Winner of a 2013 American Educational Studies Association Critics' Choice Award Drawing on conversations with hundreds of professors, co-curricular educators, administrators, and students from institutions spanning the entire spectrum of American colleges and universities, the Jacobsens illustrate how religion is constructively intertwined with the work of higher education in the twenty-first century. No Longer Invisible documents how, after decades when religion was marginalized, colleges and universities are re-engaging matters of faith-an educational development that is both positive and necessary. Religion in contemporary American life is now incredibly complex, with religious pluralism on the rise and the categories of "religious" and "secular" often blending together in a dizzying array of lifestyles and beliefs. Using the categories of historic religion, public religion, and personal religion, No Longer Invisible offers a new framework for understanding this emerging religious terrain, a framework that can help colleges and universities-and the students who attend them-interact with religion more effectively. The stakes are high: Faced with escalating pressures to focus solely on job training, American higher education may find that paying more careful and nuanced attention to religion is a prerequisite for preserving American higher education's longstanding commitment to personal, social, and civic learning.

"The first sustained history of the academic study of religion at American universities, The University Gets Religion: Religious Studies in American Higher Education is a timely book that explores the present-day implications of religious studies' Protestant past."--BOOK JACKET.

College in the United States changed dramatically during the twentieth century, ushering in what we know today as the American university in all its diversity. Religion departments made their way into institutions in the 1930s to the 1960s, while significant shifts from college to university occurred. The college ideal was primarily shaping the few to enter the Protestant management class through the inculcation of values associated with a Western civilization that relied upon this training done residentially, primarily for young men. Protestant Christian leaders created religion departments as the college model was shifting to the university ideal, where a more democratized population, including women and non-Protestants, studied under professors trained in specialized disciplines to achieve professional careers in a more internationally connected and post-industrial class. Religion departments at mid-century were addressing the lack of an agreed-upon curricular center in the wake of changes such as the elective system, Carnegie credit-hour formulation, and numerous other shifts in disciplines spelling the end of the college ideal, though certainly continuing many of its traditions and structures. Religion departments were an attempt to provide a cultural and religious center that might hold, enhance existential and moral meaning for students, and strengthen an argument against the German research university ideals of naturalistic science whose so-called objectivity proved, at best, problematic and, at worst, inept given the political crisis in Europe. Colleges found they were losing sight of the college ideal and hoped religion as a taught subject could bring back much of what college had meant, from moral formation and curricular focus to personal piety and national unity. That hope was never realized, and what remained in its wake helped fuel the university model with its specialized religion departments seeking entirely different ends. In the shift from college to university, religion professors attempted to become creators of a legitimate academic subject quite apart from the chapel programs, attempts at moralizing, and centrality in the curriculum of Western Christian thought and history championed in the college model.

In these essays, Donald Wiebe unveils a significant problem in the academic study of religion in colleges and universities in North America and Europe - that studies almost always exhibit a religious bias. To explore this issue, Wiebe looks at the religious and moral agendas behind the study of religion, showing that the boundaries between the objective study of religion and religious education as a tool for bettering society have become blurred. As a result, he argues, religious studies departments have fostered an environment where religion has become a learned or scholarly practice, rather than the object of academic scrutiny. This book provides a critical history of the failure of 20th- and 21st-century scholars to follow through on the 19th-century ideal of an objective scientific study of religious thought and behaviour. Although emancipated from direct ecclesiastical control and, to some extent, from sectarian theologizing, Wiebe argues that research and scholarship in the academic department of religious studies has failed to break free from religious constraints. He shows that an objective scientific study of religious thought and practice is not only possible, but the only appropriate approach to the study of religious phenomena.

A panoramic introduction to religion in America, newly revised and updated

A Critical Introduction to Religion in the Americas argues that we cannot understand religion in the Americas without understanding its marginalized communities. Despite frequently voiced doubts among religious studies scholars, it makes the case that theology, and particularly liberation theology, is still useful, but it must be reframed to attend to the ways in which religion is actually experienced on the ground. That is, a liberation theology that assumes a need to work on behalf of the poor can seem out of touch with a population experiencing huge Pentecostal and Charismatic growth, where the focus is not on inequality or social action but on individual relationships with the divine. By drawing on a combination of historical and ethnographic sources, this volume provides a basic introduction to the study of religion and theology in the Latino/a, Black, and Latin American contexts, and then shows how theology can be reframed to better speak to the concerns of both religious studies and the real people the theologians' work is meant to represent. Informed by the dialogue partners explored throughout the text, this volume presents a hemispheric approach to discussing lived religious movements. While not dismissive of liberation theologies, this approach is critical of their past and offers challenges to their future as well as suggestions for preventing their untimely demise. It is clear that the liberation theologies of tomorrow cannot look like the liberation theologies of today.

In this volume some of the outstanding Christian scholars of our day reflect on how their minds have changed, how their academic fields have changed over the course of their careers, and the pressing issues that Christian scholars will need to address in the twenty-first century. This volume offers an accessible portrait of key trends in the world of Christian scholarship today. Christian Thought in the Twenty-First Century features scholars from Great Britain, Canada, the United States, and Switzerland. The contributors represent a wide variety of academic backgrounds--from biblical studies to theology, to religious studies, to history, English literature, philosophy, law, and ethics. This book offers a personal glimpse of Christian scholars in a self-reflective mode, capturing their honest reflections on the changing state of the academy and on changes in their own minds and outlooks. The breadth and depth of insight afforded by these contributions provide rich soil for a reader's own reflections, and an agenda that will occupy Christian thinkers well into the twenty-first century. Content and Contributors: Historical Perspectives on the Christian Tradition 1. Jesus and The Gospels, by Craig A. Evans 2. The Dwarfs are for the Dwarfs: Medieval Church History Today, by Dennis D. Martin 3. Reflections on Medieval English Literature, by Denis Renevey 4. Reflections of an Historian of Early Modern German Protestantism, by Douglas H. Shantz 5. Making Historical Theology, by Margaret R. Miles 6. Eastern Orthodoxy in the Twenty-First Century, by James R. Payton Jr. 7. Religion's Return, by Lamin Sanneh Philosophical and Theological Issues 8. The Christian Philosopher Today, by Terrence Penelhum 9. Christian Thought: An Agenda for the Future, by Clark H. Pinnock 10. Process Theology in Process, John B. Cobb Jr. 11. Christian Theology in a post-Christendom World, by Douglas John Hall Encounters with Religious Pluralism and the new Science 12. A New Way of Being Christian, by Paul F. Knitter 13. Comparative Theology, Keith Ward 14. Science and Religion in the Twenty-First Century, by John Polkinghorne 15. Bioethics: A Forum for Finding Shared Values in a Twenty-First Century Society, by Margaret Somerville The Academy and the City 16. "But have you kept the faith of your Ancestors?" Musings on the writing and teaching of the history of Christianity in a Secular Canada, by Marguerite Van Die 17. The Spiritual Quest, Christian Thought, and the Academy: Challenges, Commitments, and Considerations, by Charles Nienkirchen 18. Ecstatic Nerve: Fiction, Historical Narrative, and Christian theology in an Academic Setting, by Peter C. Erb 19. Athens and Jerusalem: Facing Both Ways in Calgary, by Alan P. F. Sell 20. The City and the Church, by Wesley A. Kort Approaches to English Literature and Film 21. Reflections on Literary Theory and Criticism, by Susan Felch 22. A Time of Promise and Responsibility: Teaching English Literature in the Christian Academy, by Arlette Zinck 23. Thomas Merton: Retrospect and Prospect, by Bonnie Thurston 24. Thomas Merton's Divinations for a Twenty-First Century Christian Reader, by Lynn Szabo 25. Christianity and the Cinema: An Interreligious Conversation, by Anne Moore Index