Religion, Scholarship, and Higher Education: Perspectives, Models, and Future Prospects (review)

As the editor notes on the opening page, the prospective reader may well come to this work thinking it is yet another volume on how the university is remiss. And, to some degree the book's contributors indeed bemoan the fate of Christianity (and to a lesser degree, Judaism) on the modern campus—using religion to mean both, apparently. Nevertheless, the volume is both insightful and useful, although perhaps neither completely in terms of the contributors' intentions.

The book has three parts, the first on foundational issues, the second on religion and scholarship, the third on religion and teaching. For the most part all the contributions to the book are the result of papers given at the Lily Seminar on Religion and Higher Education, composed of semiannual meetings over a period of three years. Participants were drawn from a variety of institutions—although none was from a community college—and disciplines. Most telling, perhaps, is that none of the essays is from a natural or physical scientist, and in fact, those disciplines are noticeably absent from any of the discussions about religion and higher education. In a very real sense, this volume is only a discussion of the one culture, while science, the other of Snow's (1959) two cultures, is reified in its absence. In a historical sense, science's challenge to the Christian view in the nineteenth century has not ended.

Ironically, even though the natural and physical sciences are absent, their methods are not, although by and large they are present as cause for dismissal. The essays in the first section represent philosophy, history, political science, history (again), and a humanities appointment, a range that continues in the other sections. The authors call upon graduate experience as students and teachers, and as much as anything, they argue that the 1960s brought about the decline of science as method in the social sciences and humanities, what might be called the shift from the definite to the indefinite article: not the history of religion, for example, but a history of religion. Curiously, the favorite theologian, of sorts, for these contributors seems to be Max Weber. In this regard, then, it seems that the flaw of this section is the placement of religion within the graduate disciplinary context, whose home is almost necessarily the large university. I cannot help but argue that the idea that religion and higher education will have substantial and enduring relationships at universities where the gridiron is often the largest church, is, well, unconvincing. Nevertheless, as several contributors argued, graduate education is a prime factor in the sociology of knowledge, in the creation of what we hold to be some sort of truth. Theology, then, rather than religion, arises as the foundational issue; the study of religion, not the reflective or even strident advocacy of belief, engages the first essayists.

Thus the essays in the second section pick up the theme of disciplines and their origin and re-creation in graduate education. And, the theme of what has happened since the 1960s continues, with essayists repeatedly marking the 1970s and 1980s as decades of change, as broader interpretive frameworks—such as a range of feminist perspectives-begin to have an impact on religion in higher education. One author also notes the development of more fundamentalist approaches to the study of Christianity, with less interest in the traditional orthodoxies and more interest in individuals and small groups and their conceptions of Christianity. In general, an underlying theme emerges in Richard Bernstein's essay on engaged fallibilistic pluralism. Bernstein argues that such pluralism rests on cultivated values that encourage critique and allow people to give up their beliefs, and the concluding essay calls the reader's attention to the apparent potential of that pluralism.

The third section, while hardly a comprehensive pedagogical manual, offers instructors...