Religious Ideas for Secular Universities by C. John Sommerville (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 469 sexual ethics (83-85) may also strike one as problematic, at least in the context of Dante's contemporary applicability. It is one thing to say that "Dante would have accepted without demur Thomas' position" (85); it is a more far-reaching claim that the procreative telos of sexuality (I could find no mention of its unitive function here) is one of the "main truths of sexual morality" (84). Dante is surely a useful allyfor those ofus who believe our modern age has a "need for purity and chastity" (85), but I would think many of us would value his views, without adopting such a narrowly procreative-and therefore, exclusivelyheterosexual-view of sexuality. Such matters of the focus of the work, or the contemporary relevance of some of Dante's morality, should not obscure the overwhelmingly positive, enlightening impression this wonderful book makes on the reader. McInerny fully and gracefully lived up to his admiring description ofhis fellow Dante scholars: "Dantisti, as a group, seem to me a very special breed of scholar.... [they] possess an uncanny ability to enter into Dante's world in a way that strains against a merely aesthetic identification" (p. xi). One could only wish that scholars of other great works were as humble, sensitive, and loving as McInerny and his fellow"Dantisti," This book is scholarship as it should be done, and which one appreciates all the more for its rarity in the academy, and for the final look it offers us ofits author's ideas. McInerny's presentation is not detached or objective, but a matter of sharing with us what really mattered in his life, and which he powerfully felt should matter to anyone. His writing is personal, passionate, and committed, and it invites the reader to a similar encounter with Dante and his ideas, one that promises lingering, life-changing glimpses of truth and beauty. Kim Paffenroth Iona College Religious Ideas for Secular Universities. ByC. John Sommerville. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2009. ISBN 978-080286442-0. Pp. xi + 189. $18.00 (Paperback). Two opening remarks will help to frame this lively, if disturbing, challenging if unsettling, analysis of the crisis haunting the American secular university. First, much of the author's discontent with the contemporary university is epitomized in some recent turbulence at Harvard University about curriculum reform. Lisa Miller, in a remarkable article, "Harvard's Crisis of Faith" (Newsweek, February 22, 43 ff.) relates arguments about a proposal by a curriculum committee to require of its students a course in the category called "Reason and Faith:' The proposal was not agreed to. 470 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE Stephen Pinker, a celebrity on the campus, an evolutionary psychologist, expressed the opposition most forcefully. The purpose of a university, he said, is rational inquiry, and religion-which he regards as superstition and a form of irrationality , has no place in an enlightened university. Miller's observation is cogent: "Harvard's distaste for engaging with religion as an academic subject is particularly ironic, given that it was founded in 1636 as a training ground for Christian ministers " (63). My second comment is, simply, to report what Sommerville observes in his introduction, with some satisfaction: that in Gainesville, Florida, a secular public university, the University of Florida, looks at another building across the street called Christian Study Center-where, he informs us, some of his chapters were first delivered. Sommerville puts one in mind of Shakespeare, who has Bottom say (paraphrased) "to say the truth ... reason and faith keep little company together nowadays; the more the pity, that some honest neighbors will not make them friends" (MND, III, 1, 147 ff.). The four section headings of Sommerville's collection of essays give a further sense of his purpose: "The Crisis of the Secular University:' "Judging Religions,and Especially Christianity:' "Scholars Assess the Western Bible:' "The University and the Culture Wars:' Not all the essaysfit comfortably under their headings, but they indicate issues and problems about which Sommerville has been writing a long time. The contemporary university, he contends, by failing to go beyond what it is undeniably good at-job training-is not living up to its high privilege of preparing...