The Dying of the Light: The Disengagement of Colleges and Universities from Their Christian Churches by James Tunstead Burtchaell, C.S.C. (review)

666BOOK REVIEWS school. There he took a sudden chill, had a fever, developed pneumonia, and died. So ended the life of Louis Ruellan, a true Jesuit giant of one summer. In an overview Buckley writes of the internal transformation of the Society ofJesus between 1965 and 1975: "changes greater than the Society had experienced in all its four hundred years." The reviewer was a pastor in the diocese of Spokane during those years of great change following Vatican Council II and can sympathize with a shared experience that involves Louis Ruellan himself . In that summer of 1884, Louis Ruellan viewed with cries of joy from the high plateau overlooking the Spokane valley, his mission and parish below. What a joy to stir the soul of this poetic Breton: On that same bluff was to rise up a magnificent brick and terra cotta building that was the Jesuit philosophate, the "jewel of the Northwest" from 1916 to 1970. On the brow of that plateau is also the Jesuit cemetery where Ruellan lies in peace with fellow Jesuits of his and Father Buckley's generations. Within the first few years of the 1970's, the beautiful Mt. St. Michael Philosophate became a huge hollow hermitage inhabited by a few ancient Jesuits. In 1978, the building and grounds were sold, to a schismatic group called the Fatima Crusades! At the cemetery where Louis Ruellan is buried in ground that (hopefully) "will be foreverJesuit," may we add by way of epitaph for his grave the words of the poet Virgil: "Hae sunt lacrimae rerum."—These are the tears of things? William J. Brennan Walla Walla, Washington The Dying ofthe Light: The Disengagement ofColleges and Universitiesfrom Their Christian Churches. By James Tunstead Burtchaell, C.S.C. (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. 1998. Pp. xx, 868. $45.00 clothbound; $30.00 paperback.) In The Dying of the Light, James Burtchaell offers a copiously researched, eminently readable, and highly subjective account of the ways in which churchrelated colleges and universities in the United States—as Burtchaell tells the story—have broken faith with their founding religious traditions. This book is history, but it is also a jeremiad, a lamentation for what has been lost. Essentially, this book is the story of how many church-related institutions of higher education have made their way down the slippery slope that leads to secularization. Burtchaell tells his story by focusing on seventeen institutions representing seven different Christian traditions: Congregationalists (Dartmouth and Beloit), Presbyterians (Lafayette and Davidson), Methodists (Millsaps and Ohio Wesleyan ), Baptists (Wake Forest, Virginia Union, and Linfield), Lutherans (Gettys- book reviews667 burg, St. Olaf, and Concordia at River Forest), Catholics (Boston College, College of New Rochelle, and Saint Mary's of California), and the Evangelicals (Azusa Pacific and Dordt). According to Burtchaell, the slippery slope is greased by a variety of factors: a deep foreboding on the part of church-related colleges and universities that religious institutions are intrinsically inferior to non-religious ones; a fear that an institution's forthright Christian identity might somehow place it in the camp of right-wing extremists; a shift from liberal arts to professional studies or adult studies or remedial studies, often in response to financial exigencies; the failure of institutions to hire faculty, recruit students, and appoint administrators and board members whose commitment to the founding denomination is beyond question, prompting a numerical decline of denominational representation in the student body, the faculty, the administration, and the board; the loss of denominational control and, in the case of Catholic institutions, the decline of religious orders in terms of both numbers and influence; the role of faculty who exhibit little or no interest in maintaining a vital connection with the founding denomination or in nurturing any sort of religious sentiment in their teaching or in the curriculum; the failure of faculty, administrators, and board members to explore how Christian theology can, in fact, sustain the life of the mind; the role of well-meaning presidents who subtly redefine the religious mission of the institution in an attempt to either broaden its constituency or make the institution more academically respectable, or both; the tendency of presidents and other administrators to...