Sacred and Secular Tensions in Higher Education: Connecting Parallel Universities ed. by Michael D. Waggoner (review)

There has been a growing discussion of the role of spirituality in higher education since the dawn of the new millennium. These discussions examine numerous issues in regard to higher education, including the tensions, similarities, and differences between religion and spirituality; the relationship between the sacred and the secular; the place of direct and indirect discussions of religion and spirituality in the classroom; and the role of faculty, administration, student affairs professionals, and campus ministers in navigating some of these tensions. Indeed, different higher education institutions have navigated these tensions in different ways, depending on whether they are secular or religiously affiliated, private or public. In his new edited book, Sacred and Secular Tensions in Higher Education: Connecting Parallel Universities, editor Michael Waggoner gathers together several discussions of these issues and, in his opening chapter, suggests that there are ways of connecting some of these discussions taking place in “parallel universities.” He brings important context to the discussion and is well suited to do so, as he has been the editor of the journal Religion and Education since 2000 and has thus been steeped in the discourse about these issues. In fact, aside from his contextualizing remarks in the first chapter, the remaining eleven chapters are actually reprints of articles spanning 2003–2010 from Religion and Education by authors and researchers from different types of higher education institutions.

This is a very good collection discussing some of the aforementioned issues with depth and insight. A strength of the volume is certainly Waggoner’s opening and closing remarks. In the opening chapter, he provides context for the discussions that follow. He gives a brief history of religion in American higher education and notes how both secular and religiously affiliated institutions have wrestled differently with their role in dealing with religious and spiritual questions. Indeed, they are not of one mind, but the result of this history, along with the (Euro-)American tendency toward individualism, has led to the “Balkanization” of religious groups on campus and its adjacent community and has resulted in blind spots about dealing with questions of religion and spirituality and the sacred-secular dialectic (my term, not his) in the curriculum, the co-curriculum, and in the minds of faculty, students, and student affairs professionals. Waggoner’s basic argument in the opening chapter is that the sacred and secular are not as dichotomous as they might seem in higher education, though admittedly different types of institutions deal with the relationship between religious/spiritual issues and the secular world differently. Each of the authors’ contributions in the eleven chapters is unique and offers important insights to subjects as diverse as: the importance of including atheism in discussions of religion, dealing with evangelicals in the classroom in multiple kinds of higher education institutions, and attending to non-majority religions as well as religious pluralism. The book includes the perspectives of student affairs professionals, faculty, chaplains, and researchers and their discussion of data-based studies, including the well-known and landmark UCLA Higher Education Research Study on student and faculty spirituality. In the Afterword, Waggoner offers some concluding remarks and some recommendations.

From the standpoint of what it does provide, the book is excellent. No one book can provide everything, however, and there are a few absent voices in this volume that were a bit surprising. There is no chapter that deals with how the sacred-secular dialectic plays out in the many Catholic higher education institutions in the United States. Given the contribution of Catholic higher education to the U.S. university landscape, the lack of attention here is striking, as is the missing voices of those from historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), a group that has also tended to have less emphasis on individualism. Both groups here have navigated the tensions of the sacred-secular dialectic in...