This book illustrates how the university campus has been and continues to be a crucial space where diverse actors who embody Protestant, secular and pluralist forces negotiate the role of religion in a pluralistic society. Through comparative analysis of four distinct institutions in North Carolina's Research Triangle from the nineteenth century to the present day, we observe how campus religious climates have varied quite significantly within a single metropolitan area - all the more across the vast system of American higher education. Institutional identity factors including race, gender, geographical reach, resource disparities, and denominational affiliations have powerfully shaped the way these universities relate to their Protestant roots amidst growing religious diversity. And these universities, in turn, have accelerated the religious transformation of a region of the American South that is emblematic of widening cultural divides. Protestant Privilege and Pluralism on Campus illuminates a range of challenges to achieving a substantive and inclusive dialogue about meaning and values on campus and beyond.

For most of our history, American religious life has been dominated by a view of church history in which we appear as mere deposits of European religious culture. In fact, however, the freedom of Americans to choose without penalty to join any religious body or none at all is new in human history. This book is an effort to understand and interpret how we arrived at our present situation and, in doing so, to clarify many cultural, social and political issues.

This text presents a new critical theory addressing religious diversity, Christian religious privilege, and Christian hegemony in the United States. It meets a growing and urgent need in our society—the need to bring together religiously diverse ways of thinking and being in the world, and eventually to transform our society through intentional pluralism. The primary goal of Critical Religious Pluralism Theory (CRPT) is to acknowledge the central roles of religious privilege, oppression, hegemony, and marginalization in maintaining inequality between Christians and non-Christians (including the nonreligious) in the United States. Following analysis of current literature on religious, secular, and spiritual identities within higher education, and in-depth discussion of critical theories on other identity elements, the text presents seven tenets of CRPT alongside seven practical guidelines for utilizing the theory to combat the very inequalities it exposes. For the first time, a critical theory will address directly the social impacts of religious diversity and its inherent benefits and complications in the United States. Critical Religious Pluralism in Higher Education will appeal to scholars, researchers, and graduate students in higher education, as well as critical theorists from other disciplines.

The first edition of this book constituted a comprehensive resource for students of higher education, faculty, higher education administrators and student affairs leaders engaging with multiculturalism and diverse populations on college campuses. It was one of the first texts to gather in a single volume the related theories, assessment methods, and environmental and application issues pertinent to the study and practice of multiculturalism, while also offering approaches to enhancing multicultural programming and culturally diverse campus environments. This second edition retains the structure and vision of the first, introducing readers to the key theories and models for understanding the complexity of the students they serve, and for reflecting on their own values and motivations. It provides an array of case studies, discussion questions, examples of best practice, and recommendations about resources for use in the classroom. This edition includes a new chapter on intersectionality, updates several chapters, presents a number of new cultural frameworks and updated best practices for creating an inclusive environment for marginalized groups, and expands the third section of the book on cultural competent practice.

Essential reading for scholars of gender and sexuality and anyone interested in Asia.

Explores the decline in religious influence in American universities, discussing why this transformation has occurred.

Shabana Mir's powerful ethnographic study of women on Washington, D.C., college campuses reveals that being a young female Muslim in post-9/11 America means experiencing double scrutiny—scrutiny from the Muslim community as well as from the dominant non-Muslim community. Muslim American Women on Campus illuminates the processes by which a group of ethnically diverse American college women, all identifying as Muslim and all raised in the United States, construct their identities during one of the most formative times in their lives. Mir, an anthropologist of education, focuses on key leisure practices--drinking, dating, and fashion--to probe how Muslim American students adapt to campus life and build social networks that are seamlessly American, Muslim, and youthful. In this lively and highly accessible book, we hear the women's own often poignant voices as they articulate how they find spaces within campus culture as well as their Muslim student communities to grow and assert themselves as individuals, women, and Americans. Mir concludes, however, that institutions of higher learning continue to have much to learn about fostering religious diversity on campus.