God and man at college.(Religion, Scholarship, & Higher Education: Perspectives, Models, and Future Prospects)(Book Review)

Religion, Scholarship, & Higher Education: Perspectives, Models, and Future Prospects Edited by Andrea Sterk University of Notre Dame Press, 256 pages, $14.95

When Nancy Ammerman told her professors in the late 1970s that she wanted to write a dissertation on religious fundamentalism, she reports that they "were not so much opposed as quizzical: `Religion. Hmm. How quaint. I suppose one could study that.'" Ammerman, now a professor of sociology and religion at Hartford Seminary, explains, "Religion had simply passed off their radar screens as a subject of study."

Almost all of the contributors to the new collection Religion, Scholarship & Higher Education, agree with Ammerman's assessment. And it was not just religion as a topic of study that had disappeared from secular colleges, but the religious perspective in its entirety.

Many of the participants in the Lilly Seminar on Religion and Higher Education who produced these essays recall when they first felt this absence. Jean Bethke Elshtain, a professor of social and political ethics at the University of Chicago, writes of the turbulent mid 1960s as a time when "many of us were struggling to understand what was going on and to sort out just where we `fit' in the midst of all this. Who were we anyway--as a people, as singular persons? But with a rare few exceptions, none of my graduate courses in political science addressed any of these matters."

The fact that schools of thought such as behaviorism and then rational-choice theory stripped the liberal arts of any of these important considerations is a common theme in the collection. Sociologist Alan Wolfe "confess[es] to being flabbergasted by the popularity" of these "reductionist" models.

Most of the writers believe religion is making a comeback in the academy. John McGreevey, who teaches history at Notre Dame, identifies one way in which this change occurred: "The most compelling advocates for a religious `perspective' have used the opening created by the postmodern or historicist turn to press their case." In other words, as the academy began to reach a consensus that being black or being a woman altered one's perspective in a way that scholars needed to consider, it also began to acknowledge the importance of specifically Catholic, Protestant, or Jewish viewpoints.

Many of the contributors to this volume address the potential pitfalls of this logic as well. Even McGreevey acknowledges, "I'm not convinced that framing religious perspectives as yet another assault on universal reason is the best strategy."