritual growth and student leadership," explains publisher Joanna Hill. In 1999, Templeton released Colleges That Encourage Character Development: A Resource for Parents, Students, and Educators to fill the gap.

In January, the University of Notre Dame Press will publish Religion, Scholarship, and Higher Education: Perspectives, Models, and Future Prospects, a collection of essays which (like many of the aforementioned titles) was funded by the Lilly Endowment. The essays were presented during a three-year Lilly Seminar on Religion and Higher Education that involved some of the most respected names in the field: Jean Bethke Elshtain, Mark Noll, Nancy Ammerman, Robert Wuthnow and Nicholas Wolterstorff, among others. Another collection of essays, As Leaven in the World: Catholic Perspectives on Faith, Vocation, and the Intellectual Life, was published by Sheed & Ward earlier this year. Its contributions address the vitality of Catholic intellectual life, including several pieces on teaching as a religious vocation.

While higher education has received the lion's share of publishers' attention where religion is concerned, secondary education has not been neglected. Martin Marty, professor emeritus at the University of Chicago, has coauthored with colleague Jonathan Moore Education, Religion, and the Common Good (Jossey-Bass, Oct. 2000). "This book fills a need in the marketplace to move beyond the demonization of religious groups on the one hand and religious demagoguery on the other," says Mark Kerr, marketing manager for Jossey-Bass. "Dr. Marty's books seek to provide the grounds for a civil, honest discussion about the proper role of religion in American public life, particularly as related to public policy." The authors advocate a "natural inclusion" of religion in the school curriculum, stating that it should receive fair treatment "where the topic naturally fits." Jossey-Bass reports "strong, respectable sales" for the title, considering its specialized audience of religious leaders, public policy makers, professors and students. Kerr says that the book has also been particularly welcomed by journalists.

Stephen Webb's Taking Religion to School: Christian Theology and Secular Education (Brazos) also argues that public educators have a right--even a responsibility--to present religious viewpoints in the classroom at both the secondary and university levels. "Public education," he writes, "needs to invite and welcome religious discussions that are led by people of faith, even to the point of religious passion and disagreement." Brazos marketing director Bobbi Jo Heyboer says that Webb's book, which was released in fall 2000, received "strong recommendations from media and professors," but has't yet been widely received by a general audience. "We expect this to be a solid-selling and ongoing backlist title," she says.

Are American schools preparing high school students to be responsible moral agents? That is the question that drives Katherine Simon's Moral Questions in the Classroom: How to Get Kids to Think Deeply About Real Life and Their Schoolwork. Scheduled to release on November 15, the Yale University Press book follows students in Catholic, Jewish and public high schools to discover how teachers address moral questions and how students respond. Simon, a high school teacher with a doctorate in education from Stanford University, will make several appearances at bookstores and conferences, according to Yale senior publicist Brenda King.

As educators seek to find a viable place for religion in public education, theological education is also undergoing redefinition. Seminaries, theological schools and divinity schools find themselves at a crossroads: the good news is that more women, minorities and second-career students are enrolling than ever before, adding to the diversity of the student body. The bad news is that many scholars feel these institutions are no longer attracting the brightest and best women and men. Faced with the low salaries, heavy responsibilities and educational demands of the pastorate, fewer college graduates overall are opting for theological education. In Being There: Culture and Formation in Two Theological Schools (Oxford, 1997), Jackson Carroll, Barbara Wheeler, Daniel Aleshire and Penny Long Marler studied the changes at two seminaries, which were described simply as "Evangelical" and "Mainline" to preserve their anonymity. The Pew-sponsored project found that, while theological education "is not entirely ineffective in its present form," it fails on several levels to adequately prepare men and women for religious leadership.

Many Jewish readers will appreciate Michael Rosenak's Tree of Life, Tree of Knowledge: Conversations with the Torah, which addresses Jewish education more generally but is strongly based in the philosophy of education (Westview, Oct.). Mainline Protestants might find John Haddon Leith's 1997 book, Crisis in the Church: The Plight of Theological Education, helpful in diagnosing some of the problems of today's seminaries; they will be relieved to find that his forthcoming The Ideal Seminary: Pursuing Excellence in Theological Education (Dec.) goes beyond it to prescribe solutions. Both are published by Westminster John Knox. Those who are interested in attending seminary themselves will find helpful how-to advice in What to Expect in Seminary: Theological Education as Spiritual Formation by Virginia Samuel Cetuk (Abingdon, 1998).

On the evangelical side, there are concerns that theological education might undermine the core tenets of Christian faith in the pursuit of intellectual understanding. In 1993's No Place for Truth: Or Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology? David Wells threw down a gauntlet to educators to reform the seminary experience around orthodox conceptions of biblical truth. Wells's book was published by Eerdmans, and--as seems to be a pattern in these debates--Eerdmans will soon be releasing a response of sorts. On November 15, Paul Merritt Bassett's study, The Aims and Purposes of Evangelical Theological Education, will consider the issues afresh. And so the debates continue.