Building the Christian Academy

Until Relatively Recently, the history of higher education in the West was the story of a Christian academic tradition that played a major role in both intellectual history and the history of the church. Over the last one hundred years, however, we have witnessed the progressive secularization of higher education. George Marsden goes so far as to suggest that the American university has lost its soul. But what was that putatively Christian soul? Precisely what in the Christian tradition has now been lost? And what should we know about that tradition as a condition of practical wisdom for the present?

Arthur F. Holmes is professor of philosophy emeritus at Wheaton College in Illinois.